A young Nobu McCarthy
I'm gradually emerging from a cocoon of rest and work only to awaken to the feverish pangs of middle age and nostalgia. The other night on hulu I saw the season premiere of Charlie's Angels season two (watch), the one where the angels go to Hawaii to rescue a kidnapped Charlie AKA the episode that introduced Cheryl Ladd as Kris Munroe, Jill's (Farah Fawcett) little sister. There was something very strange about seeing the helicopter shots of the city and knowing that I was probably literally in that shot somewhere or seeing my old boss Al Harrington as a henchman (I worked at his Polynesian show as a bus boy after college. The going away gift he gave me personally when I left for grad school—a Farah Fawcett T-shirt). It was also strange in a pop culture sense seeing France Nuyen as a bikinied dragon lady when I had known her only as Liat in South Pacific, or the Dolman in Star Trek or Aunty Ying Ying in the Joy Luck Club and never realized they were all the same person; seeing Don Ho playing, uh, Don Ho; wondering if the "you too sistah" pidgin English was more ebonic than local.
I'm still trying to figure out how TV worked in the seventies. People today can't look at shows from that era without finding them relentlessly cheesy. TV shows back then were marvels of artifice with highly stylized "move 'em from point A to point B" blocking and connect the dots editing. I think there was a much greater chasm between film and TV. Now the distinction is blurred. But back then, movies were serious. I remember seeing Network and Taxi Driver about that time. Gritty. Real. But TV was TV and we knew that Charlie's Angels was dumb and yet we watched it every week. Somehow the episodes were just different enough, the plot contrivances just buried enough, and the costume changes just frequent enough to make it entertaining. TV was episodic then, rarely serial, and it seemed to exist on its own dramatic island separate from Cinema.
Tonight I watched the entire Karate Kid II (watch) which, ten years after Charlie's Angels, still traversed the same cartoon-drama groove. It's certainly no less nostalgic. Along with Teahouse of the August Moon (Marlon Brando), Karate Kid II is one of the few Hollywood films set in Okinawa (I'm half Okinawan). It was shot on Oahu and you can see Fisherman's Hat featured prominently. Plus it debuted Tamlyn Tomita who was a Nisei week Queen several years after a girl I sort-of dated. The film also exacerbated my middle age crisis when I found out that Danny Kamekona was only two years older than I am now when he played Sato, Miyagi's nemesis. Ex-model and Hollywood starlet Nobu McCarthy, who played Pat Morita's love interest, was about three years older than I am now. She can act with a capital "A" by the way. There's a strange sincerity about the film, as if it assumed that you didn't notice its underlying machinery. One great sequence is the bar room ice-breaking scene where the evil Chozun suddenly appears. Then Mr. Miyagi suddenly shows up. Then Sato! Where did all these people keep coming from? And the villains are relentless. They're not just bad, they're book throwing, garden bulldozing, fishing industry-killing, weights & measures-cheating, sell-out dojo running, deed-owning, house busting bad. Then there's the love scene with the music by Chicago.
This, folks, is what I've been reduced to: reliving my life for free on Hulu.
