The Karate Kid
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
The Karate Kid is a 1984 John G. Avildsen film about a teenaged boy, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), who moves with his mother from New Jersey to the San Fernando Valley town of Reseda. The handyman of their apartment building is a kindly and humble Okinawan immigrant named Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita, stunt work by Fumio Demura).
The last night of summer, Daniel and his new friends, including Ali (Elisabeth Shue), are at the beach, when Ali's boyfriend Johnny (William Zabka) and his friends, pull up on motorcycles. Johnny and Ali begin arguing, and Ali blasts a radio. Angered, Johnny throws the radio to the ground. Daniel moves to pick it up, and ignores Johnny's warning not to get involved. Soon Daniel and Johnny fight, but Daniel loses. Unwittingly, Daniel has made an enemy of one of Cobra Kai karate dojo's best students.
Johnny and his cronies torment Daniel as much as they can. When Daniel retaliates at a Halloween dance, he is pursued by Johnny and his friends who begin to seriously beat Daniel with potentially deadly force. Just then, Mr. Miyagi intervenes and rescues Daniel by singlehandedly thrashing the boy's attackers. Daniel finds that Mr. Miyagi knows karate, and asks him to be his teacher.
With some persuasion, Miyagi agrees to accompany Daniel to confront the sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo and insist that he tell his students to stop their harassment of Daniel. However, the sensei is a vicious fighter who has no patience for mercy or responsible use of his instruction. To settle the matter, Miyagi announces Daniel will enter a Valley-wide tournament where Cobra Kai students can fight Daniel on equal terms. Miyagi also requests that Johnny and his friends stop bullying Daniel in the interim while the boy is trained. The instructor, Kreese (Martin Kove) assents and orders his students to leave Daniel alone, but threatens to permit the harassment to resume if Daniel does not appear at the tournament and Miyagi himself is to be targeted as well.
Mr. Miyagi becomes like Daniel's father, but Daniel is sometimes puzzled by Miyagi's teaching methods and behavior. For instance, instead of standard instruction, Miyagi initially has Daniel perform several laborious chores which he insists must be done with specific hand and arm movements. Eventually, Daniel angrily confronts Miyagi about this labor and Miyagi shows him that in doing those chores with those movements, Daniel has in fact being subconsciously learning his defensive blocks, the vital first step in karate training. As the story moves on, Miyagi explains to Daniel about life, about how, in his opinion, everything has a reason to be the way it is, and about the meaning of things in life.
At the tournament, Daniel is an underdog. Miyagi has trained him well, however, and in a final scene made in true Avildsen fashion, Daniel beats his final opponent, none other than Johnny, with an arms-spread-like-wings kick to the chin called the Crane Technique. At the end of the movie, Johnny acknowledges Daniel respectfully while Miyagi looks on approvingly.
The Karate Kid became a karate version of the boxing movie Rocky (also directed by Avildsen).
The Karate Kid spawned an entire franchise of related items and memorabilia, such as action figures, head bands, posters, t-shirts, etc. It also had three sequels, and it launched the careers of Macchio, who would turn into a teen idol featured on the covers of magazines such as Tiger Beat, Morita, who made several other movies including the three sequels, and Elisabeth Shue. It has also been credited with renewing youth interest in martial arts with a depiction of the discipline people in the martial arts community commented was much more realistic than the standard spectacles in martial arts films. The characters of Daniel and his mother are noteworthy as positive media portrayals of Italian-Americans.
Its last sequel, The Next Karate Kid (1994), launched the career of actress Hilary Swank, who played Mr. Miyagi's new female student.
