Why Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon, is telling the story her father wanted to tell
- Helping to produce Warrior, the HBO and Cinemax series based on Lee’s idea, has allowed his daughter to emerge from his long shadow
- His original pitch has been rumoured to have been the basis of the 70s hit series, Kung Fu. Seeing her father’s vision now realised is a vindication, she says
What goes around comes around. Even if it takes half a century. In 1972, American television network ABC began showing the martial-arts series Kung Fu, produced by Warner Bros. In its three years it would enjoy off-the-charts viewing figures and make a household name of David Carradine, who starred as a fugitive Shaolin monk wandering the Wild West in search of his half-brother.
Largely responsible for introducing kung fu to Western audiences, the show might have continued for many more seasons, had it not been for Carradine’s drug problems. Yet those were not the sole cause of controversy.
Allegedly, Bruce Lee was rejected for the starring role because network executives didn’t want an Asian leading man. Worse, murky rumours persist that Lee had already pitched a show titled The Warrior, about a martial-arts prodigy wandering the US, which, circumstantial evidence suggests, was then made by Warner Bros – as Kung Fu. Whatever the truth, Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter, says she now feels justice has been served, with her father’s vision finally realised.
“I guess ‘vindicated’ is the word, if you’ve heard the story of Kung Fu,” says Lee, 51, an executive producer of Warrior, as she and Koji, in their respective Zoom rooms, consider the show’s development and impact. “[I feel] vindicated, especially in being able to tell the story my father wanted to. But it took 50 years for us to be ready and able.
“The timing was right. Even five or 10 years earlier, I’m not sure we would have been able to get this show on air the way we have. It took [film director] Justin Lin becoming Justin Lin to bring this to the screen [as a fellow executive producer] and I feel that everybody got what they hoped for from it. I think my father did, I did, Justin did, [writer] Jonathan Tropper did and I hope the rest of the world did, too.”
Koji, 33, could certainly join that cohort. “I definitely didn’t think it would be a classy crime drama at first,” he says. “I thought it would be like, ‘Ahhh-soooh!’ It was a pleasant surprise. I read the pilot script and the series outline, but I’d never heard of Cinemax so I wasn’t familiar with the format.
