More memories from The RZA via his book, Wu-Tang Manual:
“I got my introduction to kung fu flicks in '78 or '79. You’d get a triple feature on 42nd Street for $1.50. At that point, all of 42nd Street had kung fu movies. They’d have three on this side of the street and another three on the other side and they’d rotate them. They’d play them with regular first-run movies. Any given night, you could see Fright Night,Motel Hell,Invasion of the Body Snatchers-plus two kung fu flicks.
…About three years after I saw The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, I was still going to kung-fu flicks, mostly with Dirty (Ol Dirty Bastard) We’d go to a 24-hour hour movie spot that showed pornos and kung fu-flicks. By that time, it was mostly prono on 42nd Street, but some of the porno places had a small room, maybe the size of a classroom, where bums would sleep and they’d show these kung-fu flicks.
So ODB and I, we were always out at night around Times Square-starting fights,getting drunk,chasing women,going to the Roseland-and this one night, we were really high, we’d been out all night and didn’t want to go home. It was cold and we had a couple of 40-ounces and we’d thought we’d crash at this funky theater at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.
So we went in, at maybe 4 in the morning, and sat down to watch whatever was on. Some we had seen before, but there was one that we’d never seen:Shaolin and Wu Tang. We walked in near the end of it, and just from the last few minutes I was like “What the fuck is this?” It ended and another movie came on and we watched that, and Dirty wanted to leave. But I was like “I got to see that movie.” We stayed and when it came on, it woke us up. It was the best kung-fu movie I’d ever seen in my life-the fighting, the ideas, the concepts,everything.”
