I watched the martial arts masterpiece film, Enter The Dragon, for the first time in like a decade over the weekend. It’s such a shame that we lost Bruce Lee less than a week before this film premiered. Several films he was working on were released posthumously, and we’ll never know what other cinematic treasures we would have gotten from him, had he lived past the age of 32.
After all, Bruce Lee, and Enter the Dragon, specifically, has been such a huge influence over American pop culture for nearly FIFTY YEARS. Nearly every tournament fighter-style video game has a character that’s an homage, from Street Fighter‘s Fei Long to Tekken‘s Marshall Law. Even the plot of the 1995 Mortal Kombat film was incredibly similar to Enter the Dragon‘s plot. Pretty much the entire martial arts film genre became popular in America because of this single movie. Not enough can be said in a single paragraph.
Anyways, something about the opening theme of the film struck me as incredibly familiar. As previously stated, I’ve seen the movie before, but it had been years. The tune, the structure, the big hits, everything about it just felt REALLY familiar.
Enjoy the following YouTube video for as long as it remains on YouTube to watch the opening credits and hear the song in question:
The next morning, it hit me. I owned a soundalike to the song in my music library.
What’s funny, is upon first listening to the game’s tune, I remember thinking, “Man, this totally sounds like it comes out of a 70s martial arts flick. What a good pastiche.” Little did I realize at the time exactly HOW good!
There’s no way this is a coincidence. The composer of the Double Dragon Neon soundtrack, Jake Kaufman, is an accomplished video game composer. And the entirety of DD Neon is a love letter to late 70s/early 80s martial arts clichés and tropes, with a dash of mid-to-late 1980s California surfer culture tossed in for good measure. And the game’s end boss, Skullmageddon, is TOTALLY a Skeletor homage. Fer sure.
Anyhow, this revelation was fun for me, and I thought you guys might get a kick out of it.
Also, if you like beat ’em up video games, pick up Double Dragon Neon. It’s $10-15 depending on platform, and worth every penny. I bought it on Steam years ago, and re-bought it for Nintendo Switch in 2020.
And, I mean. You could probably stand to watch Enter the Dragon again, if you haven’t seen it recently. As of the time of this writing, it’s streaming for free on TubiTV, Pluto TV, Vudu, Amazon Prime, and only costs 4 bucks from YouTube, Google Play, and Apple TV.
Boards don’t hit back.