This week, I had the honor of speaking to Sahbunim Jamie Webster, who played himself (and the character of Great Wolf) in the mid 90s martial arts show, WMAC Masters.   Sahbunim (abbreviated here as SBN) is the Korean term for master instructor at a martial arts school, and the Webster Martial Arts academies have been serving the Northern Alabama region since 1973, when SBN Jamie's father, opened the first martial arts school in the area.  We had a great conversation about many topics - martial arts history, WMAC Masters, breaking, toy collecting and more, and it was long enough that for the sake of editing, I broke it into two episodes.   

I was in high school by the time WMAC Masters aired and had been doing martial arts for just a few years.  Though I was a little beyond watching cartoons on weekend mornings by then, I do remember getting up to try to watch episodes of WMAC Masters, since they were one of the few sources of martial arts I could find on network television (unless there was the Chuck Norris or Van Damme movie or the odd kung fu film playing on this random Spanish language channel that had them sometimes).  SBN Jamie was a Native American character on the show called Great Wolf, who, besides being a pretty swell martial artist and acrobat, was also a breakdancer.  He did windmills on the show a number of times. I talked about how seeing him on the show was one of the reasons I wanted to learn how to do the move on a previous episode, so when I stumbled across his school contact info, I had to reach out to thank him.  We get to talk all about mills and other acrobatics on this episode!

If you have not see WMAC Masters, you can find all the episodes uploaded to Youtube here.  They were never released on DVD, to my knowledge, so these are, I believe episodes that a kind soul likely taped off the TV and then digitized and eventually uploaded.

You can learn more about SBN Jamie and his schools here:

-The Webster Martial Arts Academy of Decatur

-The Webster Martial Arts Academy of Madison

-Instagram

-Tiktok

-Youtube

Stay tuned for part 2 next week!

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