Film and Popular Culture in The West
Karate spread rapidly in the West through popular culture. In 1950s popular fiction, karate was at times described to readers in near-mythical terms, and it was credible to show Western experts of unarmed combat as unaware of Eastern martial arts of this kind. By the 1970s, martial arts films had formed a mainstream genre that propelled karate and other Asian martial arts into mass popularity.
- The Karate Kid (1984) and its sequels The Karate Kid, Part II (1986), The Karate Kid, Part III (1989) and The Next Karate Kid (1994) are films relating the fictional story of an American adolescent's introduction into karate.
- Karate Kommandos, an animated children's show, with Chuck Norris himself appearing to reveal the episode and the moral contained in the episode.
| Practitioner | Fighting style |
|---|---|
| Sonny Chiba | Kyokushin |
| Hiroyuki Sanada | Kyokushin |
| Sean Connery | Kyokushin |
| Joe Lewis | Shorin-ryu |
| Fumio Demura | Shitō-ryū |
| Takayuki Kubota | Gosoku-ryu |
| Dolph Lundgren | Kyokushin |
| Richard Norton | Gōjū-ryu |
| Wesley Snipes | Shotokan |
| Jean-Claude Van Damme | Shotokan |
| Cynthia Luster | Gōjū-ryu |
| Michael Jai White | Shotokan |
| Tadashi Yamashita | Shorin-ryu |
Many other film stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, Phillip Rhee, Don "The Dragon" Wilson come from a range of other martial arts.
Read more about this topic: Karate
Famous quotes containing the words film, popular, culture and/or west:
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)