David Orange

Yes, that's who that is. I was looking up stuff on him because he portrayed the karate great, Mas Oyama, in some movies about thirty years ago. I was shocked to read "Sonny Chiba, who shot to fame a few years ago in the Kill Bill movies..." I couldn't believe that. Sonny Chiba was enormous back in the early seventies.

The scene I linked was from his Streetfighter series, in which he played Terry Surugi, a guy whose Japanese father married a Chinese woman and produced Terry. The father was executed by the Japanese, apparently as a spy, but in his dying words, he told little Terry--about five years old--"Always be....a number ONE man!!!!" Then they shot him. Terry grew up half-Chinese on the hard-scrap streets of Japan after WWII and became very tough and rather amoral, developing a fighting style based on Chinese boxing and Japanese karate. He was sort of a thug for hire. When one of his clients refused to pay him, he took the guy's sister and sold her into prostitution. So you see some of the roots of Quentin Tarantino's films if you watch The Streetfighter.

Return of the Streetfighter and The Streetfighter's Last Revenge got hokier and hokier, like Godzilla movies, as the writers ran out of original material. I think it may have started as a manga. There was also a Sister Streetfighter film.

Here's one of the best scenes from the original Streetfighter movie, where he faces the old master of the Seibukan Karate dojo, who teaches him some moral lessons as well as something about karate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rLoPoSCRB0

David