prettyarbitrary:

avengetheangels:

Captain America: The First Avenger Trivia Click gifs for more trivia in captions

Calling jeet kune do a style is really misleading.  It’s Cap’s fighting style in the sense that Cap sucks up whatever works and then stuffs it all together in an effective way.  And that’s what jeet kune do IS.

Bruce Lee grew up street-fighting in Hong Kong.  As such, he learned martial arts as a way to beat the snot out of other people.  He always found the kind of stylized kata-based tournament-style martial arts to be, hm.  Usually they teach you how to look pretty, not how to be effectual (with a few exceptions, such as boxing, which he had a lot of respect for because boxers have never forgotten the point of fighting; and the occasional dojo where they focus on things like self-defense or MMA).

So, while Lee studied many styles, when it came time to use them he simply snagged everything that worked and threw it into his personal style.  And that became known as jeet kune do, even though it is, in the formal sense, the opposite of a style.

There are now dojos that train people in ‘jeet kune do,’ even though in some cases they’re turning Lee’s fighting into something that’s exactly the sort of stylized and ineffective thing he worked to get away from.  In other cases, they’re simply training you how to be a down-and-dirty fighter, in case you ever need to knock somebody down.

So to say that Cap’s style is ‘jeet kune do’ is simply to say that Cap’s style is to be a combat-move-sponge and to beat the snot out of his opponents in an idiosyncratic but highly effective way.  Which is not a thing that Bruce Lee invented, although he was responsible for a renaissance in martial arts and reminding practitioners the world over that the point was not to look pretty, but to stun the fuck out of your opponent.

I bet Steve was thrilled when he discovered Bruce Lee, though.  In Marvel-verse, Steve was probably one of the fighters Bruce Lee studied, and I’m sure Steve later returned the favor.