June 22, 1984:
Karate Kid premieres. Diminuitive, baby-faced good guy Danny Russo, wearing pure white and mellowed by Taoist wisdom, clobbers the snarling, black-clad, bullying, hulking Johnny Lawrence. Purity defeats corruption, light defeats darkness, good scores a definitive win over evil. The audience cheers.
Thirty years pass. We are older but not wiser. The world has grown cold and dark, evil that we thought long-banished alive and vigorous. Every day we think "It can't happen here -- can it?" Then we realize that it already has. We need a new hero, a new baby-faced warrior in a white robe who can definitively defeat the Darkness.
May 2, 2018: The youtube series
Cobra Kai reunites Danny and Johnny.
Except Danny is no longer a bastian of purity, and Johnny is no longer pure evil. Both do despicable things while the younger generation tries to find its way.
1. 34 years after being trounced in the big karate tournament, Johnny (William Zabka, old photo) is middle-aged, unattractive, and poor, working at odd jobs, dreaming of his glory days.
2. One day Johnny saves a neighborhood boy, Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), from some bullies, and is inspired to re-open Cobra Kai, the karate dojo full of black-robed miscreants that bedeveled Danny Russo a generation ago. Oddly enough,his teaching method involves bullying.
Johnny also starts dating Miguel's mom until she starts dating someone else, and they fight.
3. Miguel enlists some of his bullied friends to join Cobra Kai: the chubby Anthony (Griffin Santopietro), the nerd Demitri (Gianni Decenzo), and the disabled Hawk (Jacob Bertrand, left). Hawk soon goes over to the Dark Side of the Force.
4. Meanwhile Danny (Ralph Macchio), who beat Johnny all those years ago, has had nothing but good luck. Karma, I guess. He's still teen-idol hot, he owns a chain of car dealerships, and he has a loving family, including daughter, Samantha.
When he discovers that Cobra Kai is opening again, Danny is livid with rage, and tries all sorts of dirty tricks to shut it down or otherwise bedevil his old nemesis.
5. For example, he talks his cousin Vinny...um, I mean Louie (Brett Ernst) into destroying Johnny's car.
6. And he gives Robby (Tanner Buchanan), Johnny's estranged juvenile delinquent son, a job at his car dealership, just to get Johnny's goat.
Eventually he starts giving Robby karate lessons, and is inspired to open his own Miyagi-Do, based on the principles of his deceased sensei, Mr. Miyagi.
7. Danny's daughter Samantha happens to be dating Kyler (Joe Seo) one of Miguel's bullies. But not to worry, the romance doesn't last long. Samantha is rather a player, moving on to Miguel, and then to Robby, and then back and forth.
It's the eternal triangle: respectable but boring, or wild and dangerous.
8. Johnny is just starting to reform when his old sensei from the 1980s, Kreese (Martin Kove, old photo), returns and pushes him toward the Dark Side again. But then he bonds with Danny, and the two work together to send Kreese back to Mordor.
Well, actually, alliances change so fast, among the adults and teens alike, that you can't really tell who's good and who's evil without a score card. Maybe that's the point.
There are no gay characters. Early fan buzz suggested that Robbie would be gay, but he turns out to be more obsessed with girls than with karate.
And, surprisingly, beefcake is limited. No one works out shirtless, like in the original, and besides, most of the kids at the dojo are actual kids, not 20-something hunkoids pretending to be high school students.
I only watched the free episode. A convoluted plot with no gay characters, limited beefcake, and a cast of scoundrels? I have the original
Karate Kid on DVD.
See also:
The Karate Kid
Was this really necessary? I mean, I could ask that about every movie after the first, but really?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are extensive articles on Bullshido about the movies, but I don't have time.
I don't know if there were a lot of people actually clamoring to revisit "Karate Kid," but reboots, rehashes, and "the next generation"-style sequels have a built in audience draw, at least for one episode, so they are attractive to producers.
DeleteSweet synopsis of the premise/first COBRA KAI episode, and recap of the themes in the KK movies proper.
ReplyDeleteThat said--by now we're on Season Three of COBRA KAI and still going strong, and viewers have noticed there is something of a shift in tone to a dark serious and well-thought-out plot, as well as some noticeable homoromantic content. Front and center, the relationship between Daniel & Johnny has a lot of emotional sexual tension and domestic banter encoded into it, and the writing plays with this in both comedic and dramatic ways--they sidestep their animosity to protect and fuss over one another, co-parent Robby, have a lot of intense fights and staredowns very close to one another, make impassioned confessions, go on a double date in a couple of episodes etc. Hundreds of fans write erotic fanfiction or draw erotic artwork of the two (sometimes very graphically), which a quick visit to Tumblr with the hashtag 'lawrusso' will reveal.
