Episode 471 - Fight Scene Analysis - Wheels on Meals with Jackie Chan and Benny The Jet Urquidez
In this episode, Jeremy is joined by Mr. Joshua Blum for a Fight Scene Analysis - Wheels on Meals with Jackie Chan and Benny The Jet Urquidez
Fight Scene Analysis - Wheels on Meals with Jackie Chan and Benny The Jet Urquidez - Episode 471
Wheels on Meals is a 1984 martial arts film featuring Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Sammo Hung. The film was directed by Sammo Hung, the action sequences are directed by Jackie Chan, and it was filmed in Spain. In this episode, Jeremy and Mr. Joshua Blum of the 13th Hour Podcast make commentaries about the fight scene between Jackie Chan and Benny Urquidez. Listen to find out more!
Show Notes
Check out Mr. Joshua Blum on Episode 425 and Episode 445. Listen to The 13th Hour Podcast hosted by Mr. Blum.https://youtu.be/d-ltRBEu0IU
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Welcome! You're listening to whistlekick martial arts radio episode 471 and today, Mr. Joshua Blum and I are reviewing a fight scene. It's going to be fun, a little bit different so hang out and I’ll tell you more in just a moment. My name is Jeremy Lesniak, your host on this show, founder of whistlekick and everything we do here, at whistlekick, is in support of traditional martial arts. If you want to know more about what we do to that end, go to whistlekick.com. That’s our online home and it's also the easiest way to find our products and make sure you use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% if you make a purchase. This show, martial arts radio, has a separate website, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. We bring you this show twice a week. The goal of, not only the show but whistlekick overall, we’re here to connect educate and entertain traditional martial artists the world over. If you want to support that work, there are a lot of ways you can do that. you can make a purchase, share this or another episode, follow us on social media, maybe tell a friend, pick up a book on Amazon, leave a review or support us on Patreon. If you think the new shows that we’re releasing are worth 63 cents apiece, not to mention all the back episodes you already get access to, consider supporting us at the 5$ a month level. Go to patreon.com/whistlekick and sign up. You know if you do? We’re going to give you more content because that’s what we’re about. If you’ve been a listener to the show for a while, the name Joshua Blum should ring a bell. We’ve collaborated on a few things and it's been a lot of fun working with this guy so we’re constantly looking at what can we do or how can we do something new or different and this is what we came up with. Today, we’re going to review, pick apart and even offer some color commentary of a fight scene from a classic film and this fight scene is Wheels on Meals and it features Jackie Chan and Benny The Jet Urquidez. What makes this episode special is this is the first one where you kind of have homework. If you listen to this episode and you don’t also watch the fight scene, what we’re saying isn’t going to make a ton of sense. If you go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, if you go to the show notes page for this episode number 471, there's a link there. You can find it on YouTube. It's a roughly 5 and a half minute clip and it's not that hard to find but the whole idea here is that you play it while you listen to this and for legal purposes, we’re not combining any of these things because we don’t have rights to that film or that fight scene or anything so don’t want to get in trouble with that. In the intro, we do talk about this a little bit. In the outro, we talk more so if you're not a point where you're able to watch the fight scene, you might want to listen to the intro and the outro. We do give some stuff worth thinking about there and in a few minutes before we start the commentary, we give you a countdown so you can sync everything up but I'm going to turn it over to Joshua now, so here we go.Joshua Blum:Hello, listeners! This is Joshua Blum from the 13th Hour podcast and Jeremy Lesniak from whistlekick and we’re bringing you another collaboration talking about a fight scene from the 1984 movie, Wheels on Meals, with Jackie Chan and a lot of his Beijing Opera brothers that he grew up training with but this particular fight scene is with him and Benny The Jet. Unless you’ve been living under a rock past couple decades in the martial arts who most likely have heard of Benny Urquidez and this is one of the chances to see him on film and so we’re going to be commenting on this particular fight scene. It's a fairly long one for a fight scene, almost 5 minutes long, and they fight almost continuously throughout that time. We picked it and it is long and it has so much stuff in there that we actually