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Muay Thai EN ไทย

artOng-Bak

องค์บาก · ong bak

2003. No wires, no doubles, and a title song about the mae mai.

Tony Jaa, Martial Arts demonstration @ The Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, Queens, NYC 8/20/061987porsche944 · CC BY 2.5

What it is

Prachya Pinkaew's film, starring Tony Jaa, which sold muay boran to an international audience that had never heard of it.

The long version

Its marketing was a negative claim — no wires, no computer graphics, no stunt double — and the claim was the product. What the audience was buying was the absence of the thing Hong Kong action had taught them to expect.

The closing song is called Mae Mai Muay Thai, sung by Add Carabao.

Inference — the film that taught the world the word taught it the wrong half. Ong-Bak is muay boran: flying elbows, knees off a man's shoulders, techniques that are not legal or not survivable in a ring. The sport in the stadium is five rounds of a man kicking another man in the arm, and the gap between those two products is most of what a first-time spectator has to get over.

Connected to

Named here by

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultcitedOng-Bak — Wikipedia (en)
text_thinferencewritten in Thai by this project, not machine-translated

Sources

cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there

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