When Vincent Vega takes Mia Wallace out for dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction, he asks her about her short-lived acting career. Mia claims that starring in a failed TV pilot was her “fifteen minutes.” Vincent doesn’t watch TV, but thanks to Jules’ earlier explanation, he knows the purpose of a pilot: to see if there’s interest in a TV series before producing more than one episode. So, curious to know what could have been, Vincent asks Mia to describe the series.
The title of the show was Fox Force Five. Mia played one member of a Kill Bill hit theaters, fans noticed a few similarities between the martial arts two-parter and the failed Fox Force Five pilot described in Tarantino’s earlier film.
Starring Mia Wallace
The most obvious parallel between Fox Force Five and Kill Bill is that they both star Mia Wallace. After becoming an overnight movie star with her turn as Mia in Pulp Fiction, Inception-like performance within a performance, playing Mia Wallace playing the Bride.
Thanks to the complicated explanation of how the Tarantino-verse works, the Bride could be played by Mia Wallace herself in some meta twist of fate. The more grounded movies like the genre-driven films like Kill Bill exist in another world that the Dogs/Pulp-verse characters watch on the big screen in their own movie theaters.
The Deadliest Woman In The World With A Knife
Mia describes her Fox Force Five character, Raven McCoy, as “the deadliest woman in the world with a knife,” which sounds an awful lot like Beatrix Kiddo. The Bride might not have been raised by circus performers like Raven McCoy was, but she certainly knows her way around a blade. Her proficiency with a sword is so renowned that legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzō came out of retirement just to forge her a new weapon.
Another one of Raven McCoy’s defining characteristics was her love of dad jokes. She would’ve rattled off a different joke in every episode, but since they only made one episode, she only ever told one joke (about a family of tomatoes). The Bride’s penchant for humor isn’t as well-established as Raven McCoy’s, but she does deliver a few snappy one-liners, like quoting the Trix commercial before her climactic showdown with O-Ren Ishii.
One, Two, Three, Four, Five Of Us
When Mia tells Vincent the title of her show and he’s confused by it, she explains what it means, one word at a time: “‘Fox,’ as in we’re a bunch of foxy chicks. ‘Force,’ as in we’re a force to be reckoned with. ‘Five,’ as in there’s one, two, three, four, five of us.” The title is pretty self-explanatory – the series has five main characters who combine forces to defeat bad guys.
Given the sprawling nature of Tarantino’s ensembles, Kill Bill naturally has more than five characters in its line-up. But the movie does have two distinctive groups of five people: there are five of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (the Bride, Budd, O-Ren Ishii, Elle Driver, and Vernita Green) and five names on the Bride’s handwritten “death list” (Budd, O-Ren, Elle, Vernita, and Bill).
The Team
The way that Mia describes the team and their specialties in Pulp Fiction doesn’t quite line up with the cast of Kill Bill, but there are a few key similarities. On top of the Bride herself being “the deadliest woman in the world with a knife,” every other assassin on the Deadly Viper team has a parallel in the ensemble of Fox Force Five.
According to Mia, the titular team in Fox Force Five has a blonde leader (both of the Deadly Vipers’ leaders – first the Bride and later Elle Driver – had blonde hair), a Japanese kung fu master (this one lines up with O-Ren Ishii), a Black demolition expert (this one lines up with Vernita Green, although she’s not established to be a demolition expert), and a French woman (this one lines up with Sofie Fatale, O-Ren’s lawyer and confidant who was present at the wedding chapel massacre).
High-Concept Action Thriller
The narratives of Kill Bill and Fox Force Five have a lot in common – they’re both stories about a team of killers and their blood-drenched exploits – but the overall genre, style, and tone of both Kill Bill and Fox Force Five are exactly the same, too. These aren’t works of socially conscious realist drama like Manchester by the Sea.
Instead of trying to capture the foibles of everyday life and touch the audience on a deep, human level, Kill Bill and Fox Force Five are works of escapist entertainment with a high-concept premise and plenty of explosive spectacle. There’s more than enough room for both in the cinematic landscape. Audiences need to be moved by movies like Moonlight, but they also need to be thrilled and entertained and transported into pulpy genre worlds like the Kill Bill universe.
