The incursion of Edward Barton-Wright’s New Art of Self Defence into modern pop-culture continues via the new Street Fighter 6 fighting game, in which the main villain, known as “JP”, is portrayed as a Bartitsu expert.
This isn’t the first time Bartitsu has been incorporated into a video game – that happened back in 2013 when the game Urban Rivals introduced a dapper Bartitsu-trained flamingo character named Flint, and again in 2016 when the Mortal Kombat franchise added a highly stylized version of Bartitsu cane fighting to the arsenal of Drunken Kung Fu stylist Bo Rai Cho.
JP’s “Bartitsu” bears a similarly tangential relationship to the real fighting style, not least because JP also possesses magical or psionic powers that enable him to do significant damage without ever getting close to his opponents. That said, his kicking attacks are reasonable approximations of both high and low savate kicks, some of his cane attacks are at least in the real-world ballpark and he occasionally pulls off a jujutsu-like throw. It’s even possible that his idiosyncratic kneeling defensive posture may have been loosely inspired by actual Vigny cane fighting techniques:
