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What is "Fearless Hyena 2"


GoldenFist

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I owned the movie at one point and someone told me that it was a movie they threw together in attempt to make money because Jackie dropped the Project, is this true?

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It IS a waste. I know there is at least one solid scene in that movie that was filmed before Jackie walked off... and it was quality. It was at his early peak.

I think Jackie had to film some of Dragon Lord in Korea - as well as come to the states to film The Big Brawl - just to get away from Lo Wei and his triad connections; I guess Jackie walked away from his contract, and Lo Wei put a price on his head.

The funny thing is: Lo Wei had the same deal with Bruce (Bruce was supposed to do Yellow Face Tiger, but went on to do "Way of the Dragon" instead, which caused bad blood between Lo Wei and Bruce)...

Jimmy Wang Yu, being the gangster he was, got Jackie out of the Lo Wei-trouble, in return, Jackie appeared in Island Of Fire...

Correct me if I'm wrong.

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TibetanWhiteCrane

Lo Wei never put a price on Jackie's head... But Jackie was scared none the less. He fled Korea in the middle of the night. Lo sent his wife to talk to him. I've never heard Jackie speak about Jimmy's involvement, but heard it from a lot of other sources.

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masterofoneinchpunch
Lo Wei never put a price on Jackie's head... But Jackie was scared none the less. He fled Korea in the middle of the night. Lo sent his wife to talk to him. I've never heard Jackie speak about Jimmy's involvement, but heard it from a lot of other sources.

It is mentioned (several times) in his autobiography about Wang Yu. This helps explain Fantasy Mission Force (1983) and Island of Fire (1990).

Yes, heaven and earth were the villians.

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Lo Wei never put a price on Jackie's head... But Jackie was scared none the less. He fled Korea in the middle of the night. Lo sent his wife to talk to him. I've never heard Jackie speak about Jimmy's involvement, but heard it from a lot of other sources.

Gotcha. Thanks for the correction.

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TibetanWhiteCrane
It is mentioned (several times) in his autobiography about Wang Yu. This helps explain Fantasy Mission Force (1983) and Island of Fire (1990).

Yeah, I know thats why he made those movies, I just feel that he kinda downplays it, and find it a little odd!

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Cognoscente

I remember that Toby Russell mentioned on Facebook that some of the footage in FH 2 came from before the first movie i.e. deleted footage from Spiritual Kung Fu.

As for what's been said about Jimmy Wang Yu's favour projects, Jackie was polite when talking about it in the January '96 issue of Impact...

Impact: You mentioned that you never had pressure put on you to make films, but you did make a film for Wang Yu in Taiwan, Island of Fire. Why did do you that?

Jackie: Because of Wang Yu. He watched me grow up. When I was young, he was already a big star. You already know Wang Yu's (Triad) background. For all those years, he treated me like his younger brother. He asked me to come and help him, to be a guest star, but there wasn't any pressure. Some other people, yes. Not me.

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Cognoscente

The gambling fight (the one with the shoe bit) was taken from Spiritual Kung Fu according to the below Japanese site which specifies the source of various scenes. Spiritual Kung Fu is the one that Google translates as Kite Juhachiten.

https://kungfutube.info/5998

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thelastDGS
On 5/22/2021 at 9:21 PM, Cognoscente said:

The gambling fight (the one with the shoe bit) was taken from Spiritual Kung Fu according to the below Japanese site which specifies the source of various scenes. Spiritual Kung Fu is the one that Google translates as Kite Juhachiten.

https://kungfutube.info/5998

It seems like what's identified as "Kite Juhachiten" in that blog is a unfinished production (seperate from "Spiritual Kung Fu") that was started after "Dragon Fist" completed shooting but abandoned when Jackie returned to complete shooting on "Drunken Master" and then moved on to "Fearless Hyena".  The blog post seems to make the case that this is origin of the footage used in "Fearless Hyena II" by using information on the shooting schedules from trade mags of the time, and observing Jackie's haircut/appearance in the footage, etc.,

 There's also another blog that's linked there, which the blogger says he found out about the existence of the "Kite Juhachiten" production originally.

Also another blog post in the same series of posts (which all go into determining the production history/shooting schedule, etc.) talks about "Spiritual Kung Fu" as a seperate movie who's shooting was completed before "Dragon Fist" started:

https://kungfutube.info/5189

The google translation gets very confusing so I could be wrong, but it seems to me that's what's being discussed in that blog post.

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Cognoscente

When I translated it back into Japanese, I copied and pasted the characters into the translate page (i.e. the translate.google one) where 鬼手十八翻 came out as Ghost Hand Eighteen Turns. Perhaps it was a sequel to Spiritual Kung Fu where Jackie was kicked out of the temple and forced to live with his dad or something.

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starschwar

Very interesting, if true.  The Lo Wei era was certainly busy for Jackie - maybe even he didn't know which movie he was filming for at any given time.  Perhaps the alleged behind the scenes confusion over TKWI's plot stems from multiple near-simultaneous productions. 


If this hypothetical movie did start after Dragon Fist wrapped, and Fearless Hyena did not begin until Kite Whatever was abandoned... Per the timeline Cognoscente posted elsewhere, that would be a window somewhere around August-October of 1978, which overlaps with the tail end of Drunken Master. 

I vaguely remember (I haven't read it in 20 years) a section of I Am Jackie Chan where he described Fearless Hyena as starting with Lo Wei behind the camera, before Jackie insisted that he have creative control so as to not spoil his current wave of success.  Maybe he was misremembering (or misquoted) this forgotten movie, which was then scrapped in favor of his own directorial debut?  That could be a good way to explain the discrepancy. 

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thelastDGS
22 hours ago, starschwar said:

I vaguely remember (I haven't read it in 20 years) a section of I Am Jackie Chan where he described Fearless Hyena as starting with Lo Wei behind the camera, before Jackie insisted that he have creative control so as to not spoil his current wave of success.  Maybe he was misremembering (or misquoted) this forgotten movie, which was then scrapped in favor of his own directorial debut?  That could be a good way to explain the discrepancy. 

What's interesting is that in the same blog post, it's also theorized that that the hypothetical abandoned movie is partly the basis for some elements seen eventually in "Fearless Hyena" because of some similarities in the descriptions in the trade mags.  Jackie could be thinking of the scrapped movie as an early version of what eventually became "fearless Hyena".

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starschwar

That makes perfect sense.  Even if they hit the reset button entirely, they could have still salvaged some of the ideas from the abandoned project, even if they decided to scrap all the footage.

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