More than most genres, martial arts films have come a long way in the
past 40 years. In the 1960's, such films were - at least when dubbed in
English - so awful that there are probably more parodies of these movies than
movies themselves. The action, of course, was almost always good, but the
ridiculous dialogue and terrible choices for voiceovers can still make a grown
man wince after all these years.
One man, Bruce Lee, was a key figure in changing all that, and we can only wonder what might have occurred had he not died so young and so tragically. The most important non-Asian to influence martial arts films was undoubtedly Chuck Norris, and he almost single-handedly kept the martial arts film genre alive in America after Lee's passing.
More recent films that have played an important part in continuing to stimulate interest in the martial arts includes the ground-breaking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the semi-comic popular martial arts films of Jackie Chan, and the universally admired films of Jet Li.
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