Nearly 40 yrs on, The Karate Kid is still packing a punch

If you’re an actor, you know you’ve achieved full-blown cult status when strangers on the road yell out lines at you from one of your movies. And on more than one occasion, Hollywood actor Ralph Macchio has had fans scream “Why don’t you go back to Reseda?” and “Get him a body bag!” at him, no matter where in the world he is.

The references are from the 1984 film, The Karate Kid, which catapulted Macchio into stardom. In the movie he plays the role of a scrawny, teenage boy named Daniel LaRusso, who moves to California from New Jersey along with his single-mom after the latter loses her job. Not thrilled about leaving his childhood friends behind and shifting into a small apartment in the downscale neighbourhood of Reseda, Daniel glimpses hope and happiness in the form of Ali Mills (played by a young Elisabeth Shue) who lives in the posher side of town called Encino Hills, and studies at his new high school. However, Ali’s rich ex-boyfriend Johnny Lawrence, who also goes to the same school, along with his friends, start bullying Daniel (something all of us can relate to)—even beating him up on multiple occasions using karate taught to them by their sensei John Kreese at a local dojo called ‘Cobra Kai’.

Johnny, played by William Zabka, is arguably the most bad-ass protagonist to have come out of the 1980s; sporting his red, leather jacket and blowing dust circles on his off-road motorcycle, followed everywhere by his loyal Cobra Kais, he is Kreese’s most accomplished student, and a force to be reckoned with—both on and off the mat. Still hung up over Ali, he uses his karate skills to bully, torment, and scare Daniel away from her.

However, Daniel ends up running into the apartment repair man Mr Miyagi, who is played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, an old man of Japanese origin, and a World War II veteran, who, upon seeing the teenager’s predicament, offers to teach him his family’s style of karate, one that traces its roots back to his hometown, the fishing village of Okinawa. Mr Miyagi’s first lesson to Daniel, when he is teaching him how to prune a bonsai tree, is, “If come from inside you, always right one.” He teaches a disturbed and troubled Daniel to use karate for self-defence only and helps him achieve balance, both within and without.

Kreese and Mr Miyagi decide to settle scores between their students at the All Valley U-18 Karate Tournament. Both, Johnny as well as an injured Daniel, face off in the finals of the competition in a best-of-three points format. With the scores tied and Daniel limping, the final round sees him, as a last resort, raise his arms in the now-iconic one-legged “crane” pose—something that he had seen Mr Miyagi practice on wooden stumps at the beach once—and deal a full-blown front kick to Johnny’s face as soon the latter tries to approach him, rendering the underdog as the winner of the tournament.

“One of the best scenes—and my all-time favourite—is from the first film,” says 30-year-old Nitesh Sanda, a Mumbai-based digital marketer and a longstanding fan of the franchise. His first memory of watching the film is of the 1990s along with his older brother. “It is the ‘Wax on, Wax off’ part. It showed me that sometimes we may not understand how doing certain things will help us, but eventually they teach us valuable lessons in the long run.”

He is referring to the scene wherein Mr Miyagi puts Daniel through a string of monotonous and physically exhausting, mundane chores like washing the cars in his garage, painting the fence, and scrubbing the wooden floor. Tired and fed-up after a few days, Daniel thinks Mr Miyagi is using him to clean and mend his house—but in an act that catches the teenager by surprise—the wise old man shows him how the circular hand movements that he (Daniel) had used to “Wax on, Wax off” the cars could be used to block incoming punches, as could the “side to side” hand motion that he had learnt while painting the fences. In a span of three minutes, Daniel ends up blocking every incoming punch from his sensei—using techniques that he had unknowingly learnt while performing household tasks.

“The movie is different because it shows us that you don’t have to be a bully to be popular,” he said, adding that it definitely made him want to take up karate as a kid. “I don’t think there were any high-school karate movies at the time. Growing up, it meant even you could be Daniel. It also showcased that you don’t have to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Lee type to be a ‘tough’ guy.”

The Karate Kid is a classic coming-of-age film that has been credited with not only popularising karate and martial arts in the United States, but also creating a franchise that has withstood the test of time. The characters created by screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen raked in hundreds of millions and spawned a trilogy for the better part of the 1980s, with The Karate Kid II releasing just two years after the first film, followed by The Karate Kid III in 1989—all of them starring Macchio as the protagonist. The last movie in the original Karate Kid saga was The Next Karate Kid which released on September 9, 1994, starring Hillary Swank in the lead role instead of Macchio, which was a first, and with Pat Morita being the only one from the original cast who was retained in the same role.

But the buck didn’t stop there. In 2010, the film was remade by Hollywood actor Will Smith, with his son Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan starring in lead roles.

