When Tangents Attack: The Life and Times of Johnny Tao, Kung-Fu Superspy...

 (originally posted 13th of July 2016)

PROLOGUE: Several years ago, I was playing El Aguila Azul, a superpowered luchador crimefighter in a Mutants and Masterminds game, and at one point, we discovered that he had a sweet crimefighting Aguilamobile packed with sweet spy gizmos. When asked where he’d got it from, I casually replied that he’d won it in a bet in Monte Carlo from Kung-Fu Superspy, Johnny Tao. Now, I can’t leave well enough alone when a plot thread like that is just there... so my weird brane started filling in gaps...

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Johnny Tao was a two-fisted, high kicking superspy working cases across the world for Interpol, but was based chiefly in Hong Kong. He was played by the Shaw Brothers’ mainstay Jimmy Wang Yu, and had a number of solo adventures in the vein of the 60’s James Bond-a-likes (Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, James Coburn’s Derek Flint, etc...) when he first encountered El Aguila Azul as the producers of El Aguila’s films decided to cash in on the spy craze, in the same tradition as the El Santo films ‘Operacion 67’ and Blue Demon’s ‘Destructor de Espias’.

The earliest Johnny Tao adventures were pretty straightforward affairs, low on budget and limited in scope, despite being generally well-executed. These usually featured him battling straightforward spy plots and tracking down international criminals who just happened to be in Hong Kong, but as the spy craze began to take off, the budgets (and the plots) began to get more elaborate. Initially, Wang played Johnny as very straightforward, and almost stoic, seeing in him the spirit of a traditional Chinese swordsman in a modern setting, but as the series wore on, cracks began appearing in his austere demeanor. He never lost the initial characterization, but began to incorporate an impish sense of humour, hiding under his stoic aspect and occasionally allowed to emerge, and this is the Johnny Tao that most fans of his stories remember.

Their first adventure in which Johnny teamed up with crimefighting luchador, El Aguila Azul occurred when the two adventurers were independently engaged to track down a gang of international jewel thieves who had stolen a series of Jade Statuary in Hong Kong and an array of Golden Mayan Temple Treasures from Mexico. This brought them into conflict with agents of a shadowy group known as Crime, International, specifically, the cruel Russian Ice-Queen known as The White Tiger, and Doctor Satanas, an archaeologist-turned-tomb robber, obsessed with mystical power. Initially, the two were suspicious of one another, which allowed their enemies to gain the upper hand. However, as the two agents came to respect one another’s very different methods and approaches, the two treacherous criminals fell out and began plotting against one another, which allowed Johnny and El Aguila to eventually win out.

It is known that they ran into each other several times over the following years, however many of those adventures are as yet, unrevealed. It is known that, in the late 1960’s, the two teamed up to prevent the assassination of the young king of a wealthy Middle-Eastern nation. The King, barely in his 20’s, was a fanatic for cross-country automobile racing, and El Aguila and Johnny Tao again found themselves alternating between teaming up and competing as both men vied not only to complete their mission, but to win the race in the bargain. During this mission, they encountered a number of international assassins in the employ of Crime, International, including the masked martial artist, King Scorpion, Ali Efreet, the infamous sniper, and the team of high tech engineers known as The Crusher Gang. It was during this mission that El Aguila Azul won Johnny Tao’s car. The details of exactly how this happened, however, remain unclear, depending on which of the two you ask.

Their final mission together occurred in the early 1970s when, tracing a series of missing ships at sea, the duo discovered a plot by former Nazis in alliance with Lemurian Snake-Priests to raise and plunder lost Lemuria. During this mission, Johnny met Meilani Kawai, a Hawaiian Oceanographer and Marine Biologist who had been captured by the Nazis and who was instrumental in assisting the two to save the various ships’ crews and passengers and put paid to the Nazis’ nefarious schemes. Shortly after this mission, Johnny and Meilani were married, and it wasn’t long after that that Johnny retired as a full-time agent.

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Many years later, El Aguila Azul’s successor, El Aguila Azul, jr. would meet a scrappy group of teenage musicians who, when they weren’t playing some of the hottest surf guitar on the West Coast, had a quite successful sideline in fighting crime and investigating mysteries. As it turned out, the core members of this group were Johnny and Meilani’s children who, along with some friends and allies they’d accumulated along the way, were carrying on the family tradition of high adventure into the next generation of heroism as The World’s Greatest Kung-Fu Surf Guitar Band, The Breakers.