I Saw The Karate Kid on Cable Last Night, and the Experience Could Not Have Turned Out Better For Me

It wasn’t actually last night, but recently anyway. Several pleasing (and perhaps not totally bloodless) revelations came my way during the viewing.

First: if you swap out the karate tournament at the climax with a rap battle, you arrive at the film Eight Mile.

Eight Mile, it would seem, is explicitly built on an extremely similar structure to The Karate Kid. Both star small young men who live in a culture/society that doesn’t accept them and are bullied, coerced, forced into bad situations, and even beaten up by their antagonists, even throughout the final climactic competition, only to use their various injuries against their enemies to win the tournament in a thrilling coup of personal triumph.

Daniel La Russo is bullied because he’s poor (comparatively). B Rabbit is bullied because he’s white (basically). And I’m not trying to take anything away from either film by pointing out similarities. I just think it’s interesting.

Another interesting thing about The Karate Kid, which I must give credit to the cable program for mentioning, is that it not only shares a director with the early films of the Rocky franchise, it also shares a theme song, in a way. Turns out that Joe Esposito’s undeniably appealing “You’re the Best Around” was originally written for Rocky III, only to be denied in place of “Eye of the Tiger”. This is an awesome detail to me, because it points to the surprising commercial/critical appeal of The Karate Kid, being made in the likeness of Rocky, and how much director John G. Avildsen relied upon–and perfected–similar tropes present in each. Rocky Balboa has more than a little in common with our young heroes mentioned above.

Anyways, I truly love The Karate Kid, to the point that I may have even been caught yelling at the TV during the ultra-exciting tournament.

Now, let’s get down to business: