Kung Fu Flicks Light Fires in Our Souls

“Can it be that it was all so simple then?” (Bergman and Bergman)[1]. That line from Barbara Streisand’s 1973 hit song, “The Way We Were,” its doubting question, that specific lyric by Alan and Marilyn Bergman—if one truly ponders its significance—it has the power to send a person down a psychological rabbit hole to spend hours, days, or weeks unpacking its confounding nature. Was the past really that damn simple as memory insists or has time conveniently slipped in a remix, one that soothes the curious if not troubled souls of reminiscers, revisionists, and recorders alike?

Perhaps time is marked by what we focus on or how focal moments shape or impact our lives. Who knows? It seems we must arrive at answers to life’s questions on our own. What I do know is how I felt inside, where I was in life, when I first heard “Can It Be All So Simple?” the third single from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the 1993 release from the Wu-Tang Clan.

Bro!!!

The RZA’s classic sample of Gladys Knight’s raspy contralto from the song "The Way We Were/Try to Remember" haunts me to this day. That soulful rendition of Streisand’s original takes me back to the birth of my first son. Life was upside down for me during those days but tracks like "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' Wit," and “Shame On a Nigga” transported me. The group’s references to comic books, the humor, their braggadocious battle raps, all the crazy pop culture references, and RZA’s soulful samples did tremendous work at pulling me out of my miseries, away from my young-adult troubles. But, what really kicked my can were the references to old martial arts movie. Those clips sent me back to early childhood, growing up in Compton, when trips to Carson to watch kung fu movies broke up the monotony of an agrarian existence at our dreary foster home. Sitting quietly in that dark theater with my brothers became the brighter entries of my childhood highlight reel; they were satisfying moments of escape from truly dark days. Saturday afternoons spent watching kung fu movies then going home to mimic the fight scenes—kicking the shit out of my brothers—those moments, it turns out, have a universality to them.

On Saturday, June 27th, 2026, I checked out Soul Comix, a small comic convention organized by David Phillips of DP Comix and held in Leimert Park. It was there I ran into comic artist and animator Chuck Patton—thee Chuck Patton—the penciler behind DC’s 1980’s Justice League of America run when the team relocated to Patton’s hometown of Detroit and was revamped with a new, multicultural lineup. This is the same Chuck Patton who drew Classic X-Men and Daredevil for Marvel Comics before turning to animation and becoming the man behind classics, such as Inspector Gadget, G.I. Joe, 2003’s The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program.

After some light-hearted, journalistic harassment, Patton agreed to a conversation. We connected four days later, on July 1, and it was like reuniting with one of my brothers. This time we kicked shit about Bruce Lee’s Taoist philosophies, the Shaw Brothers’ wuxia films, and Akira Kurosawa’s chanbara films.

Fox Theater Fan Boy

As a boy growing up in Detroit during the ‘70s, Chuck Patton spent his Saturdays at the Fox Theater gorging himself on buckets of popcorn while feasting his eyes on the high-octane choreography of kung fu and samurai films. He’s been an encyclopedia of martial-arts films and lore since childhood and can recite popular and rare film titles as if he were jacked into the IMDB database by a neck port. Name just about any half-forgotten chop-socky title, and Chuck Patton either owns it, watched it several times, or knows its full history, including personnel. He has, by his own account, seen nearly every film anyone can name from any era. The Shaw Brothers’ catalogue, the Venoms movies, the deep cuts—you name it and Chuck Patton can go there with you.

“Jimmy Wang Yu, star of the Flying Guillotine. The One-Armed Boxer. The One-Armed Swordsman. Come on! I got the box set. Kung Fu movies were my jam. The Five Deadly Venoms? I have all their movies. Masked Avengers. My favorite.”

My own visual education began in the pages of comic books, where I mimicked John Byrne and other illustrators to learn how to draw the Hulk and Spider-Man. I assumed wrongly that one of the best pencilers in the comic industry had learned his craft similarly, but not so much. Patton’s visual education began in front of a television screen tuned into the swashbuckling adventures of Robin Hood and Zorro. This fascination with sword fighting quickly expanded from Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Tyrone Power’s Zorro to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Seven Samurai.

“The first time I saw Yojimbo, I think it was... I had to be around 10 or 12. It was on one of the early public broadcasting channels before they became PBS. They did a thing on Japanese films.”

Power’s The Mark of Zorro and Flynn’s Captain Blood (1935) and They Died with Their Boots On (1941), held Patton until Asian cinema shot a golden arrow into his heart.

“There was just this aesthetic, this intelligence, as well as primordial power—animal power—of the samurai, how they fought. It just grabbed me right away,” he said.

