Movie news: THE HANDS OF SHANG-CHI

I just stumbled across the news that a movie adaptation of one of my favorite comic books is in the works. The announcement appears at IMDB, The Movie Insider, and elsewhere. One of the most detailed announcements I’ve found is at cinematical.com. The working title for the project is The Hands of Shang-Chi, and the one-sentence plot synopsis says, “Based on the Marvel Comics hero, a young Kung-Fu master learns his father is the world’s worst criminal.” The screenwriter is listed as Bruce McKenna, who at one site is quoted as giving a tiny amount of further information: “A young kung fu master learns his father is the worst criminal in the world and the drama becomes ‘The Godfather’ in reverse, ‘because Shang Chi doesn’t want to be like Michael Corleone,’ said McKenna. ‘There’s this contemporary world of Chinese billionaire industrialists, but it’s a bit like the Wild West or the robber baron era because the influence of the mafia is so strong.’

What has me more psyched than anything is that Ang Lee and Woo-ping Yuen are attached to the project. Woo-ping is of course the near-legendary action choreographer (and sometime director) behind some of the best martial arts movies in history, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix movies, the Once Upon a Time in China series, and scores of others.  (He also choreographed the action for the Charlie’s Angels movies and Quentin Tarantino‘s Kill Bill duology, which may fall into a less-exalted category, but not because of his contributions.) He’s simply the man. Ang Lee, for his part, entered martial arts territory when he directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And of course he has also directed The Hulk, The Ice Storm, and several other fine films. So this bodes well and portends that The Hands of Shang-Chi will turn out to be something special.

The only thing that worries me is the sliding date that’s been attached to it. Apparently it was first announced in Variety all the way back in 2003 and, as reported by the cinematical.com article, has been an on-again, off-again affair from the beginning. Presently the announcement for it is dated 2006 or 2007 depending on where you look. So I certainly hope the project’s very long journey through development hell doesn’t indicate that it’s going to end up as a miscarriage.

Incidentally, if you’re unfamiliar with Shang-Chi, there’s a very informative Wikipedia article about the comic. (Wikipedia has rapidly become my second brain, as indicated by the numerous links to it that I’ve peppered throughout my Teeming Brain posts. The recent, highly publicized report by Nature magazine that announced Wikipedia’s science articles compare favorably in their accuracy to Britannica’s science articles has helped to assuage my guilt feelings over this.) And a great site titled The Shang Chi Chronology features a summary of the entire series.

The short version is that the character of Shang-Chi first appeared in 1973 in Special Marvel Edition #15 and then returned in the next couple of issues, and proved so wildly popular that he was given his own series. The popularity of a kung fu-based character was of course bound up with the explosion of popularity that Asian martial arts received in America during the 1970s. ABC’s Kung Fu series was tops on television. Bruce Lee achieved immortality by dying in July of 1973, followed by the posthumous release and roaring success of his only English-language movie, Enter the Dragon, on August 24 (my third birthday, incidentally). Shang-Chi’s debut came just four months later, in December.

Moreover, Shang-Chi arose not only as an attempt to cash in on the craze, but as an actual creative and business child of it all. As recounted in the Wikipedia article, “The character was conceived in late 1972 when Marvel Comics acquired the comic book rights to Sax Rohmer‘s pulp novel villain Dr. Fu Manchu while they also held the rights to the Kung Fu television program. Instead of producing a straight adaptation of either source, the decision was made to combine them. The result was Shang-Chi, a master of Kung Fu, who was introduced as the (previously unheard of) son of Fu Manchu.”

In his appearance, personality, and fighting style, the character of Shang-Chi was largely a hybrid of Bruce Lee and Kwai Chang Caine (the protagonist of the Kung Fu TV series), a fact that seems eerily appropriate given that Lee developed the Kung Fu series with producer Fred Weintraub for ABC and was slated to play Kwai Chang until the network scrubbed him, fearing that American audiences weren’t ready for an Asian leading man on primetime television, and cast David Carradine in the role instead. Shang-Chi fought like Bruce Lee and engaged in frequent inner philosophical reflections like Kwai Chang, who frequently recalled words of wisdom that he had received during his training at the Shaolin Temple in China.  Artistically, philosophically, sociologically, and thematically, it was quite sophisticated, as were so many other Marvel comics from the same period.

I loved every bit of it, and this love played out in various ways. From age 11 to 17 I studied Japanese goju-ryu, a martial art that mingles hard-style Japanese karate with a few softer-styled kung fu techniques. During the same period I ate up the Shang-Chi comics series, Bruce Lee’s movies, and the Kung Fu series, which I watched religiously when it played in reruns on WGN every Saturday (I had been too young to remember or appreciate the series’ original run). That’s why I’m so eager to see the new Shang-Chi movie come to completion. A number of my childhood loves have already seen successful big-screen treatments in recent years, including Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings. A great Shang-Chi movie would make a wonderful extension of this trend.