RIP - Kwai Chang Caine

David Carradine

b. : 08 December 1936

d. : 03 June 2009

. You young'uns will know David Carradine from the Kill Bill movies, but us geezers remember him from the 1972-1975 series Kung Fu, where he played the Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine. . Carradine was found dead on Wednesday in Thailand. Initially reported as a suicide, it now appears he was engaged in a most bizarre practice of combining strangulation with orgasm, something that staggers even my progessive mind. . Kung Fu was an instant sensation in 1972, with Carradine playing an exiled Buddhist monk roaming the American wild west, kicking black-hatted cowboy butt and having philosophical flashbacks to his monastery days. It gave us the immortal line, "When you can take the pebble out of my hand, grasshopper, it will be time for you to leave." . With time, the series dwindled into mediocrity. As with Mork & Mindy and M*A*S*H, the moral lessons got shallower and banal, and the flashback scenes (which are what we all watched the show for) became fewer and farther-between. That made it just another western. By the time he found his long-lost brother, nobody cared. . But in its heyday, Kung Fu was a TV-changing series. Up till then, no one had tried to integrate Buddhist philosophy into a prime-time series, let alone present Kung-Fu martial arts as anything other than mindless fighting. For Carradine, it came at a cost of being typecast for the rest of his life. But there are worse fates than that. Just ask Leonard Nimoy. . So rest in peace, Kwai Chang Caine. And next time remember that with auto-erotic asphyxiation, the emphasis should be on the first half, not the second.