


"I have broken or dislocated virtually every finger and every toe that I have," he said. Still, filming could be physically hazardous work. The fight scenes in Kung Fu are pretty tame to modern eyes, and Carradine told NPR that government regulations placed strict limits on the number of minutes in each episode that could be devoted to showing violence. Po gave Caine the nickname "Grasshopper," which became one of the show's pop culture taglines. There were also numerous flashbacks to his youth in the Shaolin Temple, and the lessons learned from Master Po (Keye Luke) and Master Chen Ming Kan (Philip Ahn). In each episode, Caine would journey through the Old West and encounter an injustice to be stopped and people to be helped, and would use his martial arts abilities to do so. These things did nothing to stop Kung Fu from becoming immensely popular.
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Carradine noted in a 2009 interview with NPR that both his eyes and skin tone were altered by make-up artists on the show to make him look more Asian. The Association of Asian Pacific American Artists actor group filed a complaint, and the show has frequently been cited in the intervening years as an " example of whitewashing," or having Caucasian actors appear in roles as people of other races. (Lee had been rejected, it was claimed, because of his accent.) Carradine was chosen, however, despite having no martial arts experience. Several Asian actors auditioned for the part, including Bruce Lee and George Takei. The casting of Carradine had also been a controversial choice. (The truth is that Spielman and Friedlander had been working on the idea for the script since 1967.) This idea had so much momentum that it almost instantly became become a commonly believed urban legend. There were rumors that ABC had stolen the idea from a screenplay Bruce Lee had pitched to them called The Warrior, about a Chinese Kung Fu master traveling around the American west. By that point, the show was already dealing with controversy. The film was so popular that ABC immediately made plans to turn it into a series, and Kung Fu began production that summer under the direction of writer Herman Miller. After killing the nephew of the Emperor of China after he murdered Caine's master, Caine flees to the American west in the 1870s. Caine is the son of an American father and a Chinese mother who was orphaned at a young age and then raised in a Shaolin Monastery, where he learned the mystical arts of Kung Fu. Written by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander, and directed by Jerry Thorpe, the movie told the story of a man named Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine). 14, 1972, following a made-for-TV film called The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon from the previous February. Then came Kung Fu, perhaps the most influential television show in the history of American martial arts.
