Martial Arts Professional Magazine

With the July 20th commemoration of the death of Bruce Lee 35 years ago, the interest in and respect for one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the 20th century has never waned, and is experiencing a resurgence, with plans for multiple tributes and projects.As reported in last month’s Industry Insider, the musical, Bruce Lee: Journey to the West, is scheduled to open during the 2010-2011 Broadway season. There are new reports of a 50-part Lee documentary to air in China after the Summer Olympics, another Lee documentary on the History Channel in 200 and a Lee cartoon in development.

Now, Bruce Lee’s family and his Hong Kong fans are working, independently, to create museums in Seattle, Washington and Hong Kong, China, to honor the man that many claim to have first brought martial arts to the mainstream. During the Bruce Lee tribute in Seattle, Linda Lee Caldwell and Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s wife and daughter, respectively, unveiled plans for a $50 million Lee museum, which will include his writings, props and his signature weapon, the nunchaku. Shannon Lee runs the Bruce Lee Foundation and Bruce Lee Enterprises in Los Angeles.

Bruce Lee lived in Seattle from 15-64 and attended Edison Technical School and then the University of Washington, where he studied philosophy for three years and met and married Linda Emery. Lee is buried in Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery next to their son, Brandon.

Although born in San Francisco, Lee grew to adulthood in Hong Kong. His fans there have appealed to the government to make his old home into a museum in his memory. The residence is now a converted, rooms-by-the-hour love motel. Fans have already overcome one hurdle by convincing Yu Panglin, the cur-rent owner of the property and a local real estate entrepreneur/philanthropist, not to accept a $13-million bid for Lee’s home and donate the money to victims of the Sichuan earthquake.Instead, Yu has asked the government to rezone the property, so he can expand the two-story townhouse and add a 25,000-square-foot building, complete with library, cinema and martial arts center. Another hurdle for fans is that the project may be too ambitious to conform to local ordnances.

The people of Lee’s ancestral village, Shunde, in Guangdong province, converted his family’s old home into a museum and named a street after him in 2002, despite a slim connection to Lee himself.