Monday, August 31, 2009

'“ninja” was an unknown term.'

Maybe to you, Mr. Edwards. But James Bond had teamed-up with ninjas back in '67.

5 comments:

  1. CrusssDaddy10:09 PM

    Roald Dahl wrote a James Bond Film? Wow.

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  2. This is like the guy I gamed with back in the day who claimed D&D invented the term "Long Sword"...

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  3. Anonymous12:53 PM

    I was thinking about this one too. It's true that ninja were found in film and literature before this. But I also remember a particular moment in my little fraction of California youth culture in the late seventies when suddenly everyone wanted to be a ninja - in real life and in D&D games - and they hadn't before. I was never sure what caused this.

    Calithena

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  4. In Australia the TV series 'The Samurai' popularised ninjas even earlier.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samurai_%28TV_show%29

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  5. I'm pretty sure I first heard of ninjas in The Great Escape: A Source Book of Delights and Pleasures for the Mind and Body (1974). It had a one-page article detailing varieties of martial arts. Later they showed up on my TV in Shogun (1980), but I don't recall if the word "ninja" was used.

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