Perspective from the 80’s, and later
I started reading this thread a few years back, saw that it died off, glad it's been kinda/sorta revived.
My own experience with Green Dragon Studios – I had a subscription to IKF back in the 80's, saw the first GD ads, saw them get high ratings for their vids, even asked a couple people if they'd go in on the Stone Warrior program with me ($100, in mid-80's dollars, which was no joke), then later ordered from them in the 90's. GD appealed to that side of me that many of us can identify with, what I think of as 'Saturday Shaolin Syndrome,' the belief that some wacky exercise that you saw in a weekend kungfu movie, usually involving sand, water, or candles, will make you an invincible buttkick machine, much faster than a weight set and power rack.
Re my order – It was literally a year and a half late (they said their tech had been damaged by lightning), and when it arrived wasn't what I'd asked for, and there was nothing extra added in for the inconvenience. That sucked, but as a poster here noted, you were literally nothing to them until you'd 'proved yourself,' not a real great business model for a retail operation.
Coming from a Wing Chun background, I'd wanted to see their complete butterfly swords video. What arrived was some basic form that could be done with the swords or with sai, I found it lacking in a lot of basic details, such as the technique for reversing the weapon, and John Allen's sonorous voice-over annoying. Really, I learned more that could be applied with those two weapons in my first arnis lesson.
A few observations on GD, from the persective of 30+ years. I've been a professional fitness trainer for going on 25 years, and started Wing Chun at age 16, and received my Master's in Traditional Chinese Medicine in '01 and have practiced that professionally since as well.
GD is all about forms. In the 'intro tape,' Allen says, and barks and bellows into the camera, that forms will imprint reflexes into the body. “If there had been a better way to train, they would have come up with it. YOU – do not have to make the mistake of not doing forms!” Show of hands, who remembers this? One poster on this thread, page 12 I think, upbraided a commenter for not having done long hard work on forms, and so, how could he say that they're no good? And Iron Tiger renewed the claim that forms 'put reflexes into the body.'
It's an old, tired argument, but here's my take – We can say it's no good, because this principle is not used for any other sport, especially a combative one.
Man, when I first heard about forms giving you reflexes, I was a skinny geeky weak teen, extremely uncomfortable in regular jock culture. I would have looooved it if I could go down in my basement, practiced alone, and come out with 'reflexes' to defeat attacks. Of course, by that logic, if tennis was my game I could also go down in my basement, swing a raquet (no ball needed!) in a highly stylized manner, over and over, and come out and deal with balls hit at all speeds and from all directions. Nobody even tries to punch your face in tennis! Of course, if you said that you were going to devote a significant portion of training time to doing stylized moves with no ball, you'd be roundly seen as crazy.
If 'forms' put reflexes into the body, it should work with any reactive sportl. It doesn't, and I don't have to spend 5 years with a baseball glove on my hand, scooping up imaginary grounders, to prove it.
Does anybody go for this, anymore?
You can sell forms, especially if you claim that you're the only one that has the good ones.
We now live in the world that GD claimed to want.
If you remember the old GD ads and articles and whatnot, they rode the 'Chinese MMA' exploits of Chang Dong-Shen like a rented mule. 'Yeah, you modern-day sissies, with your jiveass tournaments, Chang went down to Nanking and took on all comers. We would be doing the same, but now it's all touch fighting..' It's fine to sneer at 'tournament fighters,' but they based their own street cred on Chang's tournament(s).
Of course, now with MMA, you have the perfect vehicle to test-drive your Suai Chiao + traditional kung fu. One poster here has posited that if he were alive, Chang would enter and easily win. Well...
It's important to remember, that GD showed by their actions that they wanted two things very badly – recognition, and money. They got magazine columns, loudly complained about getting jobbed at tournaments, loudly complained when they lost the columns, and took out very large ads. For the time, their vids were hella expensive, and you were told that you needed a bunch of them. These guys were not hermetic recluses, or Ark Wong still charging what he charged 50 years ago. Neither of these is a bad thing, imo. But -
You know what would really get the respect and $ rolling in, what worked for this little-known group called the Gracie Family? Public competition against different styles. Chang's dead though, ...man, if only he had some really close students, adopted sons, even, who'd faithfully trained in his way and could show it to the world. They'd done the dynamic tension work, and forms thousands of times, and they'll show these modern-day clowns with their free weights and Thai pads what's what! (crickets.) For guys 'not interested in sports trophies,' GD was plenty glad to glom on to Chang's MMA experience, and use that as a badge of authenticity. Since that competition wasn't for revenge or war, what was that Nanking tournament if not a sports competition?
Let's get real here. If GD entered a fighter who'd trained in say, White Crane, and strengthened with Stone Warrior, and he cleaned house in the Octagon, everybody would be training White Crane later that week. This fine ancient tradition would be saved! Gene Chicoine goes in, absorbs multiple strikes without blinking thanks to Iron Vest, who wouldn't start Iron Vest, even though it takes years?
Taking out a full-page ad in IKF and other publications, “The Real Old School Challenges the New Pretenders,” with a pic of Allen wearing one of his little brother's t-shirts and scowling..Hell yes, I'd watch that. Everyone would.
If Chang's methods worked then, they should work now, and there are people who've pretty much dedicated their lives to training His Way. If they started winning fights, either with MMA or having, say a boxer using circular techniques, 'much more effective than straight-line techniques' beating the crap out of Andre Ward, well, Traditional CMA would blow up like the Hindenberg. They'd show that their work was worth all the time put in on forms and stances, and have a whole new generation keeping their ideas alive.
Yes, yes, we know that GD 'only keeps 1 out of 100 students.' Well, they got a few students now, who are presumably down with the GD way. Let them run free! If they 'don't fight like tournament fighters,' but presumably can still fight, wouldn't this be a huge advantage? If they can't fight in tournaments, and Chicoine swore he'd never teach Suia Chiao for 'sporting purposes,' for what are they training to fight? The bugs from 'Starship Troopers?' It's not like all Chang's matches were to the death.
“In 1933, at the age of 25, Grandmaster Ch'ang entered the fifth national Kua Shu Elimination Tournament in Nanking. This no holds barred competition involved over 1,000 participants and included masters in all major styles from all over China battling each other of supremacy in all-out combat.” Well, 'all-out” is kind of vague, but what's the diff between this and MMA, a.k.a. A sporting event?
Judo is a throwing and grappling style that started as jacketed wrestling, and it a (somewhat surprisingly) big part of MMA now. Rhonda Rousey's certainly on a tear with it, why not Chicoine's SC? There's a big difference between the point fighting common in the 80's, and the MMA rules of no groin shots/fishhooking/eye gouges/(and now) headbutts.
Incidentally, the whole '1 out of 100' thing is a little tired, given that that's the retention rate for most boxing gyms, or martial arts schools that require contact competition like kyokushinkai or BJJ. You know how long it takes, in a serious school, to just get a BJJ blue belt? When you stop comparing yourself to strip mall McDojos, so 1980's, this particular brag goes way down.