#note that all the murder attempts are like extremely cartoonish and dumb

[bakawitch]

Haha random au

Atem wants to do something nice for tkb, so he invites him on a vacation for two that he won at a raffle or something and they go there and Bakura is convinced that the only reason Atem invited him on a semi-romantic get away alone is because he wants to kill him.

So like any smart person, Bakura would instead constantly make attempts at Atem's life so he wouldn't be the one to die, but all his murder schemes fail and end up looking like weird attempts at flirting on his side and Atem is completely charmed by that and he thinks Bakura's only goal by accepting the invitation is to woo him.

Hijinks ensue and they accidentally get married or something.

[latetotherant]

Negotiating Remix Culture through Steve Oedekerk’s “Kung Pow” ••• By Lissa Heineman

In “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”, Stuart Hall explains the three ways we consume media texts: dominant, oppositional, and negotiated modes. The dominant model upholds society’s norms. These works don’t break barriers, and often entertain and reassert hegemonic ideas . The oppositional model, as its name suggests, identifies and critiques the dominant notions. Oliver Moore notes that these readings are often met with hostility from those supportive of the dominant framework. Finally, negotiated works lie between these extremes, allowing consumers to choose to accept or reject elements of a text. This mode employs dominant performances without subscribing to them. Negotiation twists popular notions into something new and subversive, while allowing them to be consumable by those in the dominant sphere.

Steve Oedekerk’s Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002) is one of many pastiches of the kung fu genre. The film follows in the footsteps of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), and the Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), films famous for their own remixes (here meaning media that draws inspiration and shape from pre-existing works). Kung Pow opens with a production note: 

This motion picture contains some footage from Hu He Shuang Xing aka “Tiger & Crane Fists,” a motion picture made in Hong Kong in 1976, but the voices and soundtrack were eliminated, and new voices and soundtrack were inserted by the producers of this motion picture.

While a bit clunky, this opening does what it needed to do: the Jimmy Neutron and Barnyard creator acknowledges the work of Jimmy Wang Yu (Tiger & Crane’s director), and prefaces the remix and remediation that Tiger & Crane Fists underwent in this movie.

As described within the production note, Kung Pow is a very literal remix. Oedekerk remastered Tiger & Crane Fists: he successfully took poorly preserved footage and had it saved digitally. He then scrambled this footage, filmed himself in front of a green screen, and reshaped the film around him. The process of remastering an old film is incredibly time-consuming and expensive, and yet he did it. Why? This is emblematic of his own fanboyishness. Oedekerk replaces the hero of a film he evidently loves in a very expensive form of fanfiction. Further, as noted in the movie’s preface, the film employs gag dubbing, a controversial redubbing technique used mainly for comedy. In the film’s commentary, Oedekerk notes that when any new characters or stand-ins were inserted into the remastered Tiger and Crane Fist footage, they wouldn’t record the script’s dialogue. Instead, they’d often be filmed speaking nonsense, and then the film’s audio was post-synced once filming and editing was completed. This ultimately made the film cohesively re-dubbed, with the entire film lacking sly lip-synching. Most films look to hide any issues with editing, and it’s clear Oedekerk’s choice was an intentional part of the film’s final result. This is poignant when one recognizes that the entire process of making Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is reminiscent of the production history of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1954).

Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a heavily re-edited American adaptation, commonly referred to as an Americanization of the 1954 Japanese film Gojira. In the West, the original Gojira had initially only been shown in America in Japanese community theatres, and the re-edited version became the known Godzilla to the Western world. Gojira was a film that was made to cope with the nuclear fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when it was remixed for American and other Western audiences, this plotline was entirely removed. This process is reminiscent of Kung Pow’s removal of Tiger and Crane Fists’ anti-Japanese colonization narrative. Further, this exemplifies a dominant mode of remix. The hegemonic order of American politics at the time would want a film that could create positive relations to Japan through a fun spectacle, the inclusion of an anti-American dialogue was oppositional to that structure and therefore something that was censored as it was brought Westward. One can see then, in turn, how Kung Pow! Enter the Fist intentionally mimicked the style of dubbing, which could then mock Godzilla: King of the Monsters and other re-dubbed works that remove narrative elements from their stories. This American film is often recognized as the original Godzilla, but it was actually a remix of the 1954 Gojira. In this remix, like Kung Pow, a white savior is literally superimposed into the narrative, suggesting to an unknowing Western viewer that he was in Gojira all along. Oedekerk, in Kung Pow, seems to acknowledge this historical remixing of Asian cinema. The film’s apparent self-awareness and its transparency to the audience gives the film the opportunity to be negotiatory pastiche, and, with that, instead of invoking literal meaning through its more stereotypical comedy, we instead might see the more problematic nature of such performances in mainstream media. This being said, there are then two questions: does Oedekerk take advantage of his window to perform pastiche rather than parody? And, further, why would this film’s stereotyping be more excusable than other works?

