November 29, 2012

Bruce Lee Playing with Nunchucks

Here's a great video that's been going around supposedly showing Bruce Lee playing with nunchucks and beating top players. (This is the full version, 2:38, as opposed to various shortened versions.) The footage for the video is apparently from the 1960s, and has been used recently in a Nokia commercial. The amazing thing is many people believe it is real!!! (Right about now you are either nodding your head, sitting in your chair stunned, or shaking your fist at me and declaring that it's real and Bruce Lee is God.)

When this first came out a Bruce Lee fan really got into it with me, arguing that the footage was real, and that I just didn't understand how Bruce Lee had surpassed normal human abilities with his mental and physical conditioning. He's obviously Superman, Spiderman, and Zhang Jike all in one, right?

Someone obviously took old footage of Bruce Lee working out with nunchucks, removed the background, put him into a table tennis scene (made to match the vintage footage of Bruce) where the opponents faked their shots (or perhaps footage of real players, with the ball removed), and then inserted the ball digitally. How difficult is this? Go watch Forrest Gump or many other modern movies. It's not hard. Nokia obviously hired a special effects lab to create this. (The opponents, however, are obviously real players, since they have good stroking technique.)

How is it obviously not real? Let me count the ways.

  1. Watch the ball. Any serious table tennis player can see that it has been inserted digitally. Bruce's shots drop like they have topspin whether or not he hits with an upswing or downswing. For example, about two seconds in someone walks in front, blocking our view. After the person is out of the way, see the next three shots, where Bruce hits the ball on the downswing, but the ball travels as if it has topspin! The third one is especially obvious - see how the ball arcs down like heavy topspin, even though Bruce has hit the ball with a chopping motion.
  2. There are many examples in the video where the ball's flight doesn't make sense. For example, go to second 31, and see how the opponent's topspin return suddenly dips upward just before Bruce smashes it. As the video continues there are cases where the ball mysteriously just slows down in mid-flight or does other dips and rises that make no sense.
  3. Assuming his nunchucks aren't covered with inverted sponge, Bruce wouldn't be getting spin on his shots as he obviously does. The opponents are hitting with topspin, and when hit with nunchucks - which are not going to do any spin reversal without a sponge covering - all his returns should have backspin, instead of the obvious topspins.
  4. If it were real, it would have taken many years of serious training to learn to hit a ping-pong ball like that. There are no reports of this.
  5. If Bruce really were this good, he'd be the best in the world with a real paddle, despite no serious training. So why didn't he compete, even once? Bruce was not known for his modesty. In fact, the obviously very good players he was playing would have reported his skills, and he'd have been recruited to play on the Chinese National Team.
  6. There are several shots where Bruce returns the ball with his back turned (go to second 51), without even a glance. He doesn't just return it, he smacks a fast, incoming ball with a rapidly twirling nunchuck without even seeing the opponent hit the ball. Sorry, that only happens in movies and fake videos.
  7. Bruce doesn't vary the pace of his nunchucks - the incoming ball just happens to arrive just at the right time. If this were real, he'd have to slow down or speed the nunchucks up to time them against the incoming ball.
  8. If he was hitting a real ball with real nunchucks at the speed they are twirling, it would have broken the ball pretty quickly.

ADDENDUM: Since I posted the above Tom Nguyen (a huge Bruce Lee fan) and Julian Waters have told me that that's not even Bruce Lee in the video. (Julian says it's a look-alike trained in martial arts, and that the ad was created in China in 2008.) Apparently it's just a stand-in. So instead of using vintage footage of Bruce Lee from the 1960s it was apparently all created recently. 

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