1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

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zedz
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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#126 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:22 pm

I finally made my way through this set and, film for film and extra for extra, this could be the worst box set Criterion has released.

Apart from some well-choreographed fights, the movies range from mediocre to execrable. The best of the bunch is Enter the Dragon, which is a very perfunctory rip-off of a very perfunctory James Bond film. Lee turns out to be a great fighter, a mediocre actor, and, on the evidence of Way of the Dragon, a bad director and worse writer. That film has a plot that would look unsophisticated in a Scooby Doo episode (oh no! the baddies are pressuring uncle to sell his restaurant!), plus various lame gags and a side-order of homophobia. Fist of Fury is okay, and better shot than most of the other films, but its incessant racism is wearing.

The films are of interest mostly as documentation of a period fad and an iconic star, but the package really collapses when you get to the extras, which are almost uniformly terrible: wall-to-wall fanboys with plenty of inside-baseball trivia but no real insight, whose attitude seems to be "Bruce Lee was awesome, therefore everything he did was also awesome." It's most perplexing in one of the commentaries on The Big Boss, wherein the commentator enumerates at considerable length the many reasons why the film sucks, while also reassuring us that it's not only a masterpiece, but his favourite film of all time. Most of the commentators and docs simply regurgitate whatever promotional shit was spewed out at the time. Hilariously, there's talk of a world-wide search to find a screenwriter gifted enough to pen the posthumous hack job Game of Death, and there are so many references to that film being the expression of Bruce Lee's profound philosophical insight (which, as far as I can tell, can be summarized as "do whatever you have to do to win a fight") that I started to think it was a conceptual gag.

On one of the extras disc there's a surreally abysmal "documentary" that parrots the official hagiography in such a transparently dishonest fashion that actual interview footage is overdubbed by the narrator explaining what the people really meant to say. (In most cases, this is English over English, but in a couple of instances where he's mansplaining a Chinese interviewee, the subtitles show what the poor guy was really saying).

I will save a small, withered bouquet for the handful of extras Criterion produced themselves. There's a brief contextual piece for each film that tells you all you really need to know about them, without the puffery, and there are a couple more new pieces on the final disc that were entertaining and informative.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#127 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:31 pm

zedz wrote:(which, as far as I can tell, can be summarized as "do whatever you have to do to win a fight")
Hah! Ok, I laughed. But Lee's philosophy towards martial arts is solid wisdom not just for fighting, but for thinking, too: don't be rigid; be flexible. Don't just follow the tenets or dogmas of one school or style. Learn as much as you can and use things because they work rather than because they're tradition. There's a lot to admire in that philosophy, I think, whether you're into fighting or not.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#128 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:59 pm

I don't like Bruce Lee's movies either, but Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is a fun biopic, two words that don't often go together in my experience

Orlac
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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#129 Post by Orlac » Fri Jun 25, 2021 11:35 am

I love Bruce Lee's films but his films definetly do not represent the peak of what HK cinema was offering at the time in terms of overall quality - certainly Shaw Brothers films were considerably classier with better structured films, especially the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh.

Lo Wei was definetly on a downward trajectory when he directed Lee - very crude, Ed-Woodish strokes - but his previous Shaw work was consistently good. But Lee's director for Way is similary crude - if you came in late, you'd assume Lo Wei was still directing!

But when you consider Shaw's leading man at the time was David Chiang, a skinny kid with fighting skills reliant on the editor, you can see why Lee took HK by storm. Just compare Chiang in Duel of Fists to Lee in The Big Boss - both October 1971 films featuring Chinese heroes in Thailand, but Lee leaves Chiang far behind.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#130 Post by cdnchris » Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:07 pm

