This was one of the first ones that Chris and I tried to reverse engineer, and we tinkered with it until we felt we understood the flow of it. I’m pleased to see the introduction of head movement – I feel it is underutilized in many karate and kempo styles. We’ll do a deep dive on that later, but it’s a welcome detail.
The combination is fairly one sided, but I encountered that in some other older techniques from other arts. The flow is interesting, and it has a classic ‘Villari-esque’ finish.
We’re really connecting the dots on the 80-90 page. This one posed some trouble for us as the description used the term ‘floating knee’ and ‘reverse back crane’s wing’, which didn’t show up anywhere else. We used context clues to reverse engineer the technique, but if you have this one firsthand, we’d be happy to see a video of your version.
This was interesting – the archive received two versions of this that were nearly identical except for the assertiveness. One went forward with a closed fist iron fortress, while the other drew back to a cat with an open hand version. I do have to admit that this one was filmed at the end of a long session, and the editing is rougher than usual as I had to trim out a bit of silliness. In fact, it was a second take, as I spent the first one referring to it by the wrong number.
