The irony and travesty here is that if you've ever seen these guys' films, you'll realize they've all drastically lowered their standards to accommodate whatever they were lacking to get the job done on MARTIAL LAW. In the second season, a new duo was hired Yuen Bing, another one of the Seven Little Fortunes and who has done over 200 films (DRAGON INN, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA II-V) and Dion Lam, a fight choreographer for MATRIX and for Hong Kong's all time boxoffice grossing film STORMRIDERS. In the first season, we're talking fight directing royalty such as Richard Hung (aka Yuen De), one of the original Seven Little Fortunes which also includes Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and who did the fight choreography for classics such as DRAGON FROM RUSSIA, FONG SAI YUK, OPERATION SCORPIO and SAVIOR OF SOULS Ailen Sit, one of Jackie's top fight assistants known Stateside as the guy in the ladder fight with Jackie in FIRST STRIKE and Andy Cheng, who is one of Jackie's personally picked stuntmen for his last 6 films including SHANGHAI NOON and RUSH HOUR 2. My suggestion, and I actually got the guts up to tell the producers, was to kill all these birds with one stone by replacing Hall with the rock solid Pam Grier.Īpart from Sammo's amazing experience from doing over 140 martial art oriented films, perhaps the real stars of MARTIAL LAW were the Hong Kong fight directors. It was also obvious that Sammo and Mandylor had great chemistry which Sammo and Hall never had. Yet by downplaying Mandylor, they removed a world class boxer and martial artist from their repertoire of good fight scenes. But that's okay because he's not known for that. Instead, Hall was not funny, had no interest in learning martial arts and initially didn't want to do any fights. Also, Hall's last 2 sitcoms failed miserably, begging the question, "Why him?" If he'd been like RUSH HOUR's Chris Tucker, that would've worked. But by losing Lauren, Sammo's only true antagonist, they removed any conflict existing between the police characters. However, in today's age of political correctness, it made sense to reflect the audience's pseudo-attitude by having Asian, white and black cops working together to stamp out crime. But of course everyone and their pet cat scoffed at that one. The producers still contend that Jackie Chan's RUSH HOUR had nothing to do with hiring Hall. Several episodes after the pilot, Lauren was replaced by Arsenio Hall playing Terrell Parker and Hu's character took on a bigger role while Mandylor's character took a back seat to Hall. Pei Pei's character's name was a nod to one of Hong Kong's most famous first ladies of kung-fu cinema, Cheng Pei Pei, whose daughter Eugenia did a cameo towards the end of the last season. detectives: Louis Malone (Louis Mandylor) and Dana Dickson (Tammy Lauren). Ben Winship (Tom Wright), Sammo teams up with two L.A. The first season revolved around Law, a one-man Shanghai police department who arrives in LA to track down his protege, Chen Pei Pei (aka Grace), played by the former Miss Hawaii, Kelly Hu. Furthermore, MARTIAL LAW won its time slot every week for each new, premiered episode. No other American show in TV history can claim that statistic. In case you didn't know, MARTIAL LAW was the highest rated new drama series for the fall '98 television season and the show lay claim to international success as the best new British TV program in 1999 with sales of over 2 million video tapes of the pilot in China. What happened to MARTIAL LAW? For those of you that came in late, if you were one of the 11 million Americans who tuned in every week to MARTIAL LAW, a kung-fu cop series that quickly carved out a niche in the Nielsen ratings, you witnessed Hong Kong film legend Sammo Hung (Sammo Law) performing some of the most outrageous fight scenes ever seen on American TV. I've seen over 3000 martial art films dating back to the 60's, so if a fight scene has been done, there's is a good chance I've seen it. Shot for shot and gag for gag, it's the exact same fight in Yuen Woo Ping's IRON MONKEY, where Huang Fei Hong's wife fights 4 renegade monks. Just look at that final fight scene in ANGELS, where Barrymore takes on 4 baddies. For example, when it comes to CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON or CHARLIE'S ANGELS, been there, done that, seen it. At this point, I plan to discuss, critique or comment on Chinese filmmakers that have either recently made the transition to Hollywood or Hollywood's current exploitation of Chinese filmmakers.
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