Whats the connection between the Asian cinema and the black community?
I know that they showed up for martial arts imports in high numbers in the seventies. MELVIN: I think that’s an interesting question, y’know, I believe that the black audience is more democratic in terms of its choices–not seeing those movies as products of a minority culture, but rather as perhaps compatriots doing something as a majority in their culture that we were shut out of in ours. We were not as ruled by the idea that if I don’t understand something, then it must be wrong, and a lot of white viewers complaining about the dialogue being garbled or the story being hard to follow–we were ready to give a benefit of a doubt. MARIO: There’s also the thought that a lot of those Asian martial arts epics coming over around that time were ultra-violent revenge fantasies: one guy gets his family murdered and then spends the rest of his life making the ruling party pay. It was, it is, a real intoxicating fantasy, and I think that Sweetback–and, to an extent, Baadasssss! too–reflects t
