#Shang chi west wind drive in series#

“We were all on the same page right off the bat,” says Simu Liu, who portrays the film’s titular Chinese American superhero. It’s another long overdue moment for Asian American representation, but for Marvel Studios and Marvel Comics, it’s also an opportunity to reverse decades of damaging work and problematic decision-making, like casting Ben Kingsley to play the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange. When Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hits theaters on Friday, it will mark the arrival of the first Asian lead in the 25 films that Marvel Studios has produced since 2008, and become only the fourth film produced by a major Hollywood studio to feature a predominantly Asian cast since 1993, when the The Joy Luck Club premiered (the second being 2018 box-office hit Crazy Rich Asians, and the third being the live-action Mulan). 15 and became the series’ protagonist of Master of Kung Fu, the character is being revived in the Marvel world. Now, nearly 50 years after Shang-Chi made his debut in Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin’s Special Marvel Edition no. But rather than making the pulp villain the title character of his own series, Marvel chose to introduce a new hero in the form of Fu Manchu’s previously unknown son: Shang-Chi.Īll Eyes Are on ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’

#Shang chi west wind drive in series#

As martial arts grew in popularity in the early 1970s, Marvel Comics, which had failed to acquire the rights to adapt the popular David Carradine TV series Kung Fu, instead licensed the rights to Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. His racist image was re-created in cartoons, radio serials, and most prominently in films, with revered white actors like Boris Karloff, John Carradine, and Christopher Lee all portraying him throughout the years.īut Fu Manchu has an even larger place in the history of comic books, and plays an outsized role in the genre’s troubles depicting Asian people. The character, distinguished by his talon-like fingernails, unnatural yellow skin, and a spindly mustache that dangles across the sides of his face, quickly grew into one of the most prolific villains in 20th-century popular culture, and a stereotype that would haunt Asians around the world for generations. It was an immediate commercial success, and by the 1920s, Fu Manchu was the central focus of a British silent film series and the main character in Paramount Pictures’ The Mysterious Dr.

Fu-Manchu, which capitalized on the xenophobic fear-mongering toward East Asia known as the Yellow Peril and introduced a dastardly Asian villain who would soon become a household name. As the story goes, the spirits answered his call by spelling out the word C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N.īy 1912, Rohmer had released his first novel, The Mystery of Dr. In the early 20th century, a struggling British writer by the name of Sax Rohmer consulted a Ouija board in order to discover how he could best make his fortune.