MovieChat Forums > Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1993) Discussion > Location of the temple?

Location of the temple?

posted 15 years ago by palisade-1
5 replies | jump to latest

In the episode Temple (and others besides) there is a panoramic view of the ruins of the temple atop what look like limestone cliffs by a lake. According to the story, this temple was located in Northern California, but most of the series was filmed in the Toronto area.

Anyone know what location was used for that temple site? Southern Ontario is generally flat and low-lying. I wondered if there is some place like that along the Scarborough Bluffs (east Toronto) or along the Niagara escarpment, possibly up along Georgian Bay or even Lake Superior -- but the cliffs there are more granite; pink and gray and not so white.

A beautiful scene wherever it is, but I thought someone here might know.

[–] 15 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Talamasca2 15 years ago

The temple was only a paining anyway!

You know we have a saying around here?... The grass is greener on every side!
Yeah! ... That's how *I* feel about it!
Steven Freeling, Poltergiest

[–] 15 years ago

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[–] Talamasca2 15 years ago

I think the cliff was real, and there was a painting overlay that put the temple at the top of the cliff. At least that is the way it looked to me!

remember that ep where caine had that premonition about his painter ex girlfriend and then he just had to go and track her down? that one was pretty good

Yeah... she was the one who had the doctor husband? I loved the father son moment when those two were standing outside the office fire. While I was watching that scene for the first time, I couldn't help but wonder why they were joshing around with each other when Caine should have putting out the fire with his Shaolin talents... but later in the episode they were glad the files were lost... so maybe Caine just sensed this, and had to fill screen time with something else, hehe.

"Clever, that. I had thought the sky was ... real." The Vampire Lestat

[–] palisade-1 15 years ago

I think you are confusing the temple with Shambala. When KCC et al go to Shambala, they have to go via a watercolor painting ( a painting of a temple, in fact) in the Book of Shambala.

But the site of the KCC's temple appears to be two different *real* scenes.

The photos of the burnt-out temple (visible in the episode "Temple" and in several others) look like there is a burnt structure at the top of the cliff, and several episodes show scenes filmed with the burned rubble as part of the background.

The cliff on which the ruins appear is strikingly like the cliffs of the Scarborough Bluffs, which you can see examples of here:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/07/morning-at-scarborough-bluffs.h tml

The bluffs go on for miles along the Lake Ontario shoreline -- it is possible there is somewhere along there that has a burnt building at the top, or did in the 90's when they were filming this. We see Caine and Peter in the same shot as the ruined temple in the background.

However -- when we see shots of the temple pre-destruction (as we do in the episode Dragonwing II and many others), we see a different cliff -- it looks like a granite cliff, not limestone like the bluffs (mottled gray in color), with a distinctly Chinese-type building on top. We always see this same shot of the "temple," and we never see it with any actors in the picture. It could be this is a stock photo they obtained from some other source, not a local scene; it could even *be* a real location in Indonesia, or Thailand, or somewhere else in Asia where Buddhist temples are commonplace. Sometimes the photo is blurred in focus, to give the impression of distance in time, but it does not look (to me anyway) like a painting.

There are at least a half-dozen short scenes in various episodes, over the 4 seasons, that show the "Scarborough Bluffs" lookalike cliff with various characters in the picture. That makes me suspect that it is a real locale in the Toronto area, although they could possibly have doctored up the image to show a burnt building on top. However there might have actually been such a site at the time.