Kung Fu: how Bruce Lee lost out to David Carradine for role in martial arts TV series

The US television series Kung Fu, which told of the adventures of a Shaolin monk in the Wild West, holds a controversial place in the history of martial arts entertainment.

The hit show, which ran from 1972 to 1975, introduced kung fu to mainstream viewers in the United States, and to viewers in the UK, where it was extremely popular.

Kung Fu was also the first US television series to treat Asian philosophy in a positive light, and the first to feature an Asian hero who was both a better fighter and a morally superior person to the non-Asians he encountered.

But Asian-Americans were angered by the choice of a Caucasian actor, David Carradine, for the lead role of Kwai Chang Caine, the half-American, half-Chinese hero, rather than an Asian.

What’s more, Bruce Lee had auditioned for the role of Caine, but had been rejected because the producers felt that American viewers would not understand Lee’s accent.

Kung Fu acquired even more notoriety when a rumour surfaced that the concept behind the show had been stolen from Lee, who had tried to get a television series called The Warrior – which also focused on the exploits of a martial artist in the Wild West – into production at Warner Bros, the producers of Kung Fu.

Kung Fu is essentially a western. The late 1960s had seen the classical western films, which tried to show cowboy life as a microcosm of civil society, morph into “revisionist” westerns like Soldier Blue. Such films depicted the Wild West as a brutal, harsh and cruel place which lacked civility.