Playing Ep 04

Summary:

This was one of the few 'major' series from the early 90s that I actually had not seen yet. I remember watching TVB's 24th Anniversary Gala (1991) and this series was featured in it (which makes sense, since it was that year's anniversary series) and at that time, I had made a note to myself to watch the series when I got the chance....that was almost 20 years ago and I just recently got around to watching it (I know, a bit late huh? Better late than never, I guess!). One of the main reasons why I wanted to watch this series was because at that time (back in the 80s / early 90s), Kathy Chow was one of my favorite actresses (she still is even now, though I haven't really kept up with her much since she switched her career to the Mainland) and I was interested in seeing her ‘fresh’ pairing with Eddie Kwan (another artist from back in the 80s whom I like). The setting of the series is the Tang Dynasty era -- however the storyline does not revolve around the Imperial palace or the emperor (or anything of that nature), which I'm happy with because I'm sort of tired of the whole Imperial palace theme thing myself. Rather, the story focuses on the experiences of the ethnic minority groups during that era and the 'oppression' that they suffered at the hands of the Han Chinese – this made the storyline quite interesting and fresh because it's definitely not often that you find this type of theme in a TVB series. The other 'unique' thing about this series is that majority of the scenes take place in the desert, which means that much of the filming was done on location in the real Tibetan outdoors rather than inside some fake studio set at TVB -- no wonder the background scenery was so gorgeous! TVB really took this production seriously because I had read that the cast and crew actually traveled to Tibet and other ethnic regions in China to do the filming back then (wow, it's hard to imagine that the notoriously cheap TVB actually took productions so seriously back then....all those ancient series that they film nowadays -- most of which take place inside a studio with fake sets -- definitely pale in comparisons!).