One standard in samurai films that forever sparks nostalgia in Patton and for an entirely different reason than the other chanbara titles is the 1960’s Kenji Misumi directed Zatoichi films starring Shintaro Katsu. The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) follows a blind swordsman who is pulled into a life of gambling and crime by feuding gangs. Zatoichi resonated with Patton not only for the strong premise of a blind swordsman kicking ass all over feudal Japan, but because Patton’s father was blind.

“I’ve always had this affinity and warmth, this attention towards blind people and what they go through. And then all of a sudden, here's this guy who's blind and can kill you with his cane sword. It just grabbed me!”

Cinema’s Combat Grammar

Kung fu and samurai films were a kind of art school for Chuck Patton. Through these now classic works he learned to fuse vulnerability with lethal competence, a skillset that would surface later when he became animation director for the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series. Because of films like Zatoichie, the turtles—Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo—could be wounded, embarrassed, and afraid, but still deadly as hell. It also became clear to Patton while working on the TMNT series, that not everyone held his Eastern cinema knowledge base, the martial arts films education he’d earned.

“There's a difference between samurai sword fighting and Hong Kong sword fighting, like in Master of Flying Guillotine or The 36th Chambers. I wanted that kind of fighting in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, at least our version of it.”

The animators staffing TMNT didn’t understand combat grammar to the degree Chuck Patton did; they didn’t know the differences between chanbara and wuxia, between Kurosawa’s long, static setups and lightening quick sword slashes versus the Shaw Brothers’ Chang Cheh’s multiple opponents and multiple wounds before a final blood bath (or shower!). Patton made sure they learned.

“I was dictatorial,” he said, “kind of rough. I didn't want any inauthentic stuff.”

Fortunately, a new martial artist and film star arrived in theaters all the way from Thailand, and this dude was raw! Tony Jaa definitely came to bring the pain.

“We all love Tony Jaa. Tony Jaa took Jackie Chan’s fighting to another level. We went to see Ong-Bak. We saw it three times then got a bootleg copy and played that in the studio, a lot. I told the guys this is what we got to bring, a little bit of this and this.”

Teaching moments happened regularly during Patton’s tenure as animation director. There were corrections that had to be made, one being the younger animators were referencing Quentin Tarantino’s films for inspiration.

“We all look at the same shit,” said Patton. “Kill Bill was from Lady Snowblood.[2] I had the movies too, but why should I go to Domino's Pizza when I can go to Gino's down the street, get my pizza straight from the Italians? Why look at Tarantino when we can look at the Shaw Brothers? Kurosawa? Zatoichi?”

On-screen swordplay isn’t interchangeable, and copied choreography should never hold preference over the original. Accordingly, when Patton and his team decided to pay homage to the anime classic Akira (1988) and use the motorcycle slide in a Turtles episode, they went straight to the source material, Katsuhiro Otomo, not the countless knockoffs. And when they executed, they brought their undeniable TMNT style and aesthetic to that re-creation. It was nothing short of menacing, dopeness unchained.

“I don't want whatever I borrow to seem so obvious,” Patton said, “I want you to see it and go, ‘Oh, that reminds me of something,’ but I don't want to take it verbatim.”

Patton shared this discipline, this integrity, with his team as often as required.

“We’re lucky to regurgitate the dreams that’ve inspired us,” he said.

The goal now, Patton tells younger collaborators, is to metabolize everything that seized you before and to make that shit new again. It’s this very sentiment that places Patton in company with the likes of Wu-Tang Clan co-founder, the RZA, who also believes in transforming the classic and foundational into the new and inspirational.

Respect Young Architects

As a boy growing up in Staten Island in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, Robert Diggs, P.K.A., the RZA, rode the ferry into Manhattan with his older cousin, Russell Jones, P.K.A. Ol' Dirty Bastard. Like many of us boys, these two spent their Saturdays visiting the grindhouse theaters that lined 42nd Street[3]. When they could afford it, they gorged themselves on buttered popcorn while feasting their eyes on the syncopated choreography of kung fu and samurai films. They sat through countless hours of martial-arts dramas—double and triple features—that covered the classic themes of revenge, fealty, redemption, and identity. It was there, in one of those crappy 42nd Street grindhouse theaters, that Diggs (RZA) watched Lau Kar-leung's 1978 Shaw Brothers production The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a film he’s since watched hundreds of times.[4] The rest is history and one of hip hop’s most endearing stories.