zedz wrote:
Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:22 pm
The best of the bunch is Enter the Dragon, which is a very perfunctory rip-off of a very perfunctory James Bond film.
I've owned the film on the previous editions and hadn't really delved into the features before (that I remember), but I think what killed me most when going through them on this set was how proud the writer was around the fact the film was a James Bond rip-off.
It's most perplexing in one of the commentaries on The Big Boss, wherein the commentator enumerates at considerable length the many reasons why the film sucks, while also reassuring us that it's not only a masterpiece, but his favourite film of all time.
I didn't mind the Leeder ones, even if it was clear he was running out of material as we went through the films, but that Bentley one on The Big Boss was an annoying fanboy one.
On one of the extras disc there's a surreally abysmal "documentary" that parrots the official hagiography in such a transparently dishonest fashion that actual interview footage
If I recall, that's the lengthier one on one of the supplements disc. There was a far better one on the old Warner Enter the Dragon discs called A Warrior’s Journey, that didn't get carried over to this set or the newer Warner Blu-ray of Dragon; rights issues I assume. I haven't watched it in a while, but I remember it coming off more honest in its representation of Lee, though not without its own myth-building.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#131 Post by Orlac » Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:43 pm

Call me a fanboy, but I love Brandon's commentaries - Big Boss, Shaolin Wooden Men etc.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#132 Post by Orlac » Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:47 pm

zedz wrote:
Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:22 pm

On one of the extras disc there's a surreally abysmal "documentary" that parrots the official hagiography in such a transparently dishonest fashion that actual interview footage is overdubbed by the narrator explaining what the people really meant to say. (In most cases, this is English over English, but in a couple of instances where he's mansplaining a Chinese interviewee, the subtitles show what the poor guy was really saying).

Ah yes, Golden Harvest's Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend. Very much a rush-job to milk Lee, get some Monodish footage of his funeral and empty house, and also cover up the sleazy shennigans behind his death.

The following year, the Bruce Lee biopic Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story was released, and despite its awful fights, it is very on the nose when it comes to depicting the behind-the-scenes shennigans. So much so it got a lawsuit representing Linda Lee, Raymond Chow, Betty Ting Pei and Mr and Mrs Lo Wei!

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#133 Post by Orlac » Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:59 pm

cdnchris wrote:
Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:07 pm

If I recall, that's the lengthier one on one of the supplements disc. There was a far better one on the old Warner Enter the Dragon discs called A Warrior’s Journey, that didn't get carried over to this set or the newer Warner Blu-ray of Dragon; rights issues I assume. I haven't watched it in a while, but I remember it coming off more honest in its representation of Lee, though not without its own myth-building.
I think you make be thinking of Curse of the Dragon, which is probably the most frank of the various Lee documentaries.

Warrior's Journey is much tamer, but its major selling point was the then-unseen Game of Death footage.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#134 Post by cdnchris » Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:00 pm

Ah, I think you're right. There's so many I'm more than likely confusing them.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#135 Post by Orlac » Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:09 pm

What is very evident from several Bruce Lee documentaries, and indeed the estate sanctioned Dragon The Bruce Lee Story, that they really don't like talking about Betty Ting Pei!

The first Lee documentary I saw was a trashy public televison style thing called The Unbeatable Bruce Lee (2000) and that had Lee die at Raymond Chow's house, not Betty's apartment!

Betty of course told her side of the story in the Shaw Brothers' hilariously trashy Bruce Lee And I, starring Danny Lee as Bruce!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K06ZX5FwyA

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#136 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 25, 2021 4:17 pm

I cannot imagine why the estate would not really want exploitative speculation into the circumstances of Bruce Lee's death to occur! Those couple of quickly produced films surrounding Lee's untimely death (as distinct from the more general films passing off other martial artists pretending to be the actor under punning pseudonyms, or wacked out things like The Clones of Bruce Lee) are probably the most bad taste and strangest of all the Bruce-sploitation films, to such an extent that the structure of the Robert Clouse version of Game of Death from 1978 is probably as much a response to the way that the last few years of wanton speculation entries mixed up fact and fiction with abandon, just with a tiny bit more of an 'official' status to it. To back up Orlac's comments here is an excerpt from the chapter in Pete Tombs' Mondo Macabro book about this aspect.
While Lee's death was a tragedy for martial arts fans, it was a godsend for exploitation movie-makers. They had already been profiting from post-King Boxer interest in kung fu movies. Small independent companies had descended on the colony, buying up any film featuring fighting and releasing it to the world with a suitably aggressive title. Now they jumped in to fill the Bruce Lee gap. Strange hybrids began to appear. Real-life events became mixed up with events from Lee's films. The truth became inseparable from the fiction - understandable when nobody really knew the truth in the first place....

