Although science fiction was always the chord that resonated most strongly with me during my impressionable youth, I heard plenty of other pop-cultural notes, too. One of those was the TV series Kung Fu, in which David Carradine played a half-Chinese Shaolin monk wandering the American Old West in search of his long-lost brother.
Actually, it’s surprising this show left any kind of mark on me, when I think about it. It ran for only three seasons when I was very young, and I’m certain I couldn’t have seen it often because it wasn’t the sort of thing my dad — who was of course the unquestioned master of the TV in those days — would’ve been interested in. Kung Fu was, quite frankly, a weird show for its time, and Dad has never had much tolerance for weird. An unlikely mash-up of martial-arts films — then still largely unknown to mainstream American audiences — and the more familiar tropes of the Western, the series made extensive use of flashbacks to tell its stories, which often hinged on some bit of Zen philosophy (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof). These elements, combined with highly stylized editing and slow-motion action sequences, lent Kung Fu a somewhat surrealistic quality that was very out of step with the usual cop-and-doctor shows of the early ’70s.
And yet, probably because the show was so different from everything else, I have a powerful memory of sitting on the hearth with a blazing fire at my back, watching Kung Fu on our massive old console TV with the clunky tuner dial. I recall being simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the milky white eyes of blind Master Po (seen in the photo above with Carradine’s character, Kwai Chang Caine). The image of Caine crouched in front of a red-hot brazier, preparing to sear tattoos of a dragon and a tiger into his forearms, stuck in my head for ages before home video finally made it possible for me to see it again. And of course the character of Caine himself — serene, always trying to avoid a fight unless he had no choice, and then using only the minimum amount of force necessary to end it — is virtually archetypal, at least for anyone who was around in the ’70s.
Archetype or no, however, Carradine was never a hero to me in the same way as, say, William Shatner. I never pretended on the playground to be Caine, like I did James T. Kirk. I didn’t follow Carradine’s career, and I honestly know very little about his personal life. But his was one of the familiar celebrity faces I grew up with, and on some basic, purely visceral level, I liked him. I smiled when I encountered him in a B-movie or a television commercial, especially in recent years when he’s been willing to make fun of his enduring connection to Kung Fu. Like his best-known character, Carradine was simply cool.
