“Kung Fu” returns. The legendary Western Martial Arts series with David Carradine will be reissued in April. Unlike the classic series, “Kung Fu” takes place in the present, and this time a woman is the focus. Olivia Liang (known from the vampire series “Legacies”) plays Nicky Chen, a young American who retreats to a Chinese monastery for a while. When she returns to San Francisco, her neighborhood is threatened by the triads.
Chen takes up the fight and also has to grapple with her estranged family and anticipate a mysterious assassin (Gwendoline Yeo) who has already had her Shaolin mentor on her conscience and is now trying to kill her too.
Other roles include Shannon Dang, Jon Prasida (“Reckoning”), Tzi Ma and Kheng Hua Tan (“Marco Polo”). Series creator and showrunner is Christina M. Kim (one of the “Lost” authors), among the producers is Greg Barlanti (producer of “Dawson’s Creek” and “Everwood”, but also of numerous DC superhero series – including “Arrow”, “The Flash” and “Batwoman”).
The original series “Kung Fu” was broadcast on American broadcaster ABC between 1972 and 1975, ran on ZDF from autumn 1975 and, like the films with Bruce Lee in the cinema, ensured growing interest in Asian martial arts. David Carradine (“Kill Bill”) played the young Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Kaine, who kills a member of the imperial family in a dispute and fled to the USA, where he went in search of his half-brother.
On his hike, the Buddhist encounters the gruff manner of the Western men with gentleness and peacefulness and only makes use of his Shaolin Kung Fu in an emergency. The topic of the series has always been racism against Asians in the USA, an ongoing social problem that recently resulted in numerous acts of violence in the wake of the Corona crisis. Caine solved the hushed up murder of a Chinese man in a small town in one episode and was innocently suspected of murder in another adventure.
In a follow-up film, Caine could even float
The series drew guest stars like William Shatner (Captain Kirk in “Starship Enterprise”), Harrison Ford (before his breakthrough with “Star Wars”) and Jodie Foster. After three seasons (62 episodes) it ended, a “Kung Fu” film in 1986 told of Caine’s father-son conflict and ended with the image of a Caine who was now able to float through meditation. Between 1993 and 1997 the series “Kung Fu – Under the Sign of the Dragon” was created, in which Carradine played a descendant of the original Kwai Chang Caine of the same name.
The reboot originally planned for Fox will run on April 7th on The CW. It is not yet clear where and when the series will be shown in Germany.
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