watched it half speed. We wanted to make sure that there's enough in there that we could delve into it if you really wanted to but it would also be a great one to watch at normal speed if you just kind of want to breeze right through it so there is really a lot there and even watching it at half-speed, I feel like we didn’t quite get to talk about all the things that we wanted to. You all notice I took some notes about a couple things and you'll see the minute and second sort of play by play, so to speak, at least the things that kind of were standout in the show notes. You will also see in the show notes a link to this clip and you can click on it and watch it on YouTube along with us and YouTube has a way to lower the clip down. If you go to the lower right hand corner that you'll see a little gear and you can click on that and you can pick the playback speed. For this one, if you want to follow along with us, we’re doing half-speed, although you can watch it slower. As you're listening to this, you will notice that there are some gaps where we’re not saying anything and that’s because the clip is playing in the background so that’s why that is the case. We didn’t fall asleep while watching it. Excuse that if you're watching this, if you're just listening to this without the audio. Without further ado, we’re going to launch in at this clip at this point and we will reconvene and talk to you sort of after the clip is done about our reflections.Jeremy Lesniak:Talk about your clichés.Joshua Blum:Right. I was taking a look at some clips of Benny just to see if he fights the same way here as he does.Jeremy Lesniak:A pro-wrestling stab right there. Keep going.Joshua Blum:That’s a nice little sequence on the ground there. The mixed ring and…Jeremy Lesniak:Reminds me a lot of Silat, just the way he’s moving there which I don’t know if he’s skilled in Silat but reminded me…Joshua Blum:Jackie?Jeremy Lesniak:No, Benny. A little bit of that footwork and that flipping there, the kicking.Joshua Blum:Oh, on the ground, yeah. He’s a lot more static here than he is in his fights. Nice little thing, back kick with taking off the jacket.Jeremy Lesniak:I love the contrast of Jackie and the very Chinese, clearly, fluid movements and Benny’s much more linear kickboxing.Joshua Blum:And even though he's not bouncing around as much, he’s throwing mostly the full contact karate kind of stuff in combinations, round kicks, push kicks.Jeremy Lesniak:He’s making this overalls look really good.Joshua Blum:Suspenders.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, sorry, overalls.Joshua Blum:Jackie, you got to take off your clothes. You're always stronger if you take it off.Jeremy Lesniak:Right, it's not a good martial arts fight if clothes aren’t coming off. Got to shake out the cobwebs.Joshua Blum:I don’t think anybody does the Bruce Lee thing of they flick their nose with their thumb.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s definitely a him thing. Anytime I ever seen that, it's been either in a mockery or homage.Joshua Blum:I would say this is, definitely, they fight for a really long time. It's definitely a contest. You get the impression that it's a contest of pretty much equals.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah and I think we’re meant to see that. There's a lot of good stuff going on here and I suspect that they both enjoyed filing this scene and I wonder how much of it was structured.Joshua Blum:Yeah, Benny’s got Jackie on the ropes there on the table.Jeremy Lesniak:One of the things that always impresses me about fight scenes like this is how accurate they are. They get super close.Joshua Blum:Yeah, I was looking and could see details of it that times when they're actually blocking each other but the audience, I don’t think, can pick it up and it's fluid enough that you can't really see that they're not necessarily connecting. I imagine that they probably connected with another of these shots.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure both of them are committed as they are with what they do and hitting. Any of those kicks to the body, I'm sure they felt it. Should we talk about the hair? The hair is out of control!Joshua Blum:It's a nice back kick by Benny.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a great kick.Joshua Blum:There's a really nice sweep coming up right there.