“Huang Rong” Cedar Park, 2022
I finally watched all 52 episodes of the 2017 Chinese television series “The Legend of the Condor Heroes”. I enjoyed it quite a bit!
After reading the books (which I loved), I was curious to see how this latest re-telling of the Condor Heroes story would be. I was pleasantly surprised that the first episodes’ characters, plot, and overall feeling matched with what I had imagined in my mind when I read the books.
The kung fu moves were excellent and they spent a lot of effort in the flying effects, the spinning moves, and the choreography in general. It was interesting to me that in the books and also the live-action series, most of the kung fu is not meant to deal lethal blows. Even when fighting with weapons, the conflict was to show superiority, and trying to kill someone is a serious line that only the villains were willing to cross.
Speaking of the kung-fu, many of the moves has specific names, and in the tv show, they flashed subtitles when the person used the move. Pretty cool!
One criticism of the TV series I have is that the special effects were sometimes horrible. Laughably so! In fact, they were so bad, didn’t mind it so much after a while. They did their best! And the fighting was awesome, after all.
This adaptation stuck close to the book’s plot, but at the end I think they skipped over a lot. For instance, when Viper Ouyang was harassing our heroes in Mongolia, he suffered some hilarious indignities, however the TV show only showed one of them, and even that was toned down.
Overall, though, I thought the 2017 series was excellent. I’d definitely recommend it to fans of the legendary wuxia series.
