Oom Yung Doe/Chung Moo Quan: A Martial Arts Cult

[Cleopatra7]

The other day I was on Youtube and got a recommendation for this investigative reporting series from 1989 on the martial arts cult Chung Moo Quan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwxuyHh-52A (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj7wdzClqZo (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgAahsPPfQY(Part 3)

Aspects of Chung Moo Quan sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized that I had seen some ads for the system when I was researching martial arts schools in Boston, only it has now changed its name to Oom Yung Doe, presumably because of all the bad press the old name/brand got in the 80s and 90s. There's a lot of woo and ridiculousness in martial arts in general, and I was suspicious of a school that claims to be able to make a person a master of eight martial arts, which simply isn't possible. Maybe this absurd claim is why the group was encouraging instructors to live together in quasi-monastic dorms, so they could train full time. Unsurprisingly, the founder of this system, John C. Kim was charged and convicted of tax fraud, but in the true American style, he's back out on the streets and back to hawking the promise of being a one-person army:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czo53PBtjEY

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=13572

[Howl]

Yup, rising from the ashes.