There’s nothing like the kung fu movies of my youth: Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly fighting the system or injustice with their bare hands and maybe some nunchuks. Wu-Tang Clan honcho RZA, obviously shares the same affinity for the genre.

“In our generation, they had the Saturday afternoon kung fu theatre,” the rapper, actor and composer told me. “[In] my neighborhood, everybody would leave the block … watched the film, come back outside and you’ll see somebody added to a great dance move … we all made our own nunchuks. So it was part of my childhood. And so it is built into the music … It enhanced my imagination. If I ever get bored or stuck in an imagination rut, I throw on one of my flicks.”

Those movies continue to influence him. RZA just released a new album, “Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater,” which is a collaboration with the GOAT, DJ Scratch.

“I was the emcee and he did the production. It’s just a moment. A moment that we got that we was running into our cribs and on Saturday afternoon we turned a movie on … before we had to go back out to our concrete jungle. This album should be able to do that for you, whether you driving, whether you working out in the morning or whether you are sitting there, just want a little room for something different. This is that, you know, lyrically, musically, it’s fresh.”

RZA knows a thing or two about being fresh. The Brownsville-born, Staten Island-raised rapper started out as Prince Rakeem, but then he pivoted and started the Wu-Tang Clan — a cast of nine colorful characters who would change the rap game forever. Their first album “36 Chambers” was unlike anything I had ever heard. And I still haven’t heard anything like it since. RZA was the producer or more like a mad scientist, synthesizing all those big, audacious personalities into groundbreaking music.

“I had a chance to suss out the playing field. I knew that nobody in the game was like us. When I saw something was missing. I decided to inject it … Everybody in Wu was alphas. That’s the type of energy was missing in hip-hop,” he said adding that he wasn’t afraid to experiment even if it ended up in the trash can.

“There’s a version of C.R.E.A.M. where me and Ghostface is rhyming. It didn’t work … Sonically it just didn’t flow,” he told me. It takes a lot of humility to say the song sounded better without you.

Their music and brand allowed the world to know the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who passed in 2004. But RZA was his cousin, so I wanted to know about Russell Jones, the man behind ODB. He said his cousin’s immediate family was filled with musical talent from rock to soul and, obviously, rap.

“He was a true artist,” RZA said adding that he was also a daredevil, jumping off roofs and buildings like he was practicing a form of parkour.

“He was good at that. And you have to have a certain type of a bravery and a certain type of confidence to do that … And when he said, ‘Wu-Tang is for the children,’ he meant that, you know, people don’t know. He used to go back to the neighborhoods with a pocket full of money. Come back with empty pockets. He gave it all away.”

Each of the Wu-Tang went on to wild success. And RZA’s path changed in the late ’90s when director Jim Jarmusch approached him to score the music for “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” starring Forest Whitaker.

“That process, I kind of caught the bug. I did everything wrong, mind you,” RZA said. Making music for movies was more of a 9-to-5 gig and did not include 4 a.m. sessions in the studio. But he pulled it off. Then Quentin Tarantino asked him to work on both his “Kill Bill” movies.

“[Quentin] was a fan of Wu-Tang. He asked me, like, he never used a composer before, but ‘I like the way you produce your albums. It’s the way I want the flow of this movie to be.’ So I took on a task and look, I studied Bernstein, Mancini, Strauss…”

He went on to score music for “Blade: Trinity,” “Afro Samurai” and a handful of other movies and TV projects. However, he didn’t realize the gravity of his new IMDB credits until Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J dropped a few words of wisdom.

“I didn’t pay attention at the time, but [Snoop] said something to me,” RZA recalled. “After ‘Kill Bill,’ Snoop was in the building. He said, ‘Yo, you can do this s – – t till you an old man’ … Then LL, said, ‘Hey you are who you are, but this is different.’ Both of their words kind of sunk in. I started asking my studio to prepare for a longer journey.”

It’s an unconventional hip-hop retirement plan, but unconventional has always been RZA’s brand. And maybe he should also prepare the studio to house an Oscar or some other high-brow hardware because RZA has that golden touch.

Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the college hoops world in the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons in the NBA, before transitioning into a media personality. Rose is currently an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the author of the best-selling book, “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker, and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.