Kung Fu What If?
I finished Bruce Thomas’ biography of Bruce Lee a week ago, so the story that Lee was passed over for Carradine for the part of Caine was fresh in my mind as I watched the pilot for Kung Fu.
It’s pure speculation as to whether the series would have been more successful with Lee in the lead role. I like to think that his martial prowess would overcome the racism the networks believed would work against his acceptance by the mainstream audience of the early 70s, but we’ll never know for sure.
Aside from that, I think Lee’s involvement would have ensured that Kung Fu would have been a much bigger cult hit over the years, particularly now as a DVD box set. Every frame of publicly available footage that exists of Bruce Lee has already been studied to the point of exhaustion. An entire television series starring Bruce Lee, even if the network executives were right and it only lasted a season or two, would be devoured by his legion of admirers and the fans yet to come. While it’s possible that Kung Fu starring Bruce Lee had been a bust in the short term, in the long term it would have been a juggernaut.