Episode 03 - Meredith Lewis

For episode three of the Kung Fu Movie Guide Podcast, I have a nice chat with the Australian blogger Meredith Lewis, who runs the rather excellent kung fu movie blog, Dangerous Meredith's Fu Thoughts. I spent time with Meredith over Google Hangouts just before a talk she was doing at a Melbourne festival on the topic of Monkey - the popular Japanese TV show from the 1970s, known to international audiences as Monkey Magic. She afforded me a bit of time during her research to talk about the show's origins, which is based on a 16th century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, and tells the story of the mythological figure Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King.There are many films, animations and stories featuring the Monkey King, and countless variations on the Journey to the West story, and we discuss some of our favourite adaptions in this podcast. Meredith is also an ex-dancer and choreographer, so we discuss our favourite action directors and performers - people like Yuen Woo-ping and Lau Kar-leung, who as well as being martial arts masters, were also able to capture great sequences of intricate movement, much like a musical or dance number. We also discuss the role of women in martial arts films, particularly in wuxia literature and cinema, and we look at why we have both turned to blogging as a way of sharing our mutual passion for the genre.

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