“Jon, Josh and Hayden know way more about the films than I ever did,” marvels Macchio. But what could have been pure self-indulgence becomes surprisingly rich and textured, as Heald, Hurwitz and Schlossberg take seemingly minor elements from the original film (most notably the social class differences between Daniel and Johnny, but also the cars, the houses and the great fan debate about whether Daniel cheated in the tournament) and blow them up into whole episodes that go to far deeper places than the movies touched upon. Created by Karate Kid superfans Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, it imagines what happened to Daniel and his nemesis Johnny (William Zabka) 34 years on from the famous tournament, with Daniel now a successful car salesman and Johnny a barely functioning alcoholic, until he decides to reopen a certain karate school. #Karate kid 1984 full movie ali and johnny and daniel seriesBut it’s The Karate Kid – seemingly the most simple of 80s blockbusters – that has unexpectedly had the most satisfying afterlife with Cobra Kai, the ludicrously enjoyable series that started on YouTube and has just been bought by Netflix.Ĭobra Kai is the ultimate fan fic, but in the best possible way. Nostalgia for those films and the deceptively basic (but actually tenaciously deep) joys they brought means 80s films are, once again, having a comeback, with the third Bill & Ted film getting released next month in the UK, a fifth Indiana Jones apparently creaking out in 2022, and the official sequel to Dirty Dancing now in the works. Ralph Macchio practices the famous crane kick. ![]() Back in the 80s, a young person could become a huge star with just one movie and, to a large extent, those movies still define those actors: Tom Cruise had Risky Business, Matthew Broderick had Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Michael J Fox had Back to the Future and Macchio had The Karate Kid. It is hard to convey just how stratospherically famous Macchio, now 58, became when The Karate Kid – in which he played plucky lower middle-class teen Daniel LaRusso, crane-kicking the snotty rich kids – came out in 1984. And if I’m in a Japanese restaurant and a fly is in the building, I have about nine seconds to get out,” he says, referring, of course, to the legendary Karate Kid scene in which Daniel (Macchio) catches a fly with chopsticks. “It’s a rare sporting event I go to when I don’t hear You’re the Best Around. But, yeah, it is pretty often,” Macchio tells me on the phone from his home on Long Island, sounding every inch the cheerful suburban dad he has been for the past three decades. “It might have been a day when I was sick and stayed in my room all day. I n the past 36 years, there has been, Ralph Macchio says, just one day, maybe, when someone hasn’t mentioned The Karate Kid to him.
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