Grasshopper
David Carradine is dead (possibly a suicide). Born into an acting family, he appeared in many movies and TV shows, and got a fair amount of attention a few years ago as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.
But there's no question he'll best be remembered as the ultimate in cool, the quiet Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu, a simple man in the old West who just wanted peace, but no matter how hard he searched, could not find it. Luckily for him, he was fully trained in the ancient art of ass kicking.
It was a different time. It was a time when a man from the West who admired the East could play a man from the East traveling through the West. Also, it was a time before widespread remotes when credit sequences could last almost three minutes.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
3 Comments:
In late elementary/junior high school years, this show was one the main topics of discussion the morning after it was on. There was something very cool about beating people up in slow motion. Billy Jack and the Six Million Dollar Man (and later, the Incredible Hulk) had similar appeal.
The show also spawned about a trillion uses of the word "grasshopper" by mentors everywhere.
(Do you remember David Carradine on one of the first blooper shows?- He showed a clip of some really expensive (for the time) tracking shot in a big crowd scene from "Bound for Glory" and how it got ruined because some homeless guy came up to him for spare change in the middle of it. The memorable thing was how zonked David Carradine seemed while telling the story)
Latest reports seem to indicate that he died accidentally during auto-erotic asphyxiation. Maybe I'm being insensitive, but all I could think was "dude, it's Bangkok, and you're not broke. Pay somebody to spot you."
I'm more thinking "he's 72--you're never too old."
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