Where did they come from (as far as Korean arts are concerned)?
Well, I've watched videos produced by the Korean Taekkyon Association, as well as TK videos made in Korea and narrated in Korean. You could hardly say they were made by Americans or for American audiences. The Korean TK Association was founded by a student of Sung Duk Ki, considered a national treasure by the Korean government.
The Taekkyon students I watched did jumping front kicks, jumping side kicks, jumping back sidekicks, jumping back roundhouse kicks, and jumping wheel kicks. In short, every jumping and jump spinning kick we associate with Taekwondo. I don't know if that is a definitive answer, but maybe it helps.
Well, it certainly shows that modern TK, which grew from a base of three or four practitioners in the mid-20th century at a time when there were thousands of TKD practitioners and hundreds of TKD dojangs in the country, to its current rather modest numbers at the present time, has certainly mimicked the complex kicks that developed in TKD from the Kwan days—not one of whose founders, as Mark Pederson in his current state of the art overview of Taekkyon in the 2002
Encyclopædia of Martial Arts of the World can be securely linked to any of the know taekkyon teachers alive at the time. And the Taekkyon Research Association, the TK body pursuing the history of Taekkyon, agrees with this assessment, as Robert Young reports in his 1993
Journal of Asian Martial Arts assessment. And the head of this very selfsame Taekkyon Reseach Association, Song Duk Ki's surviving senior student, Lee Yong-bok, emphasized that real taekkyon's kicks were aimed at the opponent lower body and feet, and consisted of mostly stoming and unbalancing moves. Surviving photographs of Song Duk-ki himself from the early 1960s make the same point: they show leg-blocks of low kicks, mid/high body
pushing kicks used at close range as part of a combination with arm grabs, in order to push the defender over, and a range of other kicking techs that look nothing at all like TKD. As the World Taekkyon Headquarters site puts it
here,
The kicks are so legendary that, for hundreds of years the name of the art was synonymous with foot-fighting. However, the kicks bear little resemblance to the typical spinning and jumping maneuvers glorified in tournaments and film. Instead, Taekkyon leg techniques are simple and direct, focusing on linear moves but including limited usage of circular and spinning kicks. Taekkyon has traditionally emphasized stepping and stamping techniques directed at the opponent's lower legs and feet.
There is absolutely no need to posit the origins of TKD's high or `fancy' kicks in a skill set that was all but extinct at the time that the Kwan founders were learning their MAs via years of training in Shotokan and Shudokan karate dojos. The one thing, the only thing we need to make sense of this is the assumption that Koreans like kicking, and the more spectacular, the better. Much more to the point is the question of TKD's influence on Taekkyon. Taekkyon was originally a village competition game, with heavy gambling, probably mostly of interest to the participants. In fact, Taekkyon has come to be a tournament sport (
e.g., here), and one thing we've seen with karate as well: the more tournament-based a MA has become, with tournaments televized and increasingly enacted as a ring spectator sport, with emphasis on spectacle, the more likely it is to develop flashy athletic kicks. David Mitchell, in the
Overlook Handbook of Martial Arts, argues that many of TKDs more spectacular kicking techniques have begun to appear in karate tournaments, precisely because they are highly visible to the judges and represent athletically demanding, quasi-gymnastic skills which play well with audiences. It's no surprise that the kinds of traditional kicks that Lee Yong Bok and the World Taekkyon site talk about, and that Song Duk-ki demo'd in the early 1960s, have been supplemented by more acrobatic spinning/flying kicks as the tournament effect starts applying to taekkyon as well...
