9 thoughts on “Steve McGarrett Chatting up the Ladies”

  1. one of the “holy trinity” of Steves, from the Tao of Steve

    if you watch old episodes of Hawaii 5-0, you might notice as I did, that Jack Lord runs like a girl…

  6. “Kam Fong”¦as Chin Ho. Why did they even bother with a stage name?”

    Actually, the character’s name was “Chin Ho Kelly”, suggesting that he was Hawaiian of mixed ancestry common to many modern Hawaiians.

    Yeah, there was somewhat of a race barrier on the program, where actors with “Anglo” names played the Anglo characters, those with more native names the native characters. Chin Ho and Kono got to do all of the serious “detective leg work” whereas Steve and Danno got to “make the bust” and get the glory.

    It would be something like a meeting in the 5-0 squadroom where McGarrett would inform, “The terrorists are using fuel-fertilizer mix for their plot. Chin, Kono, check out every ag coop on the north side of the Island to find out who has made suspicious purchases of Diesel oil and fertilizer.” “OK, boss! We’re right on it.” (cue music and vehicular interlude).

    Yeah, Chin Ho was certainly the hardest working detective in all of show business in terms of the many leads he checked out and the sheer number of field interviews he did.

  8. The credits say Zulu as Kono, but the character’s name was Kono Kalakaua, according to Wikipedia. And the credits refer to Danny, but no last name. So McGarrett’s crew just get first names, and Chin Ho must count as a first name. Kam Fong and Chin Ho, to a Chinese person, probably sound very distinctly different, but to Anglos they just sound like two pairs of random one syllable Chinese sounds. We only get to see the girl at :29 who turns to face the camera for a fraction of a second, but every adolescent boy who ever watched Hawaii 5-0 remembers her.

  9. Kam Fong is his “first name”. His last name is Chun. Most educated Chinese families use two character names for their kids. The second character is not a middle name as we Anglos know it – the two characters form a semantic whole, though often as a nickname the dominant character is used as a short form. My wife and I negotiated that our kids would have Chinese first names and Anglo middle names. Their Chinese names are two characters (my daughter was born on Thanksgiving, so that her name includes the first cahracter in the Chinese for “Thanksgiving” and a second meaning “Chinese” or “Civilized”), and we followed the more Westernized Chiense custom of hyphenating those two meaningless syllables (in English) so that people whould know they are a single unit. (The two kids also share one of their characters – common among geneology-obsessed, educated Chinese).

    Kam Fong does sound distinctly different from Chin Ho to a Chinese person. The spelling in English or the pronunciation in Chinese tells one immediately that Kam Fong is Cantonese, not a native Mandarin speaker. Chin Ho could be Mandarin or a number of other dialects. I wonder if it was a nod to the original Sinbad, Zhong He, known as Chen Ho in bastardized English translation.

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