...A popular ploy was to use these imitation Lees in heavily fictionalised biopics. Dragon Story (1977) is a fairly typical example, starring one of the better Lee-a-likes, Ho Chung Tao, known as Bruce Li. The film begins with Lee working as a newspaper boy in the States. He looks about 27 years old. His supposed martial arts skills are demonstrated by his ability to hit a fat girl's butt with a rolled up newspaper as he cycles past at speed. He comes up against a rival gang of black newspaper boys. This bunch look well into their thirties. "Hey man, we run this place!" they sneer. "Who are you?!" Bruce shows them who he is with a few well placed high kicks.

In Hong Kong, Bruce gets a quick lesson in the economics of the local film business. Demanding US$10,000 per picture he's told that even big stars only get HK$1,000 per month. The balance has to be made up from backhanders and sponsorship deals. The film contains lots of parodies of real people. Mr Lo (The Big Boss director Lo Wei) is characterised as a fat, talentless rip-off merchant. "Where shall we set the angle?" asks his assistant director on set. "Ask the cameraman," growls Lo. "What shall we do now?" Lo takes his big cigar out of his mouth just long enough to shout: "Fight! Fight! Fight! Just fight!" At the film's launch party Lo is beseiged by starlets wanting a role in his next flick. "Don't worry," he assures them. "The next picture is about prostitutes. I'll need all of you!"

Soon Bruce is wooing Betty. Hilariously, at this point the schmaltzy soundtrack suddenly becomes a booting sax-led jig, introducing an unmistakable air of Benny Hill to to the soft focus love scenes that follow.

The strangest mixture of real-life and fiction came in the 1975 Shaw Brothers release Bruce Lee and I. The film starred Betty Ting Pei, the woman in whose flat Lee had breathed his last. Renamed The Sex Life of Bruce Lee in some territories, it purported to tell the truth about their relationship. The story is framed by an encounter with a sympathetic bartender to whom Betty relates the sad saga. The film builds slowly to the awaited climax. Betty sprays perfume on her giant round bed and strips off while Bruce (as played by Li Hsiu Hsein), popping pills and smoking endless joints, gives her a final workover. If this outrageous blend of fact and fiction was perplexing for the audience, it must have been even stranger for Miss Ting Pei.
And it appears that the third of the Bruce Lee 'biographical' films that Orlac mentioned is currently up on YouTube: 1976's Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth, which also features Betty Ting Pei in what appear to be much more buttoned up and brisk bookending bedroom scenes compared to those described in Bruce Lee And I!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

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zedz
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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#137 Post by zedz » Fri Jun 25, 2021 4:35 pm

cdnchris wrote:
Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:07 pm
I didn't mind the Leeder ones, even if it was clear he was running out of material as we went through the films, but that Bentley one on The Big Boss was an annoying fanboy one.
Leeder's commentary on Game of Death might be the best one, because it's the only time he seems to feel free to concede that the film is less than a masterpiece, and it's such a bad, bizarre film that there's a lot of stuff to talk about in terms of its production.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#138 Post by Orlac » Sat Jun 26, 2021 3:22 am

Bey Logan's commentaries for the Bruce Lee films on the old HKL DVDs are very good. On Way of the Dragon, he shares it with actor Jon Benn (though if memory serves me right, they don't discuss Clones of Bruce Lee)

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#139 Post by Orlac » Sat Jun 26, 2021 3:27 am

colinr0380 wrote:
Fri Jun 25, 2021 4:17 pm
I cannot imagine why the estate would not really want exploitative speculation into the circumstances of Bruce Lee's death to occur! Those couple of quickly produced films surrounding Lee's untimely death (as distinct from the more general films passing off other martial artists pretending to be the actor under punning pseudonyms, or wacked out things like The Clones of Bruce Lee) are probably the most bad taste and strangest of all the Bruce-sploitation films, to such an extent that the structure of the Robert Clouse version of Game of Death from 1978 is probably as much a response to the way that the last few years of wanton speculation entries mixed up fact and fiction with abandon, just with a tiny bit more of an 'official' status to it. To back up Orlac's comments here is an except from the chapter in Pete Tombs' Mondo Macabro book about this aspect.
While Lee's death was a tragedy for martial arts fans, it was a godsend for exploitation movie-makers. They had already been profiting from post-King Boxer interest in kung fu movies. Small independent companies had descended on the colony, buying up any film featuring fighting and releasing it to the world with a suitably aggressive title. Now they jumped in to fill the Bruce Lee gap. Strange hybrids began to appear. Real-life events became mixed up with events from Lee's films. The truth became inseparable from the fiction - understandable when nobody really knew the truth in the first place....

