Wait, is this Bruce Lee anime his family's making some kind of weird NFT thing?

For a couple of days now, we’ve been seeing a trailer floating around online for “House Of Lee,” a new anime project created and endorsed by Lee’s daughter Shannon, and the Bruce Lee Estate. The teaser itself is short, but undeniably snazzy: Shots of Lee—animated in a more old-school style of anime art, with lots of obvious manga touches—throwing punches, flowing like water, and, uh, turning into a dragon. (The synopsis for the series makes it clear that it’s going to be some kind of fantasy story, rather than anything more biographical like 1993's Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.) The film grain effect helps sell the illusion that this is the kind of animation you could have caught decades ago on some late night on cable, or via an imported VHS.

As we dug into the details on the project, though, we had to ask ourselves a question that’s been blissfully absent from the cultural conversation for a minute. I.e.: Is this some kind of weird NFT thing?

Bear with us for a second here. The credited animator on the trailer is Emily Yang, who’s best known in crypto and web3 circles as plppleasr, a massively successful (and undeniably talented, from the work we’ve seen) artist who made a name for herself with some high-profile sales of art that caught the market’s attention a few years back. Among other things, Yang used her success creating NFT art that didn’t look like a crew of infinite monkeys banging on a typewriter that can only spell “FUCK YOU, DAD” to launch a new platform called Shibuya last year, producing a short pilot for a show called White Rabbit, where users could buy NFT “producer credits” to vote on a branching story.

Now, Shibuya is also the listed producer on the House Of Lee trailer—although the actual animation was handled by Chinese studio Shockunit, whose animation reel is filled, surprise surprise, with NFT-based stuff. Anyway, Shibuya bills itself as, among other things, a crowdfunding platform—which it primarily does through, as far as we can tell, the minting and selling of NFTs.

This didn’t generate much notice at the time outside of crypto circles, but that’s exactly what House Of Lee did back in April, minting a token called “House Of Lee: Genesis” that promised buyers “This is your ticket to the House Of Lee.” Shibuya’s site says it minted 49,000 such tokens, at a listed mint price of roughly $15 a pop, suggesting that they should (assuming stable prices for the blockchain-based currency Ethereum) have netted a bit more than $700,000 for their efforts. (The value on the token has gone down now, by the way; it’s trading at between $6 and $10, depending on which marketplace you look at—such is the price of a ticket to the House Of Lee.)

Veering back toward the point: None of this has been mentioned in any of the promo materials going around right now for House Of Lee, which is set to run its trailer ahead of a 50th anniversary re-release of Enter The Dragon later this month. (Deadline’s article on the trailer, for instance, notes only that the independent project was funded “Through a community campaign,” while featuring a statement from Shannon Lee praising Yang and Shibuya as “perfect collaborators.”)

Nobody’s faulting Shannon Lee and the Lee estate for looking into non-studio ways to finance a project like this—which, again, looks pretty cool. (And there’s no indication, as of yet, that the project itself will incorporate NFT or blockchain elements into itself, behind the initial funding push.) But NFTs remain highly controversial and volatile in the minds of a lot of people, making them the sort of thing folks would probably like to know they’re getting involved in, before throwing their support behind a project built on the name of a legendary icon.