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s great. I think this is one of the few fight scenes where I really enjoyed the blocking, the defensive movements because you don’t have a lot of that.Joshua Blum:You got to have some cheesy, what do you call it, talk over dumping right there. Uses the chair for a shield and then, resting. On to round two.Jeremy Lesniak:Taking a break. that would really throw your opponent off.Joshua Blum:Well, Benny is not so gentleman enough to say ok, alright, we’re going to take a rest and we’re going to do this. He just rushed in and started hammering him.Jeremy Lesniak:You’d expect nothing less from a guy with a bowtie.Joshua Blum:Who has not taken off his clothes. I don’t think he took off his jacket.Jeremy Lesniak:No, he looks like all he needs is a jacket and he can go to a formal dinner.Joshua Blum:We start to see alright, Jackie’s loosening up here, beating him a little bit. Got a little bit of nose wipe.Jeremy Lesniak:There’s been a couple of those with some, obviously, some fake blood.Joshua Blum:Vaguely Drunken Master to elevation there.Jeremy Lesniak:Benny’s movements are just so minimal. He punches and he doesn’t get out of the way in dramatic fashion like Jackie does. He just kind of sits there and moves 2 inches.Joshua Blum:Right. That’s a nice kick. Like sort of Capoeira there.Jeremy Lesniak:Great hook kick. We got to have this element to break it up.Joshua Blum:I was looking at some of the techniques that Benny actually uses in some of his full contact matches. They're not that much different. He’s much more stylized here, obviously, but kicksJeremy Lesniak:And that’s something that I'm kind of picking up mostly in his stance and footwork is that it seems very similar versus Jackie’s stances are often really big and that’s not something that will translate well in the ring in any of my experience but Benny’s feet, from the most part, are pretty tight too.Joshua Blum:I think Benny is more of a, here he kind of switches stances, I think he’s kind of, at least from what I see, more Orthodox kind of stance. Left side forward. I think he’s a right-hander. I'm not sure. Tickling or grabbing a nipple, I'm not really sure what that was.Jeremy Lesniak:Neither is fair play. Someone’s trying to kill you, you can tickle them. Throat’s got to feel horrible at this point.Joshua Blum:Let’s face it, they probably would be, at this point.Jeremy Lesniak:And he still got that top button buttoned. I don’t even like eating with my top button on a shirt.Joshua Blum:It’s a nose broken. I know Jackie on a couple of times, he’s had his nose broken a couple times.Jeremy Lesniak:Wouldn’t surprise me if that was one of them. Benny’s eyes, they just look…Joshua Blum:Oh, he’s intense.Jeremy Lesniak:A compelling villain.Joshua Blum:I think one of your previous guests, Kathy Long, used to do that. A spanning back fist.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh yeah, that’s a brutal move. You got to commit for it but if you connect, it's a lot of power there and it's a surprise.Joshua Blum:I remember one time, I got hit by that and next thing you know, you're just on the floor.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, a lot of good movements will do that to you.Joshua Blum:No idea what happened.Jeremy Lesniak:I liked the way they filmed that. It looked like they ran it back in reverse when Jackie hit as Benny was falling.Joshua Blum:I imagine this fight scene probably took weeks to film. Probably not over…Jeremy Lesniak:There's a lot of pieces. A lot of nuance, the humor, the dialogue.Joshua Blum:Right.Jeremy Lesniak:I want to know what shoes he’s wearing.Joshua Blum:Who? Benny?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Any dress shoes I've ever worn, I wouldn’t be able to do any of that.Joshua Blum:They're terrible. You get a scene where they're pounding each other, you can see Benny’s blocking most of these shots. Jackie right there is going to take one and it looks like he punches the elbow. Well, that one looks like it connected right there.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a good shot.Joshua Blum:And I don’t think the audience will necessarily pick that up. It's happening fast and we’re watching in half time but…Jeremy Lesniak:Very much the momentum shifted, Benny is losing but it's still what you would expect in a kickboxing full contact match. He’s covering his priorities on defense. He’s just trying to make it through to the bell. Now, of course, there's no bell but that style…is he summoning his chi? Clearly!Joshua Blum:Oh, here we have this call back to Ong Bak.Jeremy Lesniak:Nothing like kicking somebody out the window! Brave words from a guy hanging.Joshua Blum:That’s the scene. What did you think?Jeremy Lesniak:It's a great scene! It's nice to see two people who actually know what they're doing and, of course, we know Jackie Chan is a consummate professional and is going to rise to any occasion, to anyone he’s working with and he’s got enough talent so you take someone like Benny Urquidez who's been in the ring and is known for being an absolute monster in the ring and just taking punishment and putting him side by side with Jackie and Jackie is going to, again, rise to that and their techniques look great and, of course, we just played it back in slow-mo but if you watch it at full speed, it's amazing!Joshua