Then there's the minor homo-explorations between Robby & Miguel (ostensibly fighting with major sweaty halfnaked ANGST over the main chick Sam LaRusso, but in reality battling for Johnny & Daniel's affections), and between Demetri & Eli aka Hawk. The latter is particularly satisfying to watch from a gay standpoint, as their friendship (one of two outcasts and misfits, i.e. stealth gays) breaks down into something very fractious and heated (like, worse than Daniel/Johnny--it results in broken bones and legal charges) thanks to a struggle for equal power between them, but the show makes clear that a strong affection and longing for one another persists in spite of their difficulties. Also, with karate training the meek plain Hawk gets quite attractive, and on appraising this change the fairly nelly Demetri encourages him not to pursue girls...very subtle.
Of course, KK Part III still has the most weirdly-charged homoeroticism and CK has not yet supplanted it, but how do you top Terry Silver? (wait, don't answer that ;P)
YMMV, but personally I find fifty-something-year-old Johnny Lawrence/William Zabka pretty hot. The character gets a fair amount of sexual attention considering CK is a family show, and his body looks in really good shape for an actor of his age. Even the wrinkles and silver in his blond hair make him seem like a grizzled hunk. Shame about the leathery tan, I guess, but he's a Boomer from Cali so wcyd?
Plus there are a few fleeting moments where, if you squint or blink or don't look closely, Macchio still looks like that 80s college-aged twink he was playing Daniel-san in the OG movie. He really has aged so damn slow, and doesn't look his sixty years.
Usually I'm the last person to believe hype, follow trends, or bother with popular streaming shows, but this is exceptionally good.
Forgot to add a couple of points to my earlier comment, hope it's ok to add them now.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of heterosexism, COBRA KAI does better than the original films. The teenaged protagonists Miguel & Robby are depicted as highly-sensitive boys who pine for M/M affection and only lose their compassion only after utmost torment, while (SPOILER ALERT) the most vicious antagonist in the show is actually a 16-year old girl (Tory) who surprisingly is a petite femme but shows less remorse to Daniel & Johnny's wards than any of her male cohorts. While much of the drama between the teen characters is 'who kissed who?' hetero bullshit, just as much attention is given to the idea that the young fighters are all in desperate need of defense against the hierarchical violence inherent within heterosexual status-pyramids---luring them to Kreese's brutal style of karate in the first place.
Speaking of Kreese; there are some lovely flashback scenes between a young John Kreese & Terry Silver as soldiers in the Vietnam War, where we see how deep their commitment to one another runs (albeit thanks to trauma). Kreese is shown similarly to care about his bond with Johnny Lawrence, and actively seeks reciprocation at some cost to his pride. Sadly his rapprochement with Johnny takes the form of an evil seduction, but that is more troubling for the implication of pseudo-incest (Kreese was essentially Johnny's father figure).
In the original post on this site for THE KARATE KID Part I, Ali Mills (Daniel & Johnny's joint ex-girlfriend and eternal sticking point) is described as a heterosexist bastion. In COBRA KAI she is remembered less fondly by both her exes, as a flawed, somewhat-selfish and meddlesome young woman who instigated their teenaged rivalry. When (SPOILER ALERT again) she briefly shows up in Season Three, she exonerates herself by telling her side of the story, but also points out that the true driving force of their triangle is external to all of them (i.e., not the personal heteroromantic feelings of any one party), and thereby gets Daniel & Johnny to make peace so they can move on as a duo without her spectre.
The point in the show so far that has struck me as homophobic is the insistence that the campy and conflict-averse coded-gay Demetri is so rabidly attracted to women that he'll let them abuse him in exchange for sexual attention. In one cringe-worthy scene, he does a popular girl's entire final-grade science project for her on the promise of one shamefaced clandestine French kiss after the fact. I thought we left this kind of thing in the 80s & 90s. Why does the show need to smack us in the face with the idea that the flouncy nerd totally lusts pussy? Here it undermines Demetri's positive character growth, as well as his important relationship with Eli aka Hawk.
I also don't really appreciate how some of Daniel & Johnny's more intimate moments (e.g., alone together driving, or at a bar drinking) are usually interrupted within five minutes by either one of the men's children or by Daniel's wife (a cool, attractive and put-together but sarcastic woman who sees Daniel's relationship with Johnny as a joke or an irritation). it happens quite a few times, enough to think that it's a way of baiting the audience to see a frisson of bonding between Daniel & Johnny, then laughing off the idea. Thankfully, CK redeems itself by giving Johnny & Daniel plenty of serious emotional encounters together that comprise of many lingering desirous gazes, quick touches, and passionate verbal exchanges.
Oh, and Moon--the pretty 'bisexual' hippie-chick with some popularity--ditches her nameless girlfriend after we see one titillating groping kiss at a party in front of dozens of horny young boys. Go figure.
While the show is still too hetero, phobic and sexist for many gay viewers, it doesn't shy and flinch from intimations of same-sex bonding as much the original films. Hopefully the three seasons to come will give us some more ground.
Great pics :) The first one, though, is from the movie Back to School, not The Karate Kid, and the actor on the right is not Ralph Macchio but Keith Gordon from that movie. William Zabka got even buffer right after Karate Kid, as evidenced in Back to School :)
ReplyDeleteIf I can't find a beefcake shot from a specific movie, I'll check anything with the actor, and if that doesn't work or I don't really know what the actor looks like, I'll just go with whatever Google Images says is the actor.
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