And in what is considered to be the franchise’s biggest revival ever, aimed not only at potentially targeting a millennial audience that has never heard of the original Karate Kid (shudders), but also doubling down on bringing back old-timers to the saga by providing them with an extremely hard-to-resist dose of nostalgia, is the 2018 hit web series Cobra Kai which saw the release of its fourth consecutive season at the beginning of this month. The show brings back the 38-year-old rivalry between Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, played by none other than their original counterparts Ralph Macchio and William Zabka.

While The Karate Kid II kept the fans fed and rode on the popularity wave the first movie had triggered (there were Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence action figures being stocked in toy stores), it also shifted the focus towards our favourite father figure Mr Miyagi. The film paid homage to Mr Miyagi’s ancestral town of Okinawa, with Daniel himself travelling there to visit the latter’s dying father; at the same time, it also brought to the fore problems from Mr Miyagi’s past, including a lost love interest as well as an arch nemesis called ‘Sato’, who used to be his best friend.

The Karate Kid III sees the return of disgraced Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese, and the introduction of his friend Terry Silver, who plays mind games with Daniel under the guise of teaching him karate. It also sees the introduction of Karate bad boy Mike Barnes, who faces off against Daniel in the finals of the All Valley, but is once again beaten, this time by the latter’s flawless execution of Mr Miyagi’s family kata.

Although The Next Karate Kid gave a chance to audiences to watch a pre-Oscars Hillary Swank on the big screen and is also touted as her “break-out” performance, the film is arguably the least successful of all the movies in the original series, raking in a total gross box office value of $8.9 million.

For 36-year-old Eric Lobo, it doesn’t matter what the plot was for these three films; he was already knee-deep in to the fandom and totally hooked after watching the first movie itself. “It’s like Star Wars—you can watch the films again and again and not get bored of them,” he said. “Growing up, martial arts films were my favourite to watch. But what sets The Karate Kid saga apart from the rest of the movies like Three Ninjas Kick Back, Rocky, and Drunken Master, which, although came later in the 1990s, is the relationship and bond that the characters of Mr Miyagi and Daniel LaRusso share throughout. Like any other relationship between a mentor and disciple, there are ups and down, and there are moments when they doubt each other—but time and again—they prove to be the perfect pairing. The skinny teenager turns out to be lethal under the guidance of a short but skilled martial arts expert, which shows us that looks can be deceiving, and that brawn is nothing compared to a focused brain.”

Lobo believes that there exists no better sensei than the character of Mr Miyagi. “His one-liners are full of wisdom and prove to be valuable life lessons. At the same time, they can turn out to be extremely funny, like the time when, in an attempt to get Daniel to go to the school Halloween Dance to meet Ali, he tells him, ‘To make honey, young bee need flower, not old prune.’ We get to see that the wise, old sage is not afraid to poke fun at himself, and the sound Pat Morita’s loud laughter will always be memorable.”

While it’s impossible to even imagine The Karate Kid franchise without the familiar face of Pat Morita (now deceased) playing the role of Mr Miyagi, what newcomers to the franchise may not know is that he wasn’t producer Jerry Weintraub’s first choice for the role. Jerry had his doubts that the audience at the time would be able to see Pat playing the serious role of a wise, old karate master. Back then, the actor was best known for his comedic work as Arnold, the restaurant owner on popular sitcom Happy Days, as well as his role in Sanford and Son. As a guest on the David Letterman Show, Morita told the late night talk show host that Jerry had said, “I wish I could get a real Japanese guy to play this guy.”

However, Morita managed to add a Japanese accent to his screen test, as well as grow a beard, all of which finally managed to impress Jerry and went on to bag the iconic role that won him an Academy Award nomination. He even urged the film makers to use his original first name “Noriyuki” in the credits so as to lend more authenticity to the role.

Actor Ralph Macchio too admits that he had his doubts about the film. He, along with rest of the film unit, weren’t happy with the title of the film, and thought it was too soft; he also wasn’t big on the love story between Ali and him. But after almost four decades, the relationships shared by these fictional characters have carved out a special place in our memory as well as in our hearts, and it’s impossible to imagine the original storyline swinging any other way.

There are few films that have achieved cult stardom the way Karate Kid has done. Even though Back to the Future and Nightmare on Elm Street saw multiple movies released during the 1980s, they remain secluded in their respective categories of sci-fi and horror. Meanwhile, Kamen’s characters have found passing references even in modern-day sitcoms such as How I Met Your Mother, with the character of Barney Stinson popularising a theory that Daniel had won the All Valley Tournament in the first film by using an illegal kick—yes, the very the same iconic “crane” kick—on opponent Johnny Lawrence during their showdown in the finals. Funnily enough, there exists a rule in most karate competitions that prevents competitors from striking their opponents “with full force” since the aim is not to injure them, especially in U-18 tournaments. Since the crane kick was a full-contact blow to the face, it should have at least (arguably) invited a warning or penalty from the referee.

It is timeless debates like these—the type that you can get heavily involved in during your weekly “Game Night” or over beer pong at a local bar—that keeps the spirit of the franchise alive and relevant, even today.