10 Things You Didn’t Know About Showdown
With the amount of content that was hitting video store shelves back in the day, I guess it is really no surprise that all the action movies that were being rented on VHS back in the day didn’t make the jump to DVD when VHS became obsolete.
But the fine folks over at the MVD Rewind Collection have seemingly made it their life’s work to make sure some of these forgotten VHS gems get new life in the form of special edition Blu-Ray releases. The latest MVD Rewind Collection release is 1993’s Showdown… a movie that I only discovered a few years back when I reviewed it for the site, but I became an instant fan and I soon learned that Showdown has one passionate fan base.
That passionate fan base is going to absolutely love the MVD Rewind release of Showdown, not only because the movie looks better than ever, but because of all the special features… including a 90+ minute documentary about the making of the film featuring Billy Blanks, Kenn Scott, John Asher, Mike Genovese, Writer Stuart Gibbs and Director Robert Radler.
I learned a ton after watching the documentary and it was the source material for today’s post, 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Showdown…
1. Kenn Scott got offered the lead role in Showdown after he created his own press kit and had his roommate/friend pose as his agent. Kenn sent the press kit to several companies that were producing martial arts films at the time and Imperial Entertainment bit.
2. The film was shot in and around Phoenix, Arizona. The school they used, Paradise Valley High, was an actual high school that had been vacated which meant the production had the full run of the place.
3. Since it was not an actual functioning school, Imperial Entertainment paid for radio ads looking for extras to play students in the movie.
4. The producers originally wanted Bolo Yeung for the part of Lee and since Bolo did not speak English, they had the character of Kate (Linda Dona) to serve as Bolo’s mouthpiece. When the role of Lee eventually went to Patrick Kilpatrick, who could most definitely speak English, they reworked the script to keep the Kate character in.
5. Director Robert Radler said the most difficult scene to shoot was the party scene that appears at the beginning of the film. The scene was shot in an upscale neighborhood and the neighbors kept calling the cops to complain… things got even worse when the inebriated homeowner started legitimately hating on the movie’s antagonist played by Patrick Kilpatrick and the movie’s location manager being taken to jail after production continued after the cops asked them to shut down.
6. Kenn Scott looked at Showdown as his chance to become the next Jean-Claude Van Damme and was very serious about his training regimen going into the movie (He was at 5.2% body fat). The catering company hooked Kenn up with the protein bars he asked for and plenty of fish so he could properly maintain his physique.
7. John Asher shared a story about hanging out with Kenn Scott one evening during the shoot and Kenn showing up at his door with a big bag of weed.
8. The bit with the kids leaving potatoes for their teacher every day was actually inspired by Robert Radler’s real life and a teacher he had in high school named Mr. Zato… who the kids nicknamed Zato the Potato.
9. All of the fight scenes in the movie were shot in a single day.
10. 50% of the crew were sick with either bronchitis or pneumonia after filming some of the training sequences in a cold, dank cellar. Robert Radler was so sick he actually had to miss a day of shooting (the first and only time that happened during his directorial career).
