CLAIM
A video which shows two players engaged in an intense game of table tennis is being shared online with a claim that one of the two players is famous martial arts artist Bruce Lee.
Lee, according to the viral message, is using nunchaku to play ping pong with his opponent.
The claim with the video reads, “A priceless clip of 1970 of Bruce Lee playing Table Tennis with his Nan-chak !! His focus on speed, reflexes and accuracy was absolutely incredible (sic).”
The video is being massively shared on Twitter and Facebook.
The Quint too received a message about the same video on its WhatsApp helpline number.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The video, in reality, is an advertisement which employed Lee’s lookalike for a limited edition Nokia N96 cell phone commercial. It was produced in the year 2008 (almost three decades after his death) by JWT Beijing.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
First, we broke down the video into several keyframes using Invid Google Chrome extension and then conducted a reverse image search using Yandex search engine on one of the frames to ascertain the reality.
We came across a link on a website called ‘AdAge’ which had the same video that which mentioned that it was actually a commercial shot in 2008 and cellular company Nokia.
Taking a cue from here and using ‘Nokia Bruce Lee ad’ as the keywords, we came across an article on AdWeek titled ‘5 Brilliantly Faked Viral Ads That People Still Keep Thinking Are Real’ which added that the brand had used the Kung-fu master’s lookalike for the commercial.
In an interview with Agency.Asia, Polly Chu, Chief Creative Officer of JWT Beijing said that the idea was to make it look like never-seen-before footage of Lee and the director put in a lot of effort to study the martial arts artist and find the right talent.
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