Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits – Criterion Collection producer on preserving the martial arts icon’s legacy with new box set

Box set collects together all of Bruce Lee’s martial arts films, along with commentaries and special features, and producer Curtis Tsui says Lee still has cultural relevance

‘He left a small body of work, but behind it was a way of addressing life … that we could implement,’ Tsui says of the actor, who died in Hong Kong in 1973

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Bruce Lee in a still from Fist of Fury (1972), one of the films featured in a Criterion Collection box set being released this week with introductions that put the martial arts icon’s films in context, and mini-documentaries. Photo: Criterion Collection

Published: 5:00am, 12 Jul 2020Updated: 3:50pm, 14 Jul 2020

Fans of Bruce Lee are in for a bonanza this week when esteemed home-video distribution company Criterion Collection release a seven-disc Blu-ray box set called Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits.

For release on July 14, the box set, put together by New York-based producer Curtis Tsui for Criterion, collects together all of Lee’s martial arts films, along with a plethora of special features and commentaries, to provide a comprehensive overview of the actor’s life and career.

Lee is still popular enough in the United States to warrant such an extensive release, says Tsui, noting that the martial artist’s philosophy of life fits the mood of the times.

“People are still hungry for Bruce Lee, and he has a cultural relevance,” he says. “Symbolically speaking, Lee has always spoken for a kind of oneness in humanity, about looking beyond our differences and finding what is similar in all of us and finding solidarity there.

“You can look at that in relation to the way he lived his own life as a teacher who went against the strict doctrine of traditional martial arts instructors by opening his school up to everyone. He showed us that everyone could use martial arts to better ourselves and to strengthen ourselves. That has a lot of meaning for people here, and it’s a key element of his continued popularity,” Tsui tells the Post.

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