Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media (Page 12 of 12)

THE KARATE KID is one of the most interesting franchises America has ever produced, arguably demonstrating the worst and best aspects of any film and TV franchise. The original movie, while dated and limited in by the filming and fight choreography of 1984, is a minor masterpiece: bullied teenager Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is fleeing a local gang of karate students and their abusive mentor, John Kreese, who runs the Cobra Kai dojo.

Daniel discovers that his apartment building's handyman, Mr. Miyagi, a serene, quiet, humble blue-collar worker, is in fact a master of karate and willing to train Daniel in martial arts to compete in a tournament against his oppressors. Miyagi's lessons are frustrating, bizarre and indirect, prioritizing harmony, peace, balance and serenity, with Daniel discovering that the karate Miyagi offers is not based in dominance or violence but masterful minimalism. The film sets up a tournament where Daniel must find out if his limited skill and ability to react and redirect can match the muscular aggression of Cobra Kai and their lead bully, Johnny Lawrence.

THE KARATE KID, despite being an action movie, is more of a gentle dramedy. Due to the limitations of the lead actors who weren't really martial artists, the action that is there may not have aged well.

The sequel, made in 1986, is (at least to me) almost everything a sequel should be if there has to be one. The story shifts to Okinawa, Japan, the fishing village home of Mr. Miyagi where this time, Daniel learns about his mentor's family history and a troubled and violent conflict that Miyagi fled home to escape, only to be drawn back by the death of his father. PART II is an incredibly stirring exploration of Miyagi's past through Daniel's perspective as Daniel is swept into a deadly confrontation with a karate master that sees Daniel not in a tournament but a duel to the death. PART II achieves almost every possible success one could hope for from a sequel.

And then with PART III in 1989, THE KARATE KID franchise crashed into every possible failure a sequel could have. PART III is a formulaic rehash of the original film where Daniel is yet again dragged into another karate tournament and is inexplicably as unskilled and incompetent as he was before Miyagi trained him in the first movie. As a result, PART III undermines everything Daniel and Miyagi accomplished in the previous two films and makes Miyagi look inept and Daniel look ridiculous.

With the fourth film in 1994, Ralph Macchio declined to return and we have Miyagi mentoring a teeanged Hilary Swank in THE NEXT KARATE KID -- except where Miyagi was previously a complex, humble man of past violence and present serenity,  Miyagi in the fourth film is a clumsy caricature of 'Asian' 'wisdom' reciting inane proverbs, and the villains of the fourth film are cartoonish figures without any of the troubled personhood of the villains in the original two. THE NEXT KARATE KID is so visually dull that it looks more like a direct to video cheapquel than a motion picture.

After this crash and burn, the franchise went into hibernation for 16 years until Sony Pictures decided to wheel out the brand again in 2010, this time electing to reboot the series with a reimagining where Jaden Smith plays Dre, a young American boy transplanted to China where he flees the local kung fu wielding bullies and is rescued and trained by Mr. Han, a Miyagi-like figure played by Jackie Chan. Inexplicably, despite the martial art being kung fu, Sony insisted on calling the film THE KARATE KID just to get the brand into theatres. Despite this foolishness with the title, the 2010 reimagining is a beautifully shot film with heartfelt performances and a gentle warmth and earnest sense of tragedy matched with Jackie Chan's martial arts excellence vastly surpassing the fight choreography of the original film.

For various reasons -- directors dropping out, Jaden Smith aging by the time Sony found a director who stuck -- the 2010 film never saw a direct sequel with Dre and Han. However, from 2013 - 2014, the original bully character from the 1984 film was referred to by the Barney Stinson character on the sitcom HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, with Ralph Macchio and Johnny's actor William Zabka playing themselves in guest-appearances. The joke was that Barney considered Zabka's bully character, Johnny, to be the true hero and protagonist of THE KARATE KID.

With this renewed prominence, TV producers Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, whose production company had a deal with Sony TV, pitched a Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence TV show in 2017 to various streamers and networks. YouTube Red picked it up, with Sony licensing the TV and streaming rights for a show that the TV team decided to name COBRA KAI in order to emphasize that Johnny's perspective would be receiving equal emphasis in this sequel.

