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- Have you ever seen this iconic film from the 70s?
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Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in "Game of Death."
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This was part of a wave of Blaxploitation
meets Kung Fu films.
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(man yells)
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Oo! Groovy.
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But there was something more than big hair
and butt kicking going on in these movies.
From "Shaft," to "Game of Death," to "Luke Cage".
Let's get a Historian's Take
on why these two genres of film intersected in the 70s
and how Black Kung Fu lives on,
starting with Blaxploitation.
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- The mob wanted Harlem back.
They got Shaft.
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- Blaxploitation films were largely from the 1970s.
These films were low-budget films.
They had really stylized aesthetics.
They were movies for the Black community.
They were usually made by Black people for Black people.
The fashion is a key part of these movies,
but really the heart of the movies
are these male characters who are fighting the system,
fighting the man from below,
and trying to engage in vigilante justice.
- And it looks like over 200 Blaxploitation films
were made in the 70s.
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What about marital arts films then?
How did they get into the mix?
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- From across the Pacific,
film studios like the Shaw Brothers
began to distribute movies en masse
to the United States,
particularly Hong Kong Kong Fu movies.
We start seeing the emergence of martial arts movies
that take on a particular theme,
which is to overthrow Japanese imperialism
by everyday people,
much like Blaxploitation films.
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"Five Fingers of Death" was the first Shaw Brothers film
to get a real U.S. release.
By May of 1973, three Kung Fu films took the top spots
at the box office.
- With the release of movies like Bruce Lee's
"Enter the Dragon,"
there was a sort of melding
between the themes of Hong Kong Kung Fu movies
and Blaxploitation movies.
And Black filmmakers were particularly inspired
by Hong Kong movies
and began to incorporate things like fight choreography,
some of the same themes,
standing up to the man and using martial arts to do so.
- Which brings us back to that iconic scene
we saw at the beginning of this video from "Game of Death,"
a movie that debuted in the U.S. in 1979.
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- "Game of Death" is such a brilliant idea.
And when Bruce Lee's character gets to the top,
he has to face this giant in Kareem
who's rocking the dark aviators.
For a person that's into 70s pop culture
that's as good as it gets.
It's just classic.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest,
if not the greatest NBA players in the 1970s.
And of course, the great Bruce Lee.
Bruce Lee was an ass kicker.
He was not another white male hero.
He wasn't Black, but he wasn't white.
Something like this resonates a lot
with Black audiences in the 70s.
So there's a real affinity between Blaxploitation audiences
and Kung Fu film audiences.
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- Kung Fu from Hong Kong took pop culture by storm.
In 1974, we get this iconic Kung Fu song:
♪ Everybody was Kung Fu fighting ♪
♪ Those cats were fast as lighting ♪
- Groovy fashion and Kung Fu fighting aside,
what was going on off-screen
that made the storyline of fighting the man so appealing?
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- It is the first decade
after the signing of the Civil Rights Act,
the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act.
And it is a time when you can start to see
broad expression of Black culture
in ways that had not existed before.
- We also see sort of a wave of death.
We see this rapid succession of assassinations
of heroes of the Black community.
The assassination of Medgar Evers,
of Martin Luther King Jr., of Malcolm X.
There's a desire for justice
and a sense that justice has been deferred.
And so people are starting to look to sort of narratives
and frameworks of self-defense
in order to think about their future
and collective liberation for Black people.
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- The Black Power movement
was very influential on these films.
A lot of narratives about going against the system,
getting back at the man.
- Even though the Black Panther Party emerges in 1966,
founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton,
they actually became even more visible in the 1970s
as they stage protests and demonstrations around the world
and across the country.
They were also really invested in the idea
that there was solidarity between Black people
and all oppressed people worldwide.
Seale and Newton,
they were students of international politics.
They were thinking about things like the Vietnam War.
- And particularly the late part of the Vietnam War,
where it was increasingly unpopular,
Black audiences and other audiences of color
were beginning to be exposed
not just to the plight of U.S. imperialism
in Southeast Asia,
but also global ideas of how to resist American imperialism.
- In America, Black people are treated very much
as the Vietnamese people.
- These anti-Vietnam War protests begin to really meld
with 1970s iterations of the Civil Rights Movement.
So on college campuses,
students were protesting both domestic racism
and domestic classism,
but also imperialism abroad.
And so these politics really set the stage
for the birth of this crossover
between Kung Fu movies and Blaxploitation films.
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- So what happened to Blaxploitation films
after the 70s?
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- One of the most vocal critics of Blaxploitation films
was actually the NAACP,
the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People.
And so I think these Blaxploitation films,
which largely centered on stereotypes
of particularly Black men being erratic, hypersexual,
violent, dope-smoking, drinking,
it didn't really align
with the vision of the NAACP at that moment
when they're trying to put forward
an image of Blackness that is not only worthy of respect,
but also dignified.
- I think the real impact of Blaxploitation films
can be measured once you get out of the 70s.
In the late 1980s,
with the emergence of what would be known as gangster rap,
you find a lot of rappers
quoting from Blaxploitation movies,
sampling Blaxploitation movies.
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♪ Who's the Mack? ♪
♪ Is it some brother in a big hat? ♪
- And then in the 1990s,
you get a filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino,
who becomes hugely popular,
appropriating from Blaxploitation movies,
martial arts movies,
appropriating for movies that a lot of people had dismissed,
but because Tarantino will have such a prominent,
mainstream, successful career,
the references that he made to Blaxploitation,
introduces these movies to new audiences
that had no idea that they existed.
- So do we see traces of Black Kung Fu today?
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- We see a resurgence of this style
of sort of vigilante justice, or justice from below
in these new Marvel movies or in these new superhero movies,
and it's really similar to what was being promoted
in Blaxploitation movies.
- And you still can't speak English.
- My English is just fine!
- There's this one scene where Luke Cage walks in
and he protects Asian store owners.
- I don't like your tone.
- Excuse me?
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- So I think it's really interesting,
the aesthetics and the sort of narrative
of this scene in "Luke Cage,"
because, you know, here he is, he's an everyday guy.
He's fighting these sort of villainous characters
who are lining up to him.
And even in that sort of way,
they surround him and attack him one by one.
that's classic Black Kung Fu movie.
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But it's also just the narrative
that he's defending these Chinese restaurant owners.
- You have my word ma'am.
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I've got you.
- I read that as incredibly meaningful
in both the movements of Black Lives Matter
and Stop Asian Hate.
- In the same way that we see that wave of death
from the 1960s, these assassinations of heroes,
now we're seeing this sort of wave of death
and assassinations of everyday Black citizens.
And on top of that, we're also seeing movements emerging,
like Stop Asian Hate,
to counteract these rises in hate crimes
against Asian American communities.
And when people feel frustrated,
when they feel as if justice hasn't been served,
that's when we start to see sort of the appeal of a hero,
someone who rises up from amongst the people
and fights injustice and does the right thing.
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- There are various possibilities
that shows like this offer
where we can imagine what safety
and genuine security looks like,
where communities of color protect other communities
and vulnerable communities
for the promise of mutual safety,
not at the expense of the other community's life.
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- Thanks for watching "Historians Take."
Make sure to like, subscribe,
and comment.
See you next time!
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