This past two weeks, I have 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. You can find part one here.
A lot of today's episode is about collecting. WMAC Masters, similar to a lot of other children's programs of the era, was created with the idea of selling toys. The company producing the show, Saban, had the toys made through its manufacturing partner, Bandai, and while you can still find the figures around today, since the show only went 2 seasons (26 episodes), there were probably more figures that would have been made had the show been around longer. I never had any as a kid, since I was a teenager when the show aired and didn't really play with action figures by that time, but I did pick up a Great Wolf figure on ebay for this interview.
Jamie also sent me a number of pictures from his own extensive collections, which he describes in the episode.
Jamie has an extensive collection of WMAC Masters memorabilia as well, and it just feels right that a star of the show would have one of the largest, if not the largest collections of show stuff ever. If you visit the links below, you can see him talking about his costume (which he still has) and more.
A few related books:
If you are interested in the show, to my knowledge there was never a "making of" book created when it came out, but author Kristopher Landis wrote an extensive behind the scenes book called Quest for the Dragon Star you can find here. Highly recommended! SBN Jamie has quotes featured in a number of the segments.
I recently also wrote a segment for a book being published by whistlekick's books division. I wrote about watching WMAC Masters as a teenager, seeing SBN Jamie doing windmills, and how that spurred me on a years long quest to be able to do the same. The show was such an inspiring thing to have as a kid since it was positive and full or actual martial artists I read about in magazine who were more or less playing themselves and saying and doing
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