Fight Clip Club: The Master

Who’s the Master?

(hint: not Sho ‘Nuff this time…)

The ‘80s were a heyday of what author Philip Pullman called the Shane genre of TV.* Meaning: good guy (whether gritty hero or surly anti-hero outlaw) breezes in to a town, gets himself involved in whatever problem is plaguing same, solves the problem (often alongside a brief dalliance with the Dish O’th’Week), and rides off into the sunset, only to do the same next week in a different town. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. Shows like Knight Rider, Airwolf (remember Airwolf?!), The A-Team, and even OG Star Trek and Doctor Who all had this rhythm to it. Sometimes, there’d be a minor thread that would run under multiple episodes, pertaining to the outlaw heroes’ past: the A-Team, after all, are persona non grata to the military; Airwolf is similarly a pariah, and The Doctor is an alien who has many enemies that arc beyond just the monster-of-the-week.

One show that landed solidly into this pattern, and included the huge ‘80s martial arts trend of ninja stuff, was a short-lived series called The Master, or sometimes The Ninja Master. Its premise? A young man travels the country in his van, trusty pet hamster by his side (no, really). A master of ninja arts, played by the incredible Lee Van Cleef, falls into his company, and together they travel on, The Master training the kid in ninjutsu, while the overall quest is to find his long-lost daughter. So each town-of-the-week is arrived at because McAllister (the titular Master) has gotten some kind of intel that his daughter might be there. As ‘the only Occidental trained as a ninja Master’ by his Japanese teachers (no, really), his desertion of the dojo to find his family is …I dunno, somehow against some ninja code? so his former student, a master ninja himself named Okasa, has sworn to assassinate him. 

So you’ve got two throughlines under The Master’s mystery-of-the-week format: the daughter quest, and Okasa’s revenge plot. And the central heroic twain are very charming, in a Luke Skywalker / Obi-Wan Kenobi type way. It’s also awful—the acting is pretty dreadful overall (though Van Cleef definitely brings his old school Western chops to this role to good effect), and the plots are pretty standard if not overused. 

But I was kind of inspired by analyzing a truly bad fight the other week, and it made me think of what bad fights out there I’ve actually enjoyed. This is one of them. Let’s watch the climactic fight together and talk about it, shall we?

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*This is from Pullman’s amazing lecture ‘The Only Ten Plots in the World.’ Problem is, I don’t think he’s ever delivered it, and he certainly hasn’t published it as far as I can tell. I received a copy of it more than 20 years ago by a saint and scholar of a phenomenal librarian, name of Judy Volc, to whom Pullman had personally emailed it. I cherished it and have referred back to it through the years, even using it in several of my writing courses. I find it brilliant, witty and pithy as all his work is, and much more useful than the Hero’s Journey. Ask me nicely and maybe I’ll write about it here on Zuko’s Musings at some point.