Similar to Chuck Patton, Robert Diggs is an encyclopedia of martial-arts films. He, too, can wax poetically about popular and rare titles as if jacked into the IMDB database. And, like it or not, these men share their affinities with Quentin Tarantino, whose childhood and coming of age was equally immersed in kung fu theater. In fact, Tarantino was introduced to martial arts films by Black men, including Floyd Wilson[5], one of his mom’s boyfriends, reportedly a struggling screenwriter (Tarantino 346–53).[6] Tarantino recounts one grindhouse Saturday screening where, as he put it, "my little face was the only white one in the audience."[7]

No Black man ever ushered me and my brothers into age-inappropriate films. We got dropped off unattended, and, basically, for two-to-four hours straight, that theater in Carson—possibly the same theater Tarantino and Wilson visited—was a virtual daycare center. We loved it. That was freedom, bro, and we absorbed those films like sun rays.

My writing about those moments are mostly autobiographical, but I’m always interested in what others have done with all they’ve consumed over the years, how they express appreciation for the works that inspired them.

Ultimately, it’s celebrated theft with Tarantino, a mythology built from the source with RZA, and instruction to always channel the source from Chuck Patton. Tarantino seldom minces words regarding his method: "Great artists steal; they don't do homages."[8]

Certainly, these cultural icons have borrowed from the best but not all deliver a new internal logic. While Tarantino takes all that’s available, Chuck Patton and the RZA take only what’s needed. Both men offer genuine transformation, a new internal logic.

The RZA and co-founder Ol' Dirty Bastard took Wu-Tang Clan, the group’s name, from the Gordon Liu directed Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983)[9]. Their first album’s title is an amalgam of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and Lau Kar-leung The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).[10] The RZA admittedly samples dialogue directly from Shaw Brothers films.[11] There’s no celebrated thievery when he discusses those sources, only genuine adoration and respect. No concealment, only conversations full of retrospection, re-memory, and gushing recommendations. Closer attention to the RZA’s focus on Eastern culture, particularly martial arts films, reveals parallels to Black American life.

“In addition to the richness of Asian culture, we at Wu-Tang were fascinated with the struggles between the oppressed Chinese villagers and the repressive Manchu authority and how it mirrored our own experiences growing up as Black kids in America’s inner cities.”[12]

Echoes of King’s "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" resound.[13]

Growing up in Detroit, Chuck Patton’s life was certainly pocked with moments of adversity that colored his world views and sent him searching for distraction in the pages of comics and on big and small screens. No different from us kids growing up in Compton. Still, despite our troubles, we found joy. In fact, we lived and learned, some of us more than others.

“I was like a sponge in water,” said Patton, when asked about his influences. “I love Jackie Chan. The idea that Jackie can take a chair and make a gun out of it. I think that's what got me inspired.”

Nearly all boys in the ‘hood aspired to combat skills mirroring Jackie Chan’s or the greatest of all time, Bruce Lee’s. The latter’s Taoist and Buddhist philosophies filter through Tarantino, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chuck Patton’s work.

“Bruce Lee was my god,” said Patton. “I mean I've looked at Enter the Dragon so many damn times, I used to joke that if I die I want a reel of it put in my box.”

In college he studied Bruce Lee’s fight sequences frame by frame.

“I would play Enter the Dragon over and over,” he said. “I can't tell you how many times I've stopped fight scenes, run them backwards, and watched them again.”

All said, it wasn’t just combat choreography that compelled Patton’s nearly habitual viewings of Bruce Lee films. It was also Lee’s Taoist philosophies.

Content and Contact

In the greatest fight scenes, combat isn’t simply about the fighting, the physical contact, it’s the emotions leading up to that fight and what sustains it to its conclusion.

“Bruce is all about emotional content, which made total sense,” Patton said. “Contact is smash, smash, but what do you have there? What led to that punch?”

Spoken plainly, a fight scene should be more than a violent dance between two or more people, it should be its own contained story. The fight must be about something or somebody in order to really matter. Make the fight about a person and a thing and there’s gold. Make fights more than just movement. Make them matter emotionally.

“It's telling a story,” Patton said. “It's building your character. Showing shifts in the storyline.”

In Bruce Lee's Return of the Dragon (1972), Chuck Norris’s character, Colt, faces Lee’s Tang Lung who is in Rome to protect his relatives from thugs who want to force the family to sell their Chinese restaurant. Colt is the syndicate's last and final hired gun. The fight with Lung isn't personal for Colt, but it's deeply personal for Lung. And it’s this content that makes their fight that much more interesting to watch.

“What I took from Bruce is that this is the real core of what storytelling's about,” said Patton. “Not just movement, but intention behind the movement.”

Bruce Lee has had a profound impact on artists of every stripe. The Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA has his own ideologies when it comes to martial arts films, something he calls an instruction manual for transformation.[14]It boils down to a way of understanding discipline, patience and self-mastery that mapped directly onto his own circumstances. And, even if and when fans are divided by Tarantino’s catalogue and brazenness when discussing sources, there is a polish and style that comes across. Some call it postmodern pastiche, but we must take Tarantino’s work for what it is: art.

