Pages

Samurai Jack meets Wong Fei Hong

Hello and welcome!

The video above (Samurai Jack meets Wong Fei Hong) was made on May 3rd 2004, at 12:25:40 AM. Just 25 minutes past midnight I finished saving the final version of the video.

At the time in 2004 I was living in Jeonju in South Korea, where I was teaching English, and I was studying Korean, archery and taekwondo. I was also spending a lot of time mountain climbing and visiting Buddhist temples. And fun fact, Samurai Jack was animated in South Korea, which is something you can even see in the landscapes depicted in the show and when touring the mountains of SK. So when you look at the landscapes in South Korea it felt like I was living inside the world of Samurai Jack.

While there I also watched an unusual number of Korean, Chinese and Japanese films - including Wong Fei Hong - so it was really just a matter of time before I sparked on the idea of combining the song with Samurai Jack. Does Jack actually meet Wong Fei Hong? No, of course not. It is just a figure of speech.

It wasn't until almost 3 years later, January 21st 2007, that I uploaded the video to YouTube. Prior to that I had been sharing the video on one of my websites. The fact that the video was so small also meant that it didn't eat a lot of bandwidth for sharing the file directly to people.

Now I made other videos obviously, but none of them became quite as popular as the Samurai Jack meets Wong Fei Hong video. It has since garnered 1.3 million views on YouTube (as of August 2019), despite having the sound removed a few years ago due to copyright issues with the music.

For those people who want to see the version with the music however they can find a copy of the file floating around on internet, or you can watch it here. Both works. The genie is out of the bottle on this one so it isn't going to go away. The video is too popular that the Chinese cannot get rid of it. So now in August 2019 I figured I might as well add it to my Nerdovore blog.

And to put that popularity into context, the video used to be the most popular Samurai Jack video on YouTube for many years - until the new fifth season was finally released - at which point 30 new videos shot up in popularity and surpassed SJMWFH. The new champ is the Samurai Jack Season 5 trailer with 5.9 million views (as of August 2019).



As a fan of both Samurai Jack and the Wong Fei Hong films I cannot help but enjoy the music video. I didn't make it for money. I made it for fun because I love the storytelling and genres depicted in both Samurai Jack and Wong Fei Hong.

So I share with the intention that other people will get to enjoy and appreciate the visual storytelling in the video.

And I hope that maybe the Chinese owners of Wong Fei Hong will stop caring about petty things like copyright over a song. We are living in a post-Napster world. Get used to it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments containing links will be marked as spam and not approved.