Long Dragon

Bruce Lee is getting a belated hero's welcome in China, with the country's state broadcaster set to air a 50 part prime-time series on the late kung fu star. What, is it his life in real time?

Lee became a chest-thumping source of nationalistic pride to Chinese around the world with his characters even though the influence wasn't felt immediately in China, which was then a closed communist country. Lee's films started surfacing in China on video in the 1980s — years after his death in 1973 from swelling of the brain.

China Central Television is producing the exhaustive $7.3 million biography, "The Legend of Bruce Lee" — the country's first movie or TV series on the actor. Shot in China, Hong Kong, Macau, the U.S., Italy and Thailand over nine months, the series, starts this weekend and will air daily on the CCTV's flagship channel, with two episodes airing consecutively every night in a two-hour slot.

Unlike past films about Lee, it is unusually detailed in tracing Lee's life, from his teenage years in Hong Kong to his move to the U.S., where he studied and taught martial arts, to his movie career and early death at 32. "We've only seen the glorious side of Bruce Lee — he comes out all guns blazing, his films are entertaining. But very few people know what injuries he suffered and what grievances he suffered." They note the series even reveals that Lee was afraid of cockroaches. Danny Chan, best known for his work in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, has an uncanny resemblance to Lee with his thick eyebrows and slender body and plays the dead icon.

In an apparent effort to boost racial pride, the series was originally scheduled to be aired before the Beijing Olympics in August, but was pushed back in keeping with the period of mourning for the deadly earthquake in China's central Sichuan province in May, which killed 70,000 people. Because kung-fu and natural disasters don't mix, buddy.