On September 4, Hulu is premiering Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a scripted, 10-episode series about the legendary Staten Island hip-hop crew the Wu-Tang Clan.
No, we don’t normally cover hip-hop here at Geek.com, but we make a special exception for the Wu. From their debut, they cut a very different figure than their bling and status-obsessed contemporaries. Producer RZA crafted his cohort into a gang of outsized personalities lifted from Shaw Brothers kung fu and other sources, and their albums were rife with unusual sounds. In the 28 years since their founding, they’ve done a lot for their fellow nerds, and here’s 11 ways they did it.
Kung Fu Rereleases
RZA’s love of old-school martial arts movies was all over the group, from their name to the backing tracks and vocal drop-ins. So it’s not surprising that the profile of these classic flicks got a big boost after the group broke mainstream. A number of small DVD distribution companies started licensing films that were never seen in America and releasing them, and for a while the shelves groaned under the weight of classics like The Five Deadly Venoms. The Wu themselves even got in on the act, releasing a pair of DVD box sets featuring kung fu flicks with introductions from the rappers. Without the group, we’d probably have never seen many of those flicks.
Ghost Dog
Jim Jarmusch is one of the most iconoclastic of American filmmakers, with a body of work that includes deadpan comedies, period Westerns and Ghost Dog, a strange, meditative action thriller starring Forest Whitaker as a hitman who communicates with his boss by homing pigeon and lives according to the samurai code of Hagakure. It was a surprising mainstream success, in no small part due to the incredible soundtrack by the RZA, which is some of his strongest work. It demonstrated his ability to channel his production skills into atmospheric audio and opened the door for more.
The Man With the Iron Fists
After consuming hundreds of martial arts movies himself, the RZA was finally in a spot to make his own. 2012’s The Man with the Iron Fists saw him team with Eli Roth on a tale of heroism in 19th century China. RZA starred in the flick as well alongside Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, and Dave Batista, and cameos from Gordon Liu and Pam Grier. The Wu-Tang leader learned filmmaking from observing Quentin Tarantino on the set of Kill Bill and trained for two hours every day for months to polish his fighting skills. The movie got mixed critical reviews but paved the way for a new wave of Western fighting flicks as well as a direct-to-DVD sequel.
Shaolin Style
Several rappers have had their own video games, but the Clan got in way ahead of the pack with 1999’s PlayStation entry Shaolin Style. Built on the engine from the discarded Thrill Kill, the game let you control all nine members of the group in a series of battles against the evil Mong Zhu as he attempts to steal the secrets of the 36 Chambers. The game wasn’t an all-time classic (as you’d expect from the PS1 era), but it had some really cool features like four-player simultaneous action and multiple fatalities for each rapper. The group even released a special custom controller shaped like the W logo, which looked dope but was pretty hard on the hands.
The Wu Name Generator
Donald Glover, star of Community, got his own rap name, “Childish Gambino,” from the thing.
WuChess
Another one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s digital initiatives, WuChess launched in 2008 to give the group’s fanbase an online destination to… play chess with each other. Cousins RZA and GZA learned the game as kids but didn’t get to play very much because they were too poor to buy a board. But in the digital age, all you needed was an Internet connection to get matched up to other Wu fan players around the world — and sometimes the rappers themselves, who would drop in to WuChess for games. The idea of a hip-hop group running an online chess site would have been absurd before the Wu, but they just made it part of their portfolio for world domination.
Bobby Digital
One of the things that differentiated the Wu from other crews is that solo albums were part of the grand plan, with just about every member of the group getting their own releases in between Wu joints. It took a while for the mastermind to drop his own, but when RZA released Bobby Digital in Stereo, it came with some serious geek cred. First, he got illustration legend Bill Sienkiewicz to draw the cover, a candy-colored Afrofuturism meets 60s sci-fi spy gimmick that popped off the shelves. Second, he reinvented both his persona and his production style, setting aside the dark world of the Wu for a fictional universe pulled straight from the pages of comic books.
The Snapchat Icon
The ripple effect of the Wu-Tang Clan’s massive success found some very interesting endpoints in tech culture. Case in point: Snapchat, the photo and video messaging app launched in September of 2011 by a trio of former Stanford students. When co-founder Evan Thomas Spiegel was working out ideas for an icon, he landed on the idea of a faceless spectre that he named Ghostface Chillah as a reference to the Wu-Tang rapper. While the group itself isn’t much for that kind of social media profile, it’s still a cool example of how pervasive their cultural influence is.
Ghostface in Iron Man
Ghostface Killa is one of the Wu’s biggest comics fans, and one of his alter egos is Tony Starks, an obvious reference to Marvel’s Iron Man. The company gave back to the rapper with the first Iron Man movie, where they tapped the rapper to play a Dubaian sheik in a scene that was later cut (watch the deleted scene here). That wasn’t Ghost’s only appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, as he’d also show up playing himself in the second season of Netflix’s Luke Cage.
Nine Rings of Wu-Tang
Several members of the Clan are hardcore comic fans, most notably Ghostface Killah who stops in regularly at Staten Island’s Comic Book Jones shop. So it’s not surprising that they’d get their own series. 1999’s Nine Rings of Wu-Tang, published by Image, recasts the group as martial arts warriors in Spain for some reason who each possess a variety of supernatural powers — props to U-God for having “golden arms” and living up to his nickname. The series wouldn’t last long, but it was a fun ride made more difficult by balancing the demands of having such a massive cast.
Afro Samurai
The blending of hip-hop and Asian cinematic culture wasn’t invented by the Wu — African-Americans have been down with anime and kung fu since Rudy Ray Moore chopped suckers and Dragonball hit Cartoon Network — but they definitely blazed a trail in representation. Takashi Okazaki’s manga Afro Samurai was a logical outgrowth. Started in the late 1990s and inspired by some of the same soul records that the RZA was sampling, it told the story of a samurai seeking revenge for the murder of his father. When it was adapted to anime form in 2007, studio Gonzo brought in the RZA to close the circle and do the soundtrack.
GZA’s Weird Science
“The Genius” isn’t just a nickname for founding Wu member Gary “GZA” Grice — the dude is legit smart in a way that we don’t expect from rappers. He’s lectured at Harvard and MIT and teamed up with Neil DeGrasse Tyson for songs on his radio show. Despite dropping out of school in the 10th grade, GZA is a voracious autodidact who reads relentlessly to expose himself to new ideas, and in 2016 he helped launch a program called Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. targeted at kids. The videos bridge the worlds of hip-hop and hard science to expose each side to the power of the other.
Wu-Tang: An American Saga premieres on Hulu on September 4.
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