Daily Dialogue — June 18, 2015

OOGWAY: I see you have found the sacred peach tree of heavenly wisdom.
PO: Oh, is that what this is? I’m so sorry, I thought it was just a regular peach tree.
OOGWAY: I understand. You eat when you are upset.
PO: Upset? I’m not upset. Why…why…why would you say I’m upset?
OOGWAY: So why are you upset?
PO: I probably sucked more today than anyone in the history of kung fu. In the history of China. In the history of sucking.
OOGWAY: Probably.
PO: And the Five! Man, you should have seen ’em. They totally hate me.
OOGWAY: Totally.
PO: How’s Shifu ever going to turn me into the Dragon Warrior? I mean, I’m not like the Five. I’ve got no claws, no wings, no venom. Even Mantis has those…thingies. Maybe I should just quit and go back to making noodles.
OOGWAY: Quit…don’t quit. Noodles…don’t noodles. You are too concerned with what was, and what will be. There’s a saying: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called ‘the present’.”

— Kung Fu Panda (2008), screenplay by Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger, story by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Wisdom. Today’s suggestion by Will King.

Trivia: One character that needed revisions was Tai Lung, who continually seemed too sympathetic as the villain of the story. As a result, the producers included the sequence that illustrates the story Tigress told about Tai Lung’s betrayal of his father’s principles and his rampage after being refused the Dragon Scroll to make him sufficiently despicable to the audience. By contrast, Po was refined by Jack Black and the writers from an unpleasant obsessed fan who unsettled his heroes to an affable martial arts lore devotee painfully self-aware of his inadequacies.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “The elderly wise man is a trope so timeworn you’d think any writer would stay far away, but in this scene it’s handled adroitly. Without spending much time lost on philosophy, they play it straight for the purpose it serves: to rescue Po’s flagging self-confidence and set him back on the road toward his storyline destiny. It also speaks aloud Po’s “tic”–his nervous habit of eating to relieve stress. This foreshadows the weakness that Shifu will later turn to an advantage when he realizes how he must train Po to prepare him to face Tai Lung.”