Surely Not Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting? — A Small Collection of Sceptical Disco Art
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| Vintage sepia illustration — one of three designs in the collection. |
Something has always bothered me about the opening claim of Carl Douglas's 1974 disco hit "Kung Fu Fighting." Not the song — the song is a joy — but the sweeping declaration at the start. Everybody was kung fu fighting. Everybody? Really? All of us? The dentists? The librarians? Somebody's grandmother? At the same time? That seems like a strong claim to make about a global population of roughly four billion people in 1974.
I decided to make some art gently disagreeing.
A Small Collection of Sceptical Disco Art
The joke is simple. A disco-era character, mid-move on a lit dance floor, with bold text asking the reasonable question — surely not everybody was kung-fu fighting? It's the kind of quiet, literal-minded rebuttal that pop songs frequently invite but rarely receive.
I ended up making the joke three different ways, in three different visual styles, because part of the fun was seeing how the same sceptical question could carry different atmospheres.
The Vintage Sepia Version
The first is a warm, cream-and-sepia vintage illustration — a mustachioed disco dancer clearly doing his own thing on the dance floor, participating in whatever wasn't kung-fu fighting. Drawn in the register of an old print, textured like something you'd find in a 1970s magazine ad. This is the driest version of the joke, and probably the one that reads best on a mantelpiece or in a home office.
Available on Redbubble as posters, art prints, stickers, greeting cards, and more.
The Retro Movie Poster Version
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| Retro movie poster style — bold, saturated, and unapologetically dramatic. |
The second version is a bold, saturated retro-poster illustration — a fierce woman in a red jumpsuit delivering a high kick beneath a disco ball, drawn in the visual language of 1970s pulp movie posters. The whole composition is treated with complete visual seriousness, which is what makes the joke land. If everybody really was kung-fu fighting, this is roughly what the poster would have looked like.
This one works particularly well as a large art print or poster — the composition wants room to breathe.
The Comic Book Version
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| Comic book panel style — strong outlines, flat colour, and a sunburst behind the kick. |
The third takes the same idea into the visual vocabulary of vintage comic book panels — strong black outlines, saturated flat colour, radial sunburst lines behind the figure. A fierce woman in a floral orange shirt and flared trousers, delivering a decisive high kick, drawn as if she were about to appear on the cover of a graphic novel about a disco martial artist. This is the most graphically bold of the three, and reads brilliantly at any size.
Who It's For
This collection is for a specific kind of person. Someone who likes the small pleasure of taking pop songs a little more literally than they were meant to be taken. Someone who owns at least one thing on their wall that requires the visitor to think about it for two seconds before laughing. Someone whose humour runs slightly dry, slightly generational, slightly affectionate toward the disco era rather than dismissive of it.
If that person is you — or if that person is someone you're shopping for — one of these three should do it. Each one is available as posters, art prints, stickers, greeting cards, notebooks, mugs, and other paper and hard-goods products across the Redbubble range.
You can find all my work at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art — or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).
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