[KFCC] Young Bruce Lee Review

Story: Billed as a Bruce Lee documentary, it would be more accurate to label this as a compilation of footage from Lee’s early career. Contains abridged portions of ‘The Kid’, ‘Carnival’, ‘Bad Boy’, and ‘The Orphan’. Also includes a wealth of extra features.

Review: If you want to cash in on the name of Bruce Lee, you have two choices. Make a documentary, or buy some hidden camera footage of Bruce Lee taking a crap, and then get somebody who looks exactly like him (well, as long as you always see him from his left side, and get him to sneer a bit and go ‘waaaaah!’) to fill in the rest of the scenes.

‘Young Bruce Lee’ chooses both options, and while telling of Lee’s career, shows various excerpts and trailers from various Bruce Li movies. It’s actually quite unsettling. Are we supposed to not notice that it’s not the real Bruce?

The bulk of this documentary, however, is a little more interesting. Ever wondered what Bruce Lee looked like when he was ten years old? Well, baby Bruce looks pretty much like grown-up Bruce, as we can see from the clips of his old movies, as on display here. Don’t expect Martial arts, these are mainly dramas, and for some reason, it seems that back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the young Bruce Lee was always cast as beggars, orphans, or orphan beggars.

The problem is, while ‘interesting’, this disk is only worth buying for the most avid of completist Bruce Lee fans, because it’s not necessarily very entertaining. The language of cinema has evolved a lot since the ‘50s, and it can be quite dull to watch degraded old sepia footage of baby Bruce complaining that he’s too broke to buy any bread.

There are tons of extras on the disk, but they are generally quite shoddy, both in content and technical quality. The main issue with this package is that it’s all comprised of very old footage, often transferred from VHS, and as such, a lot of it is in a pitiful state. What compounds the problem is that the narration, and the English dubbing of the old clips all sounds as if it were recorded in a toilet cubicle, and mastered onto sticky-tape.