Recently, a clip titled “Jackie Chan Publicly Mocks Bruce Lee” has gone viral online, with Jackie Chan’s line “Let him win,” full of provocation.
In an early interview on the show “Behind the Headlines with Wen Tao,” Jackie Chan openly ridiculed Bruce Lee. He imitated Bruce Lee’s signature punching and kicking sounds, then claimed audiences were tired of it, urging everyone to stop copying Bruce Lee: “It looks bad, and the audience is getting sick of it. Please don’t imitate Bruce Lee anymore, really.” When asked who would win in a fight if he and Bruce Lee were the same age and at their peak: “If you and Bruce Lee were the same age and both at your peak, who would win if you fought? What would it be like?” Jackie Chan replied magnanimously, “Let him win.” His use of “let” clearly implied he believed he could beat Bruce Lee.
Jackie Chan said that his own “Jackie Chan-style” kung fu was a hundred times harder than “Bruce Lee-style”: “I’m bigger than Bruce Lee, taller than him, his muscles are very developed, but mine aren’t bad either. He’s single-boned, I’m double-boned. Bruce Lee has been overly mythologized, he made Jeet Kune Do, but I could just as easily create Dragon Fist, though I wouldn’t do that.” On whether “Bruce Lee has been over-mythologized,” Jackie Chan commented, “I used to work with Bruce Lee in movies, he was a really good person, but he was spoiled by the people around him. When he arrived, whoa, it was like that! So everything he said was considered right.”
Back when Bruce Lee was making movies, Jackie Chan was just an extra, appearing in scenes where Bruce Lee kicked him out of a room. Meanwhile, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and Cheng Pei-pei all genuinely acknowledged Bruce Lee’s martial arts skills; Cheng Pei-pei even revealed, “Bruce Lee really knew kung fu, while Jackie Chan is all fancy moves and show.”
News Source: HK01