Greetings everyone all across the world in a hundred and something countries

Las la Montgomery here once again with another CHP episode.

Number 203 this time and a particularly warm welcome to any new listeners who maybe saw this topic

and are joining our little China History Podcast community for the first time.

I hope you like what you hear. Finally, everyone who has been imploring me all these years to cover this topic can stop with the emails.

Here it is.

But here's the thing. I never studied martial arts. I had friends who did, but I myself never walked down that path. For this reason, I was a little reluctant to take on such a serious topic.

Martial arts isn't a religion or anything, but it is a way of life for a lot of people everywhere.

So I guess it was out of respect for those who were serious practitioners

of martial arts and my hesitation not to let anyone down that despite this being the most

requested topic at CHP history, I hadn't covered it.

Until now, that is.

You see, I was 12, when the Big Boss came out, 1971, and I was 13 when the Chinese Connection and the Way of the Dragon were released, and 14 when Enter the Dragon hit the screens back in the North Suburbs of Chicago, and one of the most important and memorable films of my youth.

Billy Jack, also 1971, Tom Laughlin.

I never practiced any gong-ung Fu or hapequito like Billy Jack did, but, well, I couldn't play the guitar

either, but that didn't mean I didn't love to listen to Led Zeppelin. From seeing Bruce Lee for the first time and watching him introduce

Kung Fu to America, I couldn't get enough of these martial arts movies, that Kung Fuu genre I was always a fan I mean the L-ray channel love it

so despite these feelings about Chinese martial arts I was pretty much destined to be

just a spectator not the end of the world.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do an episode or a series on the whole Kung-Fru genre of

movies. I'm not going to get into that in this two-part series, but that's a great topic.

In all the decades that I've been living, not a single time, not once, did I ever run into

...