Karate Kid still kicks
Ralph Macchio tells Louise Rugendyke how he was persuaded to become the Karate Kid once more.
Ralph Macchio chuckles as he reflects on the success of Cobra Kai. ‘‘The low expectations did not hurt, did not hurt,’’ he says. ‘‘I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be the worst cash grab, one note [show].’ And the creators just did a beautiful job.’’
Macchio is calling in over Zoom from his home in Long Island, in New York State. Outside the winter sky is starting to darken, but Macchio is keen to say hello in that peculiarly American way to his ‘‘friends Down Under’’. He is relaxed and chatty, and happily riding a wave of nostalgia that has delivered him the No 1 action show on Netflix.
For the uninitiated, Cobra Kai isa modern-day spin-off of The Karate Kid, the 1984 film that made a baby-faced 22-year-old Macchio a household name. In it, he played Daniel LaRusso, a poor kid bullied at his Los Angeles high school who fights his way to the All Valley Karate Championship with the help of an eccentric handyman, Mr Miyagi (Pat Morita). It was good, harmless fun that had everyone quoting ‘‘wax on, wax off’’ for the next, well, 30 years.
It was also the film Macchio spent most of his career running from – ‘‘frozen in time’’ is how he describes it. Its huge success tied him to a couple of sequels and, apart from a well-received role in the Oscar-winning film My Cousin Vinny ,he became the obligatory once-was-famous special guest star on shows such as How I Met Your Mother and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Then came a recurring spot in the comedy Ugly Betty in 2008 and then another as a corrupt cop in HBO’s The Deuce in 2017.
But he just couldn’t shake The Karate Kid. And neither, it seems, could its legion of fans, who began to conjure up alternative histories of the film: What if Danny wasn’t the hero? What if Danny was the villain who bullied the rich, floppy-haired Johnny Lawrence (played by William Zabka), from the Cobra Kai dojo? What if everything you ever knew about The Karate Kid was wrong?
The fan theory became so popular that writers and Karate Kid obsessives Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg pitched a show that was centred on Lawrence’s point of view, where the rich bad boy was now a 50-something wastrel still tormented by the All Valley loss, while LaRusso was a successful car salesman who boasts ‘‘we kick the competition’’. The two reconnect when Lawrence decides to reopen the Cobra Kai dojo and LaRusso tries to stop him.
The rest is history. The first two seasons of Cobra Kai appeared on YouTube Red in 2018 and 2019, but it wasn’t until Netflix scooped it up and it premiered on the streaming service in
September last year that, to use a phrase popular in the show, Cobra Kai struck hard. It shot to the top of the Netflix rankings in the United States, as well as in Australia and the United Kingdom.
The wax was back on, so to speak. So why did Macchio run back to what he had been trying to escape? Well, for that we have to look to another 80s champ: Rocky Balboa.
‘‘For 30 years, I heard many, many ideas,’’ he says. ‘‘And they were all shortsighted, either one joke ideas or big eye rolls. And then after Pat Morita passed away [in 2005], we lost that component of going back to LaRusso’s life, there was never a tie-in that made sense.
‘‘When [Heald, Hurwitz and Schlossberg] brought this to me, I’m pretty sure I was the last one to come to the party, because I was the most resistant. Because the show is Cobra Kai, it sees the world through the eyes of Johnny Lawrence, at least at the onset.
‘‘[Rocky spin-off] Creed had just been released, probably about six or eight months before then. And that was sort of a glimpse into how to take a franchise like Rocky and come in from another perspective. You’re not making Rocky VII, you’re making Creed. And Rocky Balboa then finds his way in that world of where he fits.’’
Now 59, Macchio says the success of Cobra Kai has ‘‘exceeded all expectations’’ and he’s right. So much of Cobra Kai shouldn’t work – LaRusso is a smug git, Lawrence is a charismatic mess stuck in the 80s and REO Speedwagon is unironically on the soundtrack – but somehow it does. In my first sitting, I inhaled five episodes, giggling at the old film clips, another sensible school teacher friend admitted to watching it ‘‘embarrassingly fast’’, and then a very chic journalist friend in Paris said she had a crush on Zabka.
What was going on? Do we all just want to be 10 years old again?
‘‘I call it comfort food,’’ says Macchio. ‘‘It’s the best dish your grandmother ever made that reminded you of a simpler time. And in the case of Cobra Kai, I hear that a lot from the original fans who saw the movie in the 80s, or watched it on television in the 90s or in the early 2000s. They feel that slice of nostalgia.
‘‘But also, as far as the stories and characters go, we’re good. They struck a chord. And maybe it reminds us of a simpler time, certainly in the current climate of the world.’’
The other reason Cobra Kai works is because it’s a top-shelf case study in how to reboot a franchise: it respects the original, surprises the audience and finds enough grey areas in its old characters to give them new life. Essentially, it takes The Karate Kid lore – but not itself – seriously.
It was the grey areas that interested Macchio the most when he again picked up LaRusso, who fluctuates between the good guy of old and revelling in Lawrence’s misfortune. However, he was also mindful of not trashing The Karate Kid’s legacy (Macchio stands by the controversial crane kick at the end of The Karate Kid).
‘‘It was not easy for me to dive fully in,’’ says Macchio of LaRusso’s jerkier aspects. ‘‘Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, I see this line is written specifically to gain sympathy for who was the antagonist’ – flip the script, you know? So there was always the push and pull with the writers … It’s kind of fun to play both sides of that as long as the audience sees both of these characters have good intentions.’’
While seasons one and two of Cobra Kai focused more on Lawrence’s shambolic side of the story, season three sees LaRusso returning to Okinawa, the traditional home of Miyagi-do. And unlike in The Karate Kid II, where Hawaii was swapped in for Okinawa, this time Macchio actually travelled to Japan.
‘‘It was like a long weekend, sort of like going to Australia for tea one afternoon,’’ says Macchio, laughing. ‘‘It’s around the other side of the planet. But it felt close to having the essence of Pat Morita and Mr Miyagi in the show. It’s like putting the flag on the Moon. It was a nice big box to check.’’ – Sydney Morning Herald
Season three of Cobra Kai is now available to stream on Netflix.