COBRA KAI's first season in 2018 shows Johnny Lawrence 34 years after Daniel defeated him at the high school karate tournament. Johnny is an alcoholic, underemployed handyman, estranged from his son and the mother of his child, at odds with his stepfather, missing his dead mother, and increasingly frustrated as he sees that Daniel LaRusso is a successful and popular car dealership owner. Now in his 50s, Johnny continues to be haunted by his high school humiliation and his lost glory. One night, as Johnny eats a cold dinner outside a shopping plaza, Johnny sees a teenaged boy, Miguel, attacked by a gang of bullies.

Johnny ignores them until the bullies throw Miguel into his car, at which point an incensed Johnny attacks the bullies, trounces them easily with his karate, and is inspired to reopen the Cobra Kai dojo and regain his lost pride with Miguel as his first student. The reopening of Cobra Kai puts Johnny on a collision course with Daniel as these two grown men begin to re-engage with the high drama and critical conflict of a petty high school squabble that began in 1984.

COBRA KAI, to me, is a hilarious demonstration of how all drama is two people who do not like each other, forced to be in the same room together. Zabka excels at playing the boorish, aggressive, yet strangely good-hearted Johnny whose bullying masked deep-seated abandonment issues, turning Johnny into an oddly relatable character dealing with a long history of failure and embarrassment. Meanwhile, Macchio is brilliant at portraying Daniel's exasperated astonishment that his high school bully continues to be a problem over three decades after they first met.

COBRA KAI proved so successful that when YouTube Red shut down, Netflix bought the show and it ran for a total of six seasons over seven years as Johnny and Daniel deal with rivaling karate dojos, the war between their children and students, and the bleak resignation as Johnny and Daniel become reluctantly adjusted to how they are hopelessly entangled in each other's lives and make the horrifying discovery that they may in fact be friends. COBRA KAI was such a cultural phenomenon that Sony Pictures saw that the KARATE KID brand was on the rise... and nonsensically released a statement in 2022 shortly after COBRA KAI's Season 5 had been released, announcing "The return of the original KARATE KID franchise" on June 7, 2024.

There was no cast, director or writer attached; Sony Pictures had simply seen that with the KARATE KID brand revitalized via the COBRA KAI TV show, they were going to have a movie with the KARATE KID brand in theatres in the summer of 2024... and would figure out what would be in the movie later. The COBRA KAI producers released a statement clarifying that they had no involvement in the KARATE KID film for 2024 but wished it well. Over a year after the original announcement, Sony Pictures finally announced a director, Jonathan Entwistle and also that the film would feature both Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, despite the Mr. Han character appearing to exist in a separate continuity. The COBRA KAI producers also said that they had offered notes on the movie script, but that there was no tie in between the film and the TV show beyond Daniel LaRusso appearing in both.

Macchio further clarified that he would be filming the sixth season of COBRA KAI and then appear in the new KARATE KID movie, and that at his urging, Sony Pictures had moved the release date to May 30, 2025, rather than see it come out before COBRA KAI had finished its sixth and final season.

COBRA KAI had a grand finale in February 2025. KARATE KID: LEGENDS came out at the end of May. And...

The movie is not terrible. It's not bad. It's absolutely fine. The opening starts with a reprise of THE KARATE KID II where Miyagi shares his family history; we hear again how his 17th ancestor, Shimpo, was a fisherman who vanished in a storm, thought to have been washed out to sea. Shimpo vanished, but returned by ship 10 years later with a Chinese wife, two children, and what Miyagi calls "the secret of Miyagi-Do Karate."

In this reprise, however, Miyagi tells an extended version of his story, where he reveals that Shimpo washed ashore in China and was taken in by the Han family, who shared their kung fu with Shimpo, and that the Han and Miyagi families remain close even in the present day. Immediately at the outset, LEGENDS explains how the Miyagi characters and the Jackie Chan-portrayed Mr. Han character can exist in the same universe and why their styles of karate and kung fu are so similar. The movie then shifts to China briefly, focusing on Chinese teenager and kung fu student Li Fong, played by the charming and affable Ben Wang. Li is Mr. Han's grand-nephew, and Li's mother moves with Li to New York City, away from Han's kung fu academy where Ben encounters an MMA-trained bully named Conor and a love interest named Mia whose father's pizza restaurant is struggling.