Curation As Creative Act

Chuck Patton dreamily recalls a moment in his career as an illustrator in animation doing story boards for a L.A. animation company. He worked with another story boarder who moonlighted as a DJ. This person sometimes brought in mixtapes he’d made into the studio and he and Patton jammed to them as they worked. The sounds ranged from hip hop to house, but mostly house. Whatever the music genre, Patton and his co-worker would draw for hours-long stretches without a word spoken between them, just the rhythm of the beat from whatever the DJ put together that week. It was magical.

“That music fueled you,” Patton said. “It’s almost like we were both on a turntable, drawing.”

The lesson for Patton wasn’t about the music, it was about curation as a creative act: how to select, sequence, and layer items until they became something inspiring, a way of building things out of pieces never meant to fit together.

Not much different from what the RZA did for the Wu-Tang Clan.

Patton’s method of curating as a creative act was to target specific fight choreography for his animation team to study; create mood boards for a show’s tone using unrelated influences; and hire illustrators to transform ideas into kinetic action.

In college, I gathered articles, books, recordings, and images to create cohesive ideas around a paper’s thesis. I loved that shit. Loved the grades I earned, the respect from professors, the camaraderie of fellow students who also came to bring the pain. It was Black student union for me, the parties, college life.

That was years ago, the good old days...

Bro, people love talking about the good old days, the good old days. Well, let’s talk about the good old days.

I used to be a creative writing major. I’d set up my laptop, throw on some Wu-Tang Clan, and spin tales about growing up in Compton, going to the movies with my little brothers. As a kid, I spent Saturday afternoons mimicking fight scenes from old kung fu movies. We kicked the shit out of each other because we couldn’t kick the people we wanted to kick, mainly our foster parents but also our biologicals because their self-curated lives landed their children in foster care. Our fighting wasn’t about the physical contact, it was about the content of our hearts. We were full as hell back in those days, but kung fu movies did it for us.

Kung fu movies... Seriously? I mean, goddamn, can it be shit was that simple back then or has time slipped in a cold remix?

Alexa, play "The Way We Were/Try to Remember" by Gladys Knight and the Pips!

Notes

[1] Bergman, Alan, and Marilyn Bergman. "The Way We Were." Performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips, I Feel a Song, Buddah Records, 1974.

[2] "Lady Snowblood." The Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com/films/28589-lady-snowblood. Accessed 31 July 2026. Kill Bill's structural and visual debts to Toshiya Fujita's 1973 film have been widely documented; see also Chris Evangelista, "10 Movies That Inspired Kill Bill," SlashFilm, www.slashfilm.com/1178418/movies-that-inspired-kill-bill/.

[3]Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. "Wu-Tang's RZA on the Mysterious Land of Shaolin: Staten Island." Literary Hub, 12 Oct. 2016, lithub.com/wu-tangs-rza-on-the-mysterious-land-of-shaolin-staten-island/.

[4]RZA. Interview. The New York Times, 11 Nov. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/rza-36-chambers-shaolin-film-interview.html.

[5] Maland, Charles. Review of Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino. Cineaste, vol. 48, no. 4, Fall 2023, www.cineaste.com/fall2023/cinema-speculation.

[6] Tarantino, Quentin. Cinema Speculation. Harper, 2022. See also Althouse, Ann. "When Quentin Tarantino Was 8 and His Mother's Black Boyfriend Took Him to See 2 Movies about Black People in a Theater with an All-Black Audience." Althouse, 30 Oct. 2022, althouse.blogspot.com/2022/10/when-quentin-tarantino-was-8-and-his.html.

[7] Tarantino, Quentin. Cinema Speculation. Harper, 2022.

[8] Tarantino, Quentin. Interview. Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated, edited by Gerald Peary, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, p. 129.

[9]"Wu-Tang Slang: An Abridged Glossary of Hip Hop's Most Iconic Group." RADII, 22 July 2024, radii.co/article/wu-tang-slang-an-abridged-glossary-of-hip-hops-most-iconic-group.

[10]RZA. Interview. The New York Times, 11 Nov. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/rza-36-chambers-shaolin-film-interview.html. See note 4.

[11]Gross, Jason. "RZA's Edge." Film Comment, May-June 2008, www.filmcomment.com/article/rzas-edge-the-rzas-guide-to-kung-fu-films/.

[12] Cuba, Darold. “RZA Accompanies ‘The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.’” The New York Times, 10 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/rza-36-chambers-shaolin-film-interview.html.

[13] King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail. 16 Apr. 1963.

[14]The RZA, with Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. Riverhead Books, 2005. See note 10.