OK. It’s the late 80’s. It’s Friday night. School is out for the week (thank God). You’ve flown through your homework twice as fast (maths and geography – YAWN!). The six o’clock news is over and your dinner is long gone from your plate. You climb the stairs with a belt, without uniform and in civilian clothes. He turns on the TV, grabs the remote, plops down on the bed, and hits channel two, all in one non-stop motion. BBC 2 comes on and with it strange but now familiar music. A strange Sino-Japanese jingle 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 TV series in 1973, this is truly one of the darkest cult TV shows. A lot of people know the good old ‘Monkey’, but this one is more of a head scratcher, followed by an ‘Um…’, along with a ‘Not quite sure…?’.
Broadcast on 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 it has rarely been repeated since.
The story is anything but simple, and it 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. Picture 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 more often than not (truth be told) it was the action, martial arts, and sword dueling shenanigans that held the attention. Much like ‘Monkey’, this show was responsible for hordes of young Irishmen throwing all sorts of strange shapes and movements across the country. Or at least thinking children. The rest were probably watching ‘Airwolf’ or ‘Bluethunder’.
‘Water Margin’ holds a special place in my affections: for a few years of 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 rogue outlaws among the swamps filled our minds and set some of us at least on a path that would one day lead to the works of Akira Kurosawa and others.
The original 1973 Nippon TV series with all 26 episodes is available in a nice box and is worth watching; oddly enough, it’s still as good as it was then. How many things from your childhood can you say that about?