In honor of the late David Carradine:

Sorry for the poor quality of this clip; it’s the only one I could find. Still, even with the warbly audio and washed-out picture, it gives a good idea of what Kung Fu was like for those who aren’t familiar with it. If this piques your interest at all, the show is available on DVD (but not Hulu, oddly enough).

As always when I watch these old intros, I’m amazed how long this is. Back in the day, a television series went to huge lengths to explain its premise for newcomers, and to set the mood for what was to come. Now, I guess the assumption is that you already know what you’re about to watch, and anyway we need to scrounge every spare second for actual storytelling so we can cram in another commercial or three. Seriously, if you compare the average runtime of an hour-long TV drama from 1975 to a modern show, we’ve lost nearly ten minutes to advertising.

Yet another piece of evidence that, in a lot of ways, the 1970s and ’80s were a much better time…