Customer Reviews

Fight! Dragon: The Complete Series

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Being a fan of Yasuaki Kurata, I was a little ashamed that I'd never heard of this series until the DVD came out recently. Fight! Dragon is a great martial arts based TV series from Japan that features very simple, 25 minute episodes that revolve around do-gooder karate master Dragon, his funny apprentice, and a medical clinic/orphanage that he helps. A mysterious assassination ring known as Shadow tries to kill him every episode, usually with some new henchman-of-the-week hitman, all of which have names like Demon Wrestler, Sea Storm, Brown Lizard, Black Jaguar, Violent Wind, Rock Storm, etc.

It's pure vintage 70's Japanese martial arts action with little interference (in other words, forget plot, let's get to the fighting), that features karate, kickboxing, judo, wrestling, tai chi, ninjutsu, and obscure forms of weapons fighting - however, Shadow prefers to murder it's targets so that their deaths appear to be accidents or suicides.

If you enjoy the 70's action of stars like Sonny Chiba, Sue Shiomi or Henry Sanada, then you will enjoy this series very much. There are only about 30 episodes on 3 disks, so don't worry about "liking it too much", you won't have to buy 7 or 8 series' if you really get into it. It's definately more kid-friendly than films like The Street Fighter, Sister Street Fighter, Ninja Wars or the Mas Oyama Trilogy, and the Dragon character is a very positive action star and good role model.

Given the price, and the fact that you get an entire series in one little boxset, it's a great value.

I have only a few TV shows from Japan so my exposure is limited; Zatoichi TV, Shadow Warriors, Lone Wolf and Cub TV, Super Robot Red Baron, and Ultraman. But I have really enjoyed this series, "Fight! Dragon". It's a fast paced 24 minutes per episode and ends with a cliffhanger, so it's a continuing serial. After watching the first 8 episodes so far, I logged on to Amazon to see how others are enjoying this series, I was really surprised to find only 1 review, and that it had such a poor rating. I don't understand. The show was filmed on location with really good cinematography. The stunts and fights are very enjoyable. The picture and sound are good and for the low price this is a treasure for anyone looking for classic Japanese TV! Give it a chance and I'm sure you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

First let me say i am a fan of Yasuaki Kurata. I am not a fan of this tv series by him. Just for your information, the DVDs have original Japanese audio (As it should be in my opionion) with English subtitles. It has no English dub, and i am glad for that. Even though it says on the Amazon page here it has English audio, it does not. I actually tried to update 3-4 times, but for some reason they did not accept it. Strange.

Now, on to the series. I must say a was disappointed by this show. Seems like they did little to no restoring of the picture quality.I also disappointed of the fight scenes, sound effects in the fights and the silly undercranking they sometimes use in the fight scenes. You also get the same song each time a fight scenes occurs. You get tired of it after a couple episodes.

This stories are also very repetive in my opinion. I mean in story wise. This series won`t wind any awards for stories, acting and fight choreography. I think the fights which have like 3-5 fights in each episode, looks not good. I think the choreography looks too simple most of the time. You can see in nearly every fight that Kurata doesn`t connect the punches and kicks to the villains. Didn`t they have monitors back in the 70`s?

Maybe not, but they clearly had dailies to watch so they should have re-shot figths that you could clearly see that Kurata didn`t really hit that person, just the air. I guess 1 thing that is good, is that this series was cheap. I won`t watch this again. This series is not recommended by me unless you like simple choreography and disappointing fight scenes.