The Chinese Really Heart Bruce Lee

Starting this Sunday, China’s state television will be airing a 50-part Bruce Lee documentary called The Legend of Bruce Lee in prime time.

50 part!!!!!! Damn, sitting through all that is COMMITMENT.

Two episodes will air consecutively every night in a two-hour slot til the end of the series.

Americans don’t have the attention span for a fifty-part series dedicated to one person!

The kung fu master’s documentary was shot in China, Hong Kong, Macau, the U.S., Italy and Thailand over nine months.

The documentary series is seen as a ‘belated’ hero’s welcome for Bruce Lee. At the peak of his career, his countrymen didn’t ‘feel’ his influence because at that moment China was a ‘closed’ communist country and his movies weren’t allowed into the nation.

The state television channel has spent $7.3 million on the documentary. It’s the country’s first movie or TV series on the kung fu master.

And, according to reports, unlike past films about Lee, the 50-part documentary is unusually detailed in tracing Lee’s life, from his teenage years in Hong Kong to his move to the U.S., where he studied and taught martial arts, to his movie career and early death at 32.

Danny Chen, the actor who plays Lee in the doc said, “We’ve only seen the glorious side of Bruce Lee ├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥ he comes out all guns blazing, his films are entertaining. But very few people know what injuries he suffered and what grievances he suffered.”

The documentary was originally scheduled to air right before the Beijing Olympics, but was pushed back because of the deadly May earthquake in China’s central Sichuan province which killed 70,000 people.

Will us non-Chinese get to see the mondo Lee documentary?

We do have the Bruce Lee Broadway musical to look forward to in 2010!

[Image via WENN.]