“I love the choreography… it’s really sophisticated stuff. For me, it stands up as much of an art form as any great dance piece.”

For episode three of the Kung Fu Movie Guide Podcast, I have a nice chat with the Australian blogger Meredith Lewis, who runs the rather excellent kung fu movie blog, Dangerous Meredith’s Fu Thoughts. I managed to spend a bit of time with Meredith over Google Hangouts just before a talk she was doing at a Melbourne festival on the topic of Monkey – the popular Japanese TV show from the 1970s, known to international audiences as Monkey Magic. She afforded me a bit of time during her research to talk about the show’s origins, which is based on a 16th century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, and tells the story of the mythological figure Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King.

There are many films, animations and stories featuring the Monkey King, and countless variations on the Journey to the West story, and we discuss some of our favourite adaptions in this podcast. Meredith is also an ex-dancer and choreographer, so we discuss our favourite action directors and performers – people like Yuen Woo-ping and Lau Kar-leung, who as well as being martial arts masters, were also able to capture great sequences of intricate movement, much like a musical or dance number. We also discuss the role of women in martial arts films, particularly in wuxia literature and cinema, and we look at why we have both turned to blogging as a way of sharing our mutual passion for the genre.

You can keep up to date with Dangerous Meredith on Twitter by following @FuThoughts. This podcast also features a snippet from the awesome Monkey TV theme, called Monkey Magic, by the Japanese rock band Godeigo. The track is available to buy on iTunes by following this link.

Masaaki Sakai played the role of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, in the Japanese TV show which ran from 1978 to 1980.