IT’S OKAY. It’s the late ’80s. It’s Friday night. School is out for the week (thank God). You’ve flown through your homework twice as fast (math and geography – YAWN!). The six o’clock news is over and your dinner is long gone from the plate. You climb the stairs with a belt, without a uniform and in civilian clothes. He turns on the TV, grabs the remote, flops onto the bed, and hits channel two, all in one nonstop motion. BBC 2 turns on and with it strange but now familiar music. A strange Sino-Japanese tinkle punctuated by even stranger instruments against an electronic background.
It’s weird, grainy in color, iffy voice dubbing, and OTT kung fu action coupled with battle scenes that invariably take place in quarries – it can only be ‘Water Margin’!
Based on ancient Chinese legends and dramatized by Nippon Television Network Corporation as a television series in 1973, this is truly one of the darkest cult television shows. A lot of people know dear old ‘Monkey’, but this one is more of a head scratcher, followed by ‘Um…’, along with ‘I’m not quite sure…?’.
Broadcast by the BBC from 1976 to 1978, it was something of a counterpart to the much more popular (and comical) tales of the Great Wise Ape. When one was off the air, the other was usually on, and has rarely been repeated since.
The story is anything but simple, and would take more space than I have available to explain, but it centers on the trials and tribulations of 108 outlaws during the Song dynasty. Imagine him as some sort of Chinese Robin Hood meets Kung Fu and I guess he wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Unsurprisingly, the episodes themselves weren’t the easiest things to follow. But most of the time (truth be told) it was the action, the martial arts and the sword dueling antics that held the attention. Much like ‘Monkey,’ this show was responsible for the hordes of young Irish people launching all sorts of weird shapes and moves across the country. Or at least thinking children. The rest were probably watching ‘Airwolf’ or ‘Bluethunder’.
The ‘Water Margin’ holds a special place in my affections: for a few years in my childhood it opened my imagination to a larger world beyond the shores of Ireland and began my long love affair with the cultures of China and Japan. For me, and I suspect many others, the stories of the rogue outlaws among the swamps filled our minds and set at least some of us on a path that would one day lead to the works of Akira Kurosawa and others.
The original Nippon TV series from 1973 with all 26 episodes is available in a nice box and is well worth a watch; curiously, it is still as good as then. How many things from your childhood can you say that about?