The documentary claims Jigoro Kano started his martial arts training "because he wanted to be the best competitor of jiu-jitsu." While this goal may sound very Japanese due to so much history of similar protagonists in Shōnen manga, it is false in this case and is exactly the opposite impression Kano worked all his life to give. He started learning jiu-jitsu because he was bullied as a child and wanted to be able to defend himself and later continued diving into the art because he saw it as a promising educational tool for a modern society. Kano was never an active competitor himself even when he would have been expected to be; he also opposed openly the "world's strongest" mentality that many martial artists espoused and considered his art not more than a method to protect oneself and grow as a person. The documentary even claims that Kano would have never got into a fight if not by his jiu-jitsu career, which becomes ludicrous in the light of his years of bullying; much to his chagrin, getting in school fights was something that happened to him all the time.
Mitsuyo Maeda was known as a really good judoka, but he was not a "judo champion" before departing from Japan, at least not in an official sense. No biography of his mentions any competition to his name, aside from a quirky 4th dan test where he was forced to defeat several opponets to be awarded the rank.
The claim that "MMA owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda" might hold some weight from the perspective of Ultimate Fighting Championship, given that it was founded by his purported apprentices, but it is wrong in an ample sense. Maeda never actually competed in full, striking-wise vale tudo rules as we know them today, only in the jiu-jitsu/submission wrestling competitions that were popular at his time (which are often called "vale tudo" too to add confusion). Those wrestling rulesets existed way before Maeda started his fighting career and wouldn't really evolve into true vale tudo until decades after Maeda had died, thanks mostly to promoters that had nothing to do with him or his possible apprentices. Even if it was the case, by those years Japanese pro wrestling was developing its own forms of mixed martial arts, away from any influence from Brazilian vale tudo and modern MMA owes as much to the former as it does to the latter.
According to the documentary, Gastão Gracie helped Mitsuyo Maeda to establish Japanese settlements in Brazil and in exchange he wanted Maeda to train his troublemaker son Carlos. In real life, while Maeda certainly worked to help Japanese settlers, his only business with Gastão amounted to work a wrestling act in a circus that Gastão half-owned. Also, it was Carlos himself who asked Maeda to train him after watching a live exhibition.
The notion of Hélio Gracie being sickly and small in his childhood is a popular belief, likely spread by the Gracies themselves to turn his later fighting career into an example of personal achievement against nature. In reality, Hélio was a very active, athletic boy who competed in swimming and rowing. He was not particularly small either, to the point that in his legendary match against Masahiko Kimura, Hélio was actually the taller of the two.
Speaking about the Gracie/Kimura fight, the documentary repeats the mythical notion that Kimura outweighed Hélio by 45 pounds. The real weight difference among them is impossible to know with certainty, as the match had neither a weigh-in nor official stats, but it was surely not so big. While Kimura was known to be heavier than Gracie, modern estimations have him outweighing Hélio by 20-30 pounds instead, especially having in mind that Kimura was stockier yet shorter than him. FAL also assures Kimura unsuccessfully tried to finish Hélio with "various holds" on the ground, but accounts have Kimura basically putting a deliberate show and switching voluntarily from every pin to the next for the audience before going for the kill (which he got pretty quickly).
The rest of Hélio's competition career is similarly embellished to a great extent. FAL claims that he "very often won", but in Hélio's registered record in real life, his losses and draws together actually outnumber his wins. Also, while he did have a couple of fights where he got spectacularly maimed as the video claims, most of his fights were under jiu-jitsu/wrestling rules, which usually saw Gracie working long, uneventful rounds from his guard without doing or receiving much damage. Finally, the documentary's claim that vale tudo fights usually lasted hours is untrue; this kind of affair was the exception, not the rule and tellingly, the bout put by FAL as an example (the Gracie/Santana fight) became famous precisely for its insane length.
The yakuza find something to do with their money
The claim that Rickson Gracie "excelled at vale tudo" might have been meant as a reference to his purported 400-0 record, which his own dad Hélio would label as promotional fiction. While Rickson does have a godly reputation in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that will surely never die, his official MMA career is currently seen as underwhelming, as he only engaged opponents who were low-level, in bad health or both at once instead of the many big names who challenged Rickson through his career - that is, truly the opposite of excellent.
The documentary claims Bob Sapp debuted in PRIDE "with nothing but football and pro wrestling on his résumé and zero martial arts ability". While it's true that Sapp was never exactly a technician of the ring, the quote is false nonetheless: before debuting in PRIDE, Sapp had competed in an amateur boxing match, learned some kickboxing under Sam Greco and trained for several months in AMC Pankration and Team Quest.
