Season 9, Ep. 10: Finishing the Game

It's our final episode of our 9th season of Saturday School, which covers "Stars of Asian American Cinema." Before YouTube, if you wanted to see an abundance of stories with Asian Americans as stars, you'd have to go to an Asian American film festival. And there, we had our own stars who would walk down our own red carpets and get standing ovations at our own screenings (regardless of whether Hollywood took notice). For the last 9 episodes, we've been paying tribute to some of the regulars of that scene -- and if we missed anyone, chances are they are in our season-concluding film, 2007's "Finishing the Game," directed by Justin Lin.

To guide us through this 1970s-set mockumentary which follows a casting call for a new stand-in for Bruce Lee, we have a special guest! We welcome Phil Yu, our fellow Potluck Podcast Collective member who hosts They Call Us Bruce, All The Asians on Star Trek and the official "Squid Game" podcast. You might also know him as the blogger behind Angry Asian Man and the co-author of "Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now." But guess what, he was also an extra in "Finishing the Game" who shows up for 1 second just before the credits.

"Finishing the Game," at its heart, is about all the pre-2010s anxiety about what we would need in order to have an Asian American leading man in Hollywood. Not a loveable sweetheart (like Sung Kang's character in the film), a serious actor (like Dustin Nguyen's character), reliable B-Lister (like Roger Fan's character) or Asian star visiting from a foreign country (like Leonardo Nam's character), but a bankable Asian American Hollywood star who could greenlight a film and get the screaming fans to show up. At the time, it was almost unimaginable. But now, we can see why it was so important that we continued -- and continue -- to imagine.