Game Of Death Fight — Myriad Misadventures

After finishing up our first movie fight video, the Michael Jai White vs Eoin O’Brien fight from Never Back Down 3 we started deciding what movie to do a fight from next. The obvious choice was Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee is quite possibly the most famous martial artist ever and his movies are very well regarded so he was an obvious choice. We looked through his fights for something that we might be able to do and decided on the fight against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Game of Death. I was going to be Bruce and SJ was going to be Kareem. We got to work, learning the Game of Death fight while also sometimes working on our original fight to make sure we didn’t forget it. It was going pretty well.

“But wait Seth,” I hear you say. “I’ve seen Game of Death and you didn’t do the whole fight! Yours was great (okay I added that part) but why didn’t you do the whole fight?” Well I can answer that question.

We got bored.

“Bored?!” You exclaim? “By Bruce Lee? Unbelievable!”

I can understand that sentiment. Bruce Lee is held in such high regard by so many people that the very idea I could get bored the fight is almost inconceivable. But hear me out. The fight isn’t that good. Bruce Lee’s fights did not age well. You heard me right. I don’t think they aged well. Compare the fights in Bruce Lee’s original Fist of Fury to the fights in the 1994 Jet Li remake Fist of Legend. In my opinion at least the fights in the Jet Li remake are hands down better.

Now this isn’t to say that the fights in Bruce Lee’s movies are bad. It’s just that fights have gotten so much better in the last couple decades that Bruce Lee’s movies seem dated. At the time, in the early 70s, his movies were revolutionary. He completely changed the martial arts film scene. He deserves all the credit he gets for that. But the changes he set in motion continued for years and years and the fights nowadays are, in my opinion, just more fun to watch.

I’d like to stress before anyone gets too mad that I’m not questioning Bruce Lee’s ability as a martial artist. This post isn’t about that at all. It’s only about the fight scenes in his movies. Not even his movies in general. Just the fight scenes as viewed in a vacuum.

Bruce Lee’s fights are steeped in nostalgia. For the group of people that grew up watching them they probably still hold that magic. But I was born 20 years too late. I grew up watching Jackie Chan and Jet Li. To me Bruce Lee’s fights seem almost archaic. Here’s a similar example. The people that grew up between the late 80s and early 00s probably have fond memories of either playing the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System or, a couple of generations later, the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation. For those of us, me included, games on at least one generation of those systems will always have a place in our hearts. We’ll always remember the magic of those games. To this day I remember how incredible Ocarina of Time was. But honestly those games did not age well. I think it would be very difficult for someone who grew up on more modern systems to go back and play those systems. They may have been revolutionary at the time, and still have an important place in history, but a lot of newer stuff is just better.

I think that Bruce Lee is the same. Historically he’s very important to the history of martial arts films and always will be. But what’s been developed since then is just that much more impressive. I also wonder if Game of Death in particular suffers from another problem. The original fight against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is VERY long. There are tons of pauses and down time. Bruce Lee filmed those parts of the movie before filming Enter the Dragon and then died before he could finish filming it. I have to wonder if he had a more concise, impressive fight in his head but since he died it was edited by someone else. Someone who did not know what it was supposed to look like. And because of that the fight suffered. It’s not what it could have been. Not what it should have been. But I guess that could be said about the whole movie.

But that’s why we only filmed part of the fight. We were learning the fight and working our way through it and we just got bored. Or at least I did. I can’t speak for SJ. And we decided that instead of spending more time to learn the rest of the fight (some of which would have required some creativity since we didn’t have windows to poke holes in) we decided to jump from where we were to the end and then start working on something else. Why keep working on something we weren’t really having fun with?

I will admit that I’m something of a fight scene peasant though. I enjoy fights that many people criticize as boring or technically bad. My only metric of goodness if you will is whether or not, or how much, I enjoy a fight when I watch it. A perfect example is the fight in Star Wars Episode 8 when Kyle and Ren fight Snokes’ guards. That fight has been pretty much universally panned. By everyone. But I remember enjoying it while I was in the theater watching the movie. So just remember my opinion is just that; my opinion.

Well anyway I hope that everyone enjoyed the piece of the fight we did at least and will forgive us for not learning the entire thing. If you like these movies fights feel free to leave a comment with a recommendation with what we should do next. We’re always looking for good (and doable) fights to try learning.

While we may not have enjoyed the entire process we learned a lot by learning someone else’s fight, just like we did when we learned the Michael Jai White fight. And I’m looking forward to the next one. Don’t forget to leave a comment with which fight you’d like to see next!

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