Blum:I thought you can see their own personal styles coming out. I'm not entirely sure. Jackie is sort of all over the place with sort of what he does but you can definitely see Benny, kind of the way, he’s a lot more, he felt looser. He felt kind of tighter, more controlled here. I guess, it's because it's a choreographed kind of thing and you can definitely see the influence of what he does versus Jackie kind of, not so sticking to one way of attacking or anything like that using angling, hiding, some trickery and some things like that which I guess is what he’s kind of known for. He didn’t use any like, I guess, there was a chair but he didn’t employ any makeshift weapons.Jeremy Lesniak:There were no ladders he was popping through or anything. What I found interesting, Jackie’s always comical in his fight scenes. There's always an element of humor. There's at least some playfulness but Benny is so stoic, so reserved, so conservative in everything he’s doing that I don’t know if it was Jackie’s idea or how or why it played out the way it did but, from my experience, that is probably the most comical I've seen Jackie be within the actual combat. Sticking his face out multiple times, playing that joke out, with knowing inevitably that he’s going to get hit so you see those 2 extremes play out and the contrast is enjoyable and you can watch how it shifts back and forth that anybody who trains knows you can't always be calmed and reserved because it becomes predictable but to be crazy and silly with your techniques leaves you open and we saw both of those things happen.Joshua Blum:Here’s a question. It's almost like there's 2 rounds here, right? It’s like a vaguely, maybe 4 and a half minute kind of fighting before Benny goes out the window, there's a few dramatic pauses, stuff like that, almost 4 or 5 minutes almost broken into 2 rounds. The first round where kina ending with Jackie sitting on the chair and then the 2nd round when he goes out the window. If you have to put who took the first round, who would you say?Jeremy Lesniak:I think, given all of it, I have to say Benny but I don’t think it was as lopsided as Jackie’s part sitting on the chair implies.Joshua Blum:Oh, you mean, just by a hair, you mean?Jeremy Lesniak:Maybe not by a hair but if you were to kind of diagram this out to say hey, there's a fight. One guy’s winning, the other guy has to sit in a chair and we make a humorous element out of that, you would assume it would be because it was so overwhelmingly in one guy’s favor that he needed a break but I didn’t see it as overwhelming. How about you?Joshua Blum:No, I didn’t either. I think it was pretty evenly matched. I thought, at the beginning, it's clearly a contest and there's like implicit rules that go with if you're going to make it a contest. There's some things you just don’t do. I don’t know if there's any groin shots, no one tried to grab anybody’s ear or eyes. They're all fairly clean techniques. There was some playing around but, I mean, there was nothing like no one pulled out a gun. Nothing outright duplicitous so if they just wanted to end the thing, they probably could have found more efficient ways of doing it. It was sort of a see who is the better fighter so with that comes certain implicit rules like when the guy is down, I'm not going to kick him when he’s down even if that would be the quicker way to end it so it's kind of interesting, even without setting it up, there's no referee. There's no out bounds. They stuck within that little area for filming reasons or practical reasons. They stuck within a fairly small space and they gave each other that sort of leeway to sort of get back to let that other man get back to his feet, that kind of stuff. I have heard, I don’t know if they ever worked together again, but I've heard that or read somewhere, they had planned to do a non-choreographed sparring session just to see who would come out on top some time before the movie ended. I don’t think if they ever did but I think they both, independently said, I’ll probably win.Jeremy Lesniak:And that will be really interesting because when you talk about Jackie Chan, you have this whole idea of he’s got a tremendous amount of skill but how does it apply? How does he react to things that are less choreographed and the moment you get to tie him to Benny with any kind of scoring; you, now, because of the number of people that Benny fought, now you’ve got this whole kind of hierarchy that you get to try to place Jackie into.Joshua Blum:He can certainly take a hit. That’s for sure.Jeremy Lesniak:I would guess if you add up all of his injuries, because he’s broken something in pretty much every movie he’s ever done; if you were to add all that up and the fact that he keeps going, that’s a very resilient man.Joshua Blum:We all know Benny can take lots of hits but I think we all know Jackie