Review

Review of Master Wong’s DVD on the 116 Movements.

I bought the 1^st edition of this DVD in 2003 about April and didn’t have a DVD player to watch it until December of that year. Come to that I didn’t have a Wooden Dummy either ! (Actually I still don’t really as I have a plastic Immortal one – but that split’s hairs and we want to move away from all that. (Ok I have wooden arms specially made for it – happy)).

OK the 1^st edition is good. Very good. The use of the menus is very good as it supply’s aspects of the form into chunks. Applications too have a menu for themselves too. It’s the best menu system I have seen on any DVD of martial arts. It allows you to get to the part of the form you want.

To learn this form I utilised step motion and drew cartoons of stick men to learn the form. It took me about 5 months to learn the form properly. I would not move on until I knew the part off by heart and had some flow. The learning experience was really exhilarating.

I also cross referenced this form with a disk I got off ebay. This was the Pan Nam disk – which by coincidence was the same style of Wing Chun that Michael Wong’s form was (but he wont go into style issues on the DVD or his www-site for some reason). I then chose aspects I could understand and excluded minor parts I didn’t. For example in the final third there are some finger jabs I didn’t want to use / understand so I modified this.

2 years Later there is a second edition of Michael Wong’s disk and I bought that too. Glad I did as its even longer (3 hours) and more verbal explanation. He breaks down some of the moves and explain typical mistakes. There are some useful drills offered too – such as jut gerk type leg sweep. This is something I drill now.

Also you see some teaching going on in the extras menu in the author’s club with question and answer session. I wonder what it would be like to study there for a year.