Tom Yum Goong

Warrior King, the new Tony Jaa DVD has arrived from Amazon so I'm going to sit down and watch it to see if I can't work out an edit that will make it accessible to my own little six year old Muay Thai exponent.

Even though Ong Bak- Jaa's breakout movie - was rated 18 in the UK just like Warrior King, I managed to develop a real-time remote-control driven version of the DVD that I was happy to busk as I watched the film with my boy.

Ong Bak has a classic action fim scenario in which dastardly big city villains steal a MacGuffin from a bucolic village, and the village in turn dispatches an innocent, good hearted representative with a convenient aptitude for bone-crunching violence to get it back.

I found that if I removed the subplots about drugs, and a couple of the more violent encounters such as Ting finishing off Big Bear in the night club with a double elbowed Muay Boran technique and Humlae being crushed by the statue in the finale, what was left need be no more disturbing than an episode of Power Rangers. Brilliant scenes like the market race and the tuk-tuk chase are spectacles that raise the spirits and are fun for an audience of any age.

It seems that I'm not the only person to think about repurposing movies like this. I learned from Robert Scoble, that a guy called Evan Krauss is launching software called Cuts to do exactly that. I've signed up for the Beta but not received anything yet.

From another viewpoint, in this digital age it's surprising that content providers aren't addressing the issue and providing different versions for differerent audiences. Maybe it relates to the cost of having multiple versions classified.

Anyway, enough of my yacking, I am going to open a fresh can of Stella and then watch Tony Jaa open a fresh can of whup-ass.