The legend of Bruce Lee was so significant that movie makers couldn’t resist exploiting it.

By Eli Dairo

It’s October 5th, 1972, and you’re headed to a single-screen theater with your dad. When you get there, you spot a poster for a movie titled “The Big Boss.” The guy’s flying kick alone captivates you. So, you grab tickets, sit down, watch the lights dim and the curtain open as the movie starts.

You’re greeted by blaring horns and flashy opening credits. The movie progresses and you watch in amazement as this Bruce Lee guy kicks, punches, and yells with an explosive power you’ve never seen before.

You finish the movie excited to see what comes next from this man, but less than a year later — Bruce Lee is dead. While Hong Kong continues to move forward, the West grieves Lee and the movies that could’ve been. Audiences ask, “If he hadn’t died, what would we have gotten?” Distributors are asked for more, even with Bruce gone. However, they have a simple solution that goes like this:

And so came the Golden era of Bruceploitation. Full of unlicensed sequels, biopics, and general craziness, with filmmakers trying to resurrect him by using actors like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, and Bruce Leung, to name a few. First, they tried to see his “real” life, and in a way denied his death, with the “Lee-alike” names basically saying, “See, he never left! They just spelled his name wrong.” The biopics had a semblance of his life, though highly fictionalized and over the top. In “The Dragon Lives,” there’s a completely fictional scene where Bruce Lee (played by Bruce Li) works as a film extra, quitting upon realizing he’s dressed in an old Ming Dynasty Hanfu for a movie entitled “Hong Kong Today.” Upset by the racism he faces in the States, he moves back to Hong Kong and is gifted a giant training machine with the face of a demon and boxing gloves.

He locks himself in his room, training all day while others are pounding on the door, yelling, “Bruce, you gotta stop, you’re doing too much!” Biopics like these focused on his love for being Chinese, they wanted to give a sense of nationalism, show the little guy being a hero, and show Bruce’s righteous fury. So in turn, things like his relationship with his co-star Betty Ting Pei were focused on. She was Bruce’s main love interest in these films, often putting Bruce’s wife, Linda, a white woman, in the backseat.

These biopics showed how each director viewed his life through each different movie, almost as if he had 10 different lives. Other films, however, like “Challenge of the Tiger” (starring Bruce Le) had plots unrelated to Bruce Lee, but were movies that included roles reminiscent of what he would’ve starred in, typically spy-related. Plots tended to be rushed and absurd. This somewhat buddy cop movie includes Bruce Le fighting a bull alongside his partner Richard Cannon and is full of meaningless fights and Cannon’s womanizing, which the real Lee likely would’ve called “classical mess.” One big chaotic spectacle, filled with punching, kicking and gratuitous nudity.

However, “The Dragon Lives Again” (not to be confused with the biopic) takes the term “chaotic spectacle” and turns the knob up to ten. This film, inarguably the most exploitative, follows the journey of Bruce Lee (played by Bruce Leung) through the Underworld. There, he meets the copyright infringement gang: Popeye, James Bond, Zatoichi, Clint Eastwood, The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Count Dracula — all led by the king of the Underworld. The fights are fine, the plot unimportant and nonsensical, the extra characters made to put people in seats — but by now, in the late 70s and early 80s, people had moved on. Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Sammo Hung had all found success without the need for the Bruce Lee mannerisms. With these newcomers and rising stars, the zanyness, camp, and absurdity that stemmed from the Bruceploitation subgenre and cinema’s grief no longer controlled audiences. They were finally allowed to move on, be refreshed, and stop saying, “If only…” Instead, they asked “What’s next?” and “What is new?”

Interestingly enough, the films echoed the five stages of grief in movie form. Shock and denial to the documentaries and finding the “Lee-alikes” to fill the void, anger to biopics where he fights racism and the institution, bargaining as “what-if” movies like “The Dragon Lives Again,” movies that asked questions like, “What if Bruce Lee never died and played Indiana Jones?” and movies that had titles like “Bruce Lee Makes Java in Borneo.” Depression, where the genre had lost its fire, became stale, then acceptance, as we realized that there was only one irreplaceable Bruce Lee. We realized that in trying to keep him alive, we only distorted him. We forgot Bruce Lee, the philosopher, the artist, and the poet.

Bruce himself once said that life’s meaning was to be lived, not to be squeezed into a rigid system. Though these films did exactly that by making a formula out of his life. So, in the words of Moon Kyung-seok, also known as Dragon Lee: “I’m not particularly proud of having acted as an imitator. Because Bruce Lee’s martial arts skills were so extraordinary, the positive aspect of my films was to help appease that longing.”

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“Hong Kong – Bruce Lee” by IQRemix is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.