...A popular ploy was to use these imitation Lees in heavily fictionalised biopics. Dragon Story (1977) is a fairly typical example, starring one of the better Lee-a-likes, Ho Chung Tao, known as Bruce Li. The film begins with Lee working as a newspaper boy in the States. He looks about 27 years old. His supposed martial arts skills are demonstrated by his ability to hit a fat girl's butt with a rolled up newspaper as he cycles past at speed. He comes up against a rival gang of black newspaper boys. This bunch look well into their thirties. "Hey man, we run this place!" they sneer. "Who are you?!" Bruce shows them who he is with a few well placed high kicks.

In Hong Kong, Bruce gets a quick lesson in the economics of the local film business. Demanding US$10,000 per picture he's told that even big stars only get HK$1,000 per month. The balance has to be made up from backhanders and sponsorship deals. The film contains lots of parodies of real people. Mr Lo (The Big Boss director Lo Wei) is characterised as a fat, talentless rip-off merchant. "Where shall we set the angle?" asks his assistant director on set. "Ask the cameraman," growls Lo. "What shall we do now?" Lo takes his big cigar out of his mouth just long enough to shout: "Fight! Fight! Fight! Just fight!" At the film's launch party Lo is beseiged by starlets wanting a role in his next flick. "Don't worry," he assures them. "The next picture is about prostitutes. I'll need all of you!"

Soon Bruce is wooing Betty. Hilariously, at this point the schmaltzy soundtrack suddenly becomes a booting sax-led jig, introducing an unmistakable air of Benny Hill to to the soft focus love scenes that follow.

The strangest mixture of real-life and fiction came in the 1975 Shaw Brothers release Bruce Lee and I. The film starred Betty Ting Pei, the woman in whose flat Lee had breathed his last. Renamed The Sex Life of Bruce Lee in some territories, it purported to tell the truth about their relationship. The story is framed by an encounter with a sympathetic bartender to whom Betty relates the sad saga. The film builds slowly to the awaited climax. Betty sprays perfume on her giant round bed and strips off while Bruce (as played by Li Hsiu Hsein), popping pills and smoking endless joints, gives her a final workover. If this outrageous blend of fact and fiction was perplexing for the audience, it must have been even stranger for Miss Ting Pei.
And it appears that the third of the Bruce Lee 'biographical' films that Orlac mentioned is currently up on YouTube: 1976's Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth, which also features Betty Ting Pei in what appear to be much more buttoned up and brisk bookending bedroom scenes compared to those described in Bruce Lee And I!
Dragon Story is indeed the 1974 Bruce Lee A Dragon Story. It was released in the States as Dragons Die Hard, with a trailer misleadingly featuring clips of better fights from an unreleated Bruce Liang film! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_1ZOzLGAM.

The original Chinese version of Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (and some of the non English versions) have a Bruce and Betty love scene present, as one of the several "alternate endings" the film has at its conclusion - the ones still in the English version are Bruce getting stabbed by Triads and Bruce going into a 10-year seclusion.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#140 Post by Orlac » Sat Jun 26, 2021 3:47 am

The weird thing about Game of Death is that we now know Lee had shot three battles, featuring him and 2 colleagues fighting three opponents, one on each floor. The total of useable footage is 40min. Surely the easiest thing for Clouse and Chow to have done is what was eventually done in 2000 - put a documentary at the beginning, use a double to begin the story, then show 40min of unseen Lee footage. There were plans for an official Clouse directed, Barbara Streisand produced Bruce bio with Alex Kwon discussed around this time.

