American insurers consider the world's most joyful action hero effectively uninsurable, because a lead actor who dangles from helicopters and slides down glass skyscrapers without a harness breaks every risk model on a movie set. This episode traces how Jackie Chan, born Chan Kong-sang in 1954 to political refugees in British Hong Kong, was left at age seven in a brutal Peking opera school under a ten-year contract and turned that regimen into a new language of physical storytelling.

The discussion follows his early stunt work taking hits from Bruce Lee, the failed attempt by director Lo Wei to rebrand him as the next Lee, and the 1978 breakthrough with Yuen Woo-ping on Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, where he consciously inverted the invincible-hero template. It examines his wide-angle, long-take approach to action, the cha ...