Through a somewhat tangled plot, Li must compete in a karate tournament against Conor to save Mia's pizza shop; Han visits New York to train Li -- and elects to travel to Reseda to find Daniel LaRusso, asking Daniel to help him train Li in Miyagi-Do Karate to win the tournament.

It's at this point that the legal issues become clear: LEGENDS makes absolutely no reference to Daniel's life for most of the film. We see him living in Miyagi's house: there is no reference to Daniel's job, family, wife, children, business, whether or not he's maintained his karate training, or what he's been doing with his life since THE KARATE KID III in 1989. LEGENDS brings in the Daniel character but presents him as a complete blank aside from offering good-natured karate mentorship to Li.

Why? Because LEGENDS cannot use any characters or plot elements from COBRA KAI. The COBRA KAI series was made under television license and developed original characters that are held by the Sony TV division in collaboration with Hurwitz & Schlossberg Productions and Netflix, with Netflix effectively owning the majority of the show. Sony Pictures, the film branch, cannot use any characters that first appeared in COBRA KAI without entering some agreement with Netflix: they have no access to COBRA KAI's cast and cannot feature Daniel's wife, Daniel's business, Daniel's friends, Daniel's students, Daniel's kids. It's not impossible that Sony Pictures could have licensed them back from Netflix, but the convolutions and cost were likely seen counter to getting the KARATE KID brand back in theatres as opposed to promoting a Netflix property, effectively a rival.

As a result, Daniel LaRusso is nearly a cipher in LEGENDS. The movie makes no effort to define Daniel's life. Ralph Macchio refused to allow the film to contradict COBRA KAI in any way, but it also can't make any significant references or explicit tie-ins. They can't even show Daniel using any of the karate techniques that were first shown in COBRA KAI.

This also cripples LEGENDS' depiction of Daniel further: it's unclear why Han wants Daniel to teach Li anything; Li is already a capable martial artist and Ralph Macchio's above average athleticism and passable karate are clearly a lesser level of skill than Jackie Chan's Han or Ben Wang's Li.

The fiction declares that Daniel LaRusso is a martial arts master equal to the legendary; the obvious onscreen reality is that Ralph Macchio is a reasonably athletic man with limited martial arts training who can fake it for the camera -- but because Jackie Chan and Ben Wang are actual martial artists, Macchio looks like an imposter next to them, and all the points of karate that COBRA KAI developed for Daniel: his minimalism, his defense-only, his pressure point manipulation -- all of it is inaccessible and off-limits to LEGENDS.

LEGENDS comes off as simply an exercise in managing the KARATE KID IP: unifying the two separate timelines, making it possible to continue in the future as an anthology movie series whether the next film features Ben Wang or a new Karate Kid who can be either from Daniel's end or Mr. Han's end of the universe. Where THE KARATE KID and COBRA KAI had a lot to say about violence, aggression, pacifism, passivity, self-defense and physical offense, LEGENDS seems to simply run through the old formula. Li Fong is already a martial artist, so any training he receives seems trivial. The Conor villain has no backstory or personality beyond superficial savagery. LEGENDS is a film without a point or a purpose beyond rearranging the IP elements. It is not art. It is a product.

Spoiler warning.

Hilariously, the final scene of the film features Daniel back at home and hanging out with Johnny Lawrence with William Zabka making a cameo, validating the COBRA KAI continuity, and permissible because Johnny first appeared in the 1984 film. In this single scene, largely improvised by the actors, LEGENDS seems to accidentally concede that THE KARATE KID, even if going by another name on Netflix, is the franchise of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, and a KARATE KID film, even this mediocrity, is unable to get to the end without Daniel and Johnny reclaiming the narrative. COBRA KAI ended with Johnny and Daniel sharing a meal. LEGENDS ends the same way, which only serves to indicate how pointless LEGENDS really was.

This was probably more than what you really needed or wanted to know.