The trick to prying the security collar off a motel room’s
cable is to use a house key.
These days, of course, you just plug your laptop into the
HDMI port on the side of the digital screen. But back in
the 90’s, hotel room TVs were old-school, with a collar
around the “Cable In” input to keep you from being able
to unscrew the cable and steal the TV. So if one might be
a stand-up comic traveling on the road, and might have
a VCR along with a metric crapload of bootleg Jackie
Chan, Chow Yun Fat, John Woo, Tsui Hark and Shaw
Brothers VCR tapes in his car, one might need this trick
in order to connect said VCR to the room TV.
The tapes travelled with me as I crisscrossed the
country doing stand-up. I found my best stuff in the
legendary 36th Chamber Video store in Hell’s Kitchen
in New York, discussing the finer points of Jet Li’s work
with the Nation Of Islam dudes who were all about
the vintage Shaw Brothers stuff. Grabbed a few off
Hollywood Boulevard pop-ups, then looped up into
Chinatown in Seattle. It started with Jackie, I think,
a half-remembered viewing of Battle Creek Brawl
moving me to pick up some tapes while kicking around
in LA. Comedians have nothing but time, during the
day, so what else to do but… have my mind blown.
I got into Hong Kong action just (hipster alert) a few
years before Hollywood discovered it. It was the height
of the VCR bootleg industry, handwritten labels on
tapes in corner stores in seedy neighborhoods. What
grabbed me was the sheer pulp purity of those movies.
Heroes were heroes, villains were either tormented
evil or gleefully evil, but magnificently evil. And the
choreography. Not “choreography” as we’ve cheapened
it to mean now, as in any action arrangement, but back
when it still had the connotation of “dance.” Everyday
heroes, legendary martial artists of both sexes —
Fong Sai-Yuk and Ting-Ting! — and self-destructive
gunmen battled across roofs and mountaintops and
moving trains across a weird spot-welded genre that
told stories spread out over centuries. These movies
deeply influenced an entire generation of screenwriters
and directors, and so directly influenced an entire
generation of western culture. I will admit not two
weeks ago, I said to a director setting up a fight scene:
“He’s in conflict because he needs to distract them, but
doesn’t want to damage the artifacts — oh hell, I’ll just
find the Jackie clip on YouTube.”
It wasn’t all about the action, of course. These movies
are melodramas in the best, original sense of the world.
They’re uncut emotion, broken friendships and doomed
love affairs. Friends dying for friends. Loved ones
walking away in the snow, bleeding out, to save their
beloved who will never know of their sacrifice. These
are stories in the best sense of the word: tales meant to
convey an emotion, to invoke more than inform.
Luckily for all of us, Robin Laws was nice enough to
create a game allowing us to jump into the action. The
original Feng Shui was rightfully considered a classic.
Not only did it allow roleplaying gamers to enjoy
adventures in a new setting unencumbered with surly
elven layabouts, it created a bunch of rules you now
use in your other RPGs without knowing where they
came from. Mooks? Feng Shui, brother. Robin and the
other designers also broadened out the gaming world
from the movie world. We learned of a Secret War for
control of the world, the factions that had risen, fallen,
and even now battled each other in the shadows. Feng
Shui is to a great degree the synthesis of ideas Hong
Kong Action Cinema unwittingly spat out over three
decades. They took the implied genre and created a
logical framework for it. That’s art, kids. The goal of art,
after all, is synthesis.
Apparently, this particular synthesis required cybernetic
apes. Huh. Art’s funny that way.
The original Feng Shui had a good run, exploring and
expanding its world, keeping players in the “firing two
guns at a flying time-travelling eunuch sorcerer whilst
riding a motorcycle atop the rooftops of Shanghai”
business for quite a bit longer than seems possible. All
things evolve however (cybernetic apes forcibly so), and
thus we find ourselves at the proper historical juncture
— play the game, you’ll get the reference later — for
a new edition of Feng Shui. Take all the awesome of
the greatest time-spanning action movies and tune
the gameplay with all the lessons Robin and the other
developers have perfected over the last twenty years.
That is what you hold in your hand. Cherish it. Examine
it. Rotate it, noticing how easily you could throw it a
cross the room and crush the windpipe of the first ninja
smashing through your office window, allowing you to
grab the sword from his dead hand and wield it against
his greasy smoke-bombing compatriots.
So go get ‘em. Leap off buildings, sword-fight across
treetops, pry artifacts from deathtrap-laden temples,
have running gun-battles through the Underworld
in a desperate race to keep history itself from being
rewritten. Discover your sworn enemy is your longlost
sister, swear vengeance for the fallen noodle-boy
caught in the crossfire, kill a lot of kill-worthy dudes
to both save the world and earn one more bounty so
you can buy that nightclub singer some new corneas …
KI-YAAAAH.
—John rogers
John Rogers is a screenwriter, comedian,
and producer. Among other things, he is the
creator of Jackie Chan Adventures and executive
producer of Leverage and The Librarians.