{"id":23796,"date":"2025-12-28T17:45:40","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T09:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=23796"},"modified":"2025-12-28T17:45:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T09:45:40","slug":"how-stephen-chow-and-donnie-yen-reinvented-bruce-lees-classic-chen-zhen-in-their-own-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=23796","title":{"rendered":"How Stephen Chow and Donnie Yen reinvented Bruce Lee\u2019s classic Chen Zhen in their own ways"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Chen Zhen, a fictional character first played by Bruce Lee in the 1972 film Fist of Fury<\/em><\/span>,<\/em> became a cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong because of the way he stood up to the Japanese in Shanghai in the early 1900s.<\/div>\n

A scene in which Chen makes students at a Japanese karate school eat the paper on which they had written \u201cChina is the sick man of Asia\u201d was especially popular, as was the scene in which Chen smashes a sign outside a Shanghai public park reading \u201cNo dogs or Chinese\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here, we look at two very different retellings of the Chen Zhen story.<\/p>\n

Fist of Fury 1991 (film version, 1991)<\/h3>\n

Chow had been a fan of Lee since childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike other children of his age, he was fascinated by Bruce Lee,\u201d wrote film historian Ryan Law in an essay. \u201cIn 1971, when Lee\u2019s The Big Boss<\/em><\/span> opened in Hong Kong, Chow was nine years old. He began to study kung fu, and made his friends call him Little Dragon [Bruce Lee\u2019s nickname].\u201d<\/div>\n

Fist of Fury 1991<\/em> falls somewhere between a tribute to Lee, a loose modern retelling of the original film, and an out-and-out oddity.<\/p>\n

Scripted by Jeff Lau Chun-wai and directed by actor Rico Chu Tak-on, it retains the story\u2019s core thread but distorts it through Chow\u2019s unique comedic style. The film is recognisable as a remake only through key set pieces and its rebellious sensibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Chen Zhen, a fictional character first played by Bruce Lee in the 1972 film Fist of Fury, became a cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong because…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[6737,8566,1984,1774,14479,6738,14480,8890,2470,2806,3673],"class_list":["post-23796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-bruce","tag-chen","tag-chow","tag-classic","tag-donnie","tag-lees","tag-reinvented","tag-stephen","tag-ways","tag-yen","tag-zhen","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}