Above you see a prized part of our collection—five vintage Bruce Lee promo posters produced in Hong Kong from 1971 to 1973. We still have probably ten more Lee posters, which we’ll get uploaded sometime in the near future. 

Above are six issues of Hong Kong’s West Point magazine, named for a geographical feature of Hong Kong Island. The insides of these are not as visually interestings as the outsides, owing mainly to the poor quality printing and coarse paper stock, but if you’re curious you can see some interior pages here. You may also be wondering if West Point had coverage of Asian celebs. Yes, but unfortunately they weren’t allowed within light years of the magazine’s cover, as far as we can tell. These issues, top to bottom, date from the early-’50s to 1967 and feature Barbara Lang, Ann-Margret, Rock Hudson, Jeanne Crain, Michèle Girardon, and Julie Andrews. 

Vintage Shaolin comic books are items we see often and the cover art always catches our eye. This one dates from the 1960s, we’re guessing, and it came from Hong Kong. Unless you read Chinese the specifics will be lost, but there are swords, and boats, and horses, and flames, which means it’s great. Thirteen interior scans below. We'd have posted more, but that's where the laziness thing comes in.

We found something quite cool yesterday—six Enter the Dragon lobby cards produced in Hong Kong and featuring the one and only Bruce Lee. Looking at them, we aren't sure they're all actually from Enter the Dragon, but that's the way they were packaged. Five of the cards are printed film frames and feature him in full ass-kicking action, but the last one, at bottom, is the true winner, showing a smiling Lee during a break in filming. Assuming these are indeed all from the set of Dragon, it would have been the spring of 1973, when Lee was on top of the world. And in that last shot he looks like it. Just a few months later, in July, he would be gone.  

Below, eight issues of the Hong Kong cinema and celeb magazine Technicolor Weekly, with unidentified cover stars, 1950 and 1951. 

Above, a never-before-seen-online poster for Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, made for the DVD release around 1999 or 2000. Fist of Fury should not be confused with Fists of Fury. The latter was released in 1971 and was better known in the U.S. as The Big Boss, whereas Fist of Fury was known as The Chinese Connection as well as The Iron Hand, and its Mandarin title was Jing mo mun and its Cantonese title was Jing wu men. Got all that? Great. Fist of Fury premiered in Hong Kong today in 1972. 

You can keep your Christmas music—we’ve been listening to Bruce Lee. On this 45 record from 1972, Bruce explains his philosophies of self-discipline and self-defense, in both English and Cantonese. Lee was popular—we all know that. But the very existence of this record speaks to the intensity of worldwide interest in the man, his movies, and his unparalleled skills at pimp smacking bad guys. Put another way—can you imagine an action star putting out a release like this today? We think not. The record would be better if Lee were the only one speaking, but every Gladys Knight needs her Pips, seemingly. You can listen to My Way of Kung-Fu here. 

Above are two Japanese posters for the Hong Kong lost world flick Xing xing wang, aka Goliathon, aka The Mighty Peking Man. We watched it last week, and mainly what was peeking was Swiss actress Evelyne Kraft’s ladyparts out of her costume. Those are the highlights. The lowlights are innumerable, and include choppy editing, bad miniature work, unconvincing rear projection trickery, and a dubious moral to the whole exercise. But because the film is so unusually bad it may be worth a look. It certainly made us laugh out loud more than once. But if you don’t want to spend ninety minutes finding out what happens, the frame captures below tell all you need to know in only ten seconds. Anyway, at least the posters are good. Xing xing wang opened in Hong Kong today in 1978. 

This True Detective from November 1939 features a cover painting of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose flight from authorities had taken him from the U.S. to Mexico, and then to Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and across the ocean to England, France and Germany. Buchalter had begun his career in organized crime by shaking down pushcart operators in Brooklyn, and had risen through the ranks of the criminal-controlled fur industry by doing every type of dirt imaginable, from issuing threatening phone calls to garment union activists to throwing acid in a competitor’s face. Eventually he was running a criminal empire that stretched to both coasts, and was acting as head of the infamous assassination squad Murder, Inc.

In 1936 Buchalter went into hiding after he became aware that criminal charges were being prepared against him. Not long after he dropped out of sight, he was indicted for smuggling an estimated $10 million in heroin into the U.S. from Hong Kong. The FBI printed a million posters and displayed them in every post office, police station, and federal building in America. All this attention was a problem for U.S. mob bosses, and so with characteristic unsentimentality, they decided Buchalter had to surrender. Convincing him was not difficult. While he undoubtedly had the flair and intelligence to dodge the feds indefinitely, living in another country away from the old neighborhood and away from the hundreds of underlings who respected him was not his style. Buchalter was a mobster through-and-through. To him, an anonymous existence, even in a tropical paradise or cosmopolitan foreign capitol, was little different from being in prison.

Buchalter’s associates got word to him that if he came back to the U.S. he would be able to surrender personally to J. Edgar Hoover. Surrendering to the Feds meant he would not face a more serious group of charges brought by Manhattan D.A. Thomas Dewey. But it was wishful thinking. The federal charges were rapidly followed by Dewey’s charges and Buchalter earned a fourteen-year jolt in the pen. His legal team hoped tohave the sentence reduced via appeals and procedural maneuvers, but when a snitch fingered Buchalter for ordering the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen, he was tried for the killing, convicted, and sentenced to execution. By some estimates Buchalter had been responsible for a thousand murders as head of Murder, Inc., but all it took was one to seal his fate. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison's famous "Old Sparky" electric chair on March 4, 1944, perhaps while realizing life on a beach in Costa Rica hadn’t been so bad after all.