On the topic of pastiche versus parody, it is most appropriate to look at scenes from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist. The film opens on an original six-minute scene by Oedekerk that sets the tone of the film: a man, known as the Chosen One, and his sentient tongue, Tonguey, seek revenge on Master Pain, the person who murdered his family and attempted to kill him. The scene uses a CGI baby that has a powerful knack for kung-fu and seeming immortality (displayed by not dying while being flung down a steep hill). This scene explicitly presents what is to be anticipated for the rest of the 81 minute movie: this film is absurd, parodic, hyper-masculine, and hyper-violent. The cartoonish exploits paint the comedy of the work, from the CGI Tonguey to the over-the-top redubbing for the main antagonist. The film is obviously ridiculous, and everything about the over-dramatic, cliched narration and equally contrived action demands the audience to recognize that the film is absurd. There’s no denying that it absolutely is an inherently dumb film—the humor is juvenile, and often much closer to straight-up mockery than thoughtful pastiche—yet the film reveals itself as more deliberate than its surface-level silliness. Across the following scene in Kung Pow, country-rock music mixes with moments of flute-playing reminiscent of traditional kung-fu scenes. This transcultural moment highlights how Eastern and Western action cinema influences the other. Looking at Jimmy Wang Yu’s work, as well as other kung fu films and anime, one can see how American rock-n-roll has become embedded as marker of “the Chosen One” archetype; he’s a badass loner. Similarly, the Western genre plays into the same markers of the solitary hero, often with a tragic backstory.

The scene ultimately continues to an abandoned dojo where the Chosen One encounters other adversaries. The actors, all Asian, are dubbed-over in ridiculous American accents, and perform dramatic Kung-fu style moves. The fighting choreography revels in the extreme. At one point, rather than attacking the main pursuer, the Chosen One speedily tears apart a man’s black robe, resulting in the garb resembling a tasseled bikini, which causes the man, mortified, to run away whimpering. Soon after, the Chosen One literally punches a circular hole through one of his attackers’ chest, the camera peering through the maimed body to see Oedekerk’s fist retract from the man-made cavity, and we see the missing-cylindrical bulge of flesh in the background. It’s impossible not to recognize the scene’s cinematic violence and hyper-masculinity. There is contrast between Oedekerk’s clothed body and how the shirtless or stripped villains are put on display. This is one example of how the film notes that many films promote Caucasian masculinity dominating Asian masculinity. 

Narratively, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist does significantly more to perpetuate problematic Asian stereotypes than many other kung fu remixes. However, the films’ genres are considerably different. Oedekerk’s work is well defined by the term “transgressive”, meaning that the film is oppositional and deliberate in its offensiveness. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Guthmann wrote that “Kung Pow! is the kind of movie that's critic-proof, simply because it aims so low.” Guthmann suggests that the Oedekerk purposefully looked to disgust critics with the film’s exaggerated racism, homophobia, and misogyny. By making it “critic-proof,” Oedekerk reveals the film’s agenda, which is very different from, say, Quentin Tarantino’s art house style of taking lowbrow cinema (self-proclaimed “B-Movies”) and making it tasteful, in his duty as tastemaker. Oedekerk, instead, uses the same kinds of movies but degrades them further, making Kung Pow offensive to the taste of critics.

Despite being reviled by many critics, however, Kung Pow is a quite popular film. Despite coming out close to two decades ago, the film is still engaged by active reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon, and is still commented on in Reddit channels and on Youtube videos. Metacritic reviews from the film’s cult following reveal the movie to be, to some, “silly and creative” and “one of the funniest movies [ever]”. One fan even described the film as “unbelievabl[y] hilarious”, stating that Kung Pow’s absurdity:

“...is something to cherish. It takes masterful skill to create such comedic bliss with this spoofing style...it can be a bit childish, but most of the time, I'm laughing harder than I ever have at film... I can confidently say this was the funniest movie of the decade.” 

It becomes clear, from the film’s status as a new-age cult classic, that while Oedekerk doesn’t undermine racist representations of Asians in Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, he does ultimately mock genre and notions of the importance of critical acclaim. Even racist movies many win Oscars, but that was never Oedekerk’s plan. Steve Oedekerk, unlike Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill, didn’t strive to make an art film. Rather, as he notes in film’s commentary, he sought to have fun, and, seemingly, had fulfilled making a “realization of his childhood dream to be in a martial-arts flick.” By taking over director and actor’s Jimmy Wang Yu’s role from Tiger and Crane Fist, Steve Oedekerk fulfills his own dream of being a kung-fu action hero and simultaneously embodying an Asian director. Oedekerk successfully takes over and embodies Jimmy Wang Yu, but then with that power he doesn’t replicate Asian cinema, but rather destroys it in a transgressive act of defiance against the politics of film criticism and connoisseurship. Ultimately, while Oedekerk doesn’t negotiate racist rhetoric, he does do substantial work in creating friction about what it means to be an auteur, and how his cult cinema and others’ art cinema operate deliberately and differently.

Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is a screwball cult film. Oedekerk’s film commentary offers insight into the film production, describing the joy and challenges of its creation. The movie ultimately presents itself as a fan-project, rather than an auteurist work. Yet, it is this structure, as described above, that allows for Kung Pow to mimic practices of problematic remix to then develop a subtextual commentary. This commentary doesn’t undermine racist representations of Asians, but rather reveals the immature-comedy-packed film to be intelligent and aware of the history it partakes in, and use this to critique the nature and importance of “critical acclaim”.