Of course, that wouldn't have been as sleazy or fun...

But it was probably too late, as a fake version, The New Game of Death (AKA Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death) had been released worldwide in 1975.

HK trailer (with music by Barry White, George Martin and Pink Floyd!) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWr3zPJ_UGM

International trailer (with a very funky song!) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaTiukN ... ietrailers

And now its oddly part of Celestial's Shaw Brothers holdings! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cxRfAt5-OU

Later the same year as Clouse's version, there was Bruce Le's Enter The Game of Death, which interestingly has script elements present in Bruce Lee's original footage that Close didn't use, such as the red light warning of death.

International trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYC8ELv ... nel=NasosP.

US trailer (clearly under legal advice not to mention the 'B' word) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twpJPJcQs5s

And then there was True Game of Death, a poor Xerox of Clouse's film, with future Shaw Brothers star Lung Tien Hsieng - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2ig6ZpKRrE

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#141 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 26, 2021 5:34 am

According to the Bey Logan commentary on the old Hong Kong Legends DVD of Game of Death apparently the film had been pre-sold to Japan on name and star-value alone, so maybe just a documentary would not have cut it contractually? Even if it would have been far more respectful!

By the way, someone has put up the Bey Logan commentary tracks he did for the releases of the Bruce Lee films by Hong Kong Legends UK DVDs in the early 2000s (the first time the BBFC passed the nunchaku footage in these films) on YouTube for the moment: here's The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, a second commentary for a second edition of Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, Game of Death and even the one for Game of Death 2! I know he is a controversial figure now for other reasons, but he always did some of the best commentary tracks, especially when he was solo commentating.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#142 Post by Orlac » Sat Jun 26, 2021 9:33 am

I recently bought one of his e-books, and it was bloody fantastic.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#143 Post by CriterionPhreak » Wed Dec 15, 2021 1:39 pm

It used to be far-fetched to think that Criterion would embrace the kungfu genre, just like it used to be far-fetched to think that Jackie Chan would one day win an Oscar, since the Academy had rarely honored martial art films. But I guess as time goes, thinking changes, people change, committees change, etc. When Jackie Chan won that Oscar, Criterion probably thought, we'd better put some of that stuff in our collection. And the floodgate opened with Police Story, Once Upon a Time in China, Bruce Lee, etc. titles that not loo long ago would never be associated with Criterion.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#144 Post by Rupert Pupkin » Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:34 pm

I would like to buy the Criterion box set. I watched recently "The Big Boss" and wonder since Criterion has several audio/dubs tracks for each movie, if the Pink Floyd snippets (Time, Obscured By Clouds...) are included in the soundtrack or if for (c) reasons Criterion did not include this soundtrack.
This is during the whole movie, not only a specific trailer.
check here for all details : http://atagong.com/iggy/archives/2017/0 ... d.html#bos

I ask this because I'm a fan of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and it's sooo cool to have such soundtrack when even "La Vallée" which is the official soundtrack for Obscured By Clouds was released the same year than "The Big Boss".

Orlac
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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#145 Post by Orlac » Sun Apr 02, 2023 10:11 am

Rupert Pupkin wrote:
Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:34 pm
I would like to buy the Criterion box set. I watched recently "The Big Boss" and wonder since Criterion has several audio/dubs tracks for each movie, if the Pink Floyd snippets (Time, Obscured By Clouds...) are included in the soundtrack or if for (c) reasons Criterion did not include this soundtrack.
This is during the whole movie, not only a specific trailer.
check here for all details : http://atagong.com/iggy/archives/2017/0 ... d.html#bos

I ask this because I'm a fan of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and it's sooo cool to have such soundtrack when even "La Vallée" which is the official soundtrack for Obscured By Clouds was released the same year than "The Big Boss".
The Pink Floyd bits were only in the 80s Cantonese reissue - the soundtrack for the original Mandarin version is completely different. Both Shout! and Criterion removed the Pink Floyd music from their releases of the film.

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Re: 1036 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

#146 Post by ComradeMisato » Sun Apr 02, 2023 5:40 pm

IIRC a later Cantonese home video dub is swapped in to replace the stretches with Pink Floyd/King Crimson music.

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