We were more than interested to see the headline “Warriors’ success makes strong case for arts investment” as the lead subject in the Letters To The Editor section of today’s SCMP.
For a nanu second, we thought this might have had to do with the win of Romantic Warrior in Tokyo on Sunday. But no, it was about the success of the excellent neo noir martial arts film “Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In”, something that augurs well to Hong Kong creating and producing more productions than don’t fall into the “art house” genre and are lost to a mainstream audience and moving into more different creative avenues.
Hong Kong’s creative community deserves this opportunity.
On the subject of creativity, when Hong Kong had an international award winning advertising industry, someone in an ad agency would have found a way to marry the success of this film and, believe it or not, with the champion Hong Kong equine athlete Romantic Warrior- and not going anywhere close to gambling or needing permission from anyone.
It would have all been achieved through creative writing.
Sadly, left field thinking like this has almost been reined in whereas despite all the different platforms out there to showcase creativity, something is missing a beat in Hong Kong these days and it’s back to bland advertising that says nothing other than the obvious.
There’s a wonderful human interest story behind the success of Romantic Warrior that transcends horse racing- a real story and not bibs and bobs hidden in the racing pages that lead nowhere.
There’s the story of trainer Danny Shum when he was the assistant trainer to the legendary and always interesting and somewhat controversial Ivan Allan and their win in Tokyo in 2000 with Fairy King Prawn ridden by Robbie Fradd.
Like “Twilight Of The Warriors” that reminds some and introduces new audiences to the story of Kowloon’s Walled City, the backstory of the win of Romantic Warrior is beyond reporting on what happened in Tokyo in 2024.
It’s an extremely interesting story about everything and everyone surrounding Romantic Warrior and Fairy King Prawn and much more than has been written.
In the win of Romantic Warrior is also the backstory of owner Peter Lau and his role as co-founder of Hong Kong’s Japan Home Centre.
There’s much more to all this, but for the time being, let’s just politely say that an opportunity to show Made In Hong Kong creativity in marketing and advertising has been lost because some continue to work with blinkers on and have no idea how to look beyond Captain Obvious.
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