Chan as well. I would imagine they would have a tough go at it if they did one of these sessions. I think they did that a lot. I imagine they have a ball doing this.Jeremy Lesniak:It looks like it.Joshua Blum:If they didn’t, I don’t know what's wrong with either of them but I imagine they had a lot of fun and it must have taken quite a while to do the whole thing but I mean, you can kind of see it in their faces. There's like a few times when, I don’t know if it was written in the script, where they kind of look at each other in the eye and they kind of nod or do something that lets the other person know that it was a good shot or whatever and I imagine, they didn’t need to, but I imagine they stuck that stuff in just kind of for kicks. That’s the way I kind of see it, I guess.Jeremy Lesniak:My guess is they did a bunch of takes of this to keep it from getting stale. They said lets kind of play this out in different ways and, you can see, that they cut things. Obviously, in the end, when Jackie goes to halfway across the room and kneeing him under the chin, the physics of that don’t work so you know they are editing things together and that’s totally fine. It's part of what makes an old fight scene fun is the suspension of reality but I wouldn’t be surprised if they're using different cuts from different takes throughout.Joshua Blum:I would imagine and I would also guess that they probably had a barebones idea of how the fight should go but they wanted it to last a pretty long time and so, my guess is they probably had a couple variations of it, I would guess and they just wanted to see what kind of flowed best, I would guess.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, yeah, I would agree.Joshua Blum:When we had talked about doing this, this was the first one that came to mind. There's got to be, there's so many others. This happens to be a fairly lengthy scene but I guess to say, anybody who's out there and listening, if you like this sort of format, if you like other sort of drawn out fight scenes like this where it's like commentary or if you’d prefer it done a different way, let us know.Jeremy Lesniak:This was fun and the idea of, and I got to give credit to you Josh, I didn’t even know you could slow things down on YouTube. I thought we’re going to do this at full speed but obviously, that would have been really difficult. It allowed us to dig a little more and say those things that you think when you're watching something but don’t have time too.Joshua Blum:Even doing it half speed, there's stuff that you miss.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, we totally could have done it in quarter-speed and still have enough to talk about.Joshua Blum:Yeah, because I have a page of notes here of little things and I don’t know if anybody would listen to this kind of detail but this shows how much time and effort they put into that. Just that little ground sequence that they do where they're striking each other on the ground and within the span of a couple seconds, they’ve done numerous movements that, if you were watching it, you would have missed. That was second 11, I think on this one. You would just miss. You’d be just ok, that was cool and move on to the next thing but that probably took a fair amount of work just to choreograph that couple second of fight choreography right there so it's kind of nice to slow it down and actually see what they put into it.Jeremy Lesniak:Cool. I hope you post those notes that you took. I didn’t take notes but I think we would want to see what you’ve made.Joshua Blum:I’ll see if I can read my own handwriting. I’ll type them up and put them up there.Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome!Joshua Blum:Any last words that you have, final thoughts?Jeremy Lesniak:Not really. This was fun!Joshua Blum:Yeah, let’s do it again!Jeremy Lesniak:Absolutely! I want to thank Mr. Blum for coming on the show for the collaboration. I've been really enjoying getting to know this guy. He’s a good guy and if you're not checking out his show, go do that. He does some really cool stuff. If you want to find the show notes for other episodes, you can visit whsitlekickmartialartsradio.com. Check those out. You're going to find photos and videos, links, social media and a lot more. If you're willing to support us and the work that we do, we have quite a few options. Make a purchase at whistlekick.com, don’t forget the code PODCAST15 or leave a review, buy a book on Amazon. If you help out with the Patreon, that’s patreon.com/whistlekick and we’d love to hear your suggestions for guests or anything else. You can email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com, to do that and I hope you follow us on social media. We’re @whistlekick everywhere you can imagine. That’s all I've got today. Until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!