KarateFest '05

Here's why I love my job.

I don't get paid a whole lot, and I have to drive an hour to get there, and I have to deal with this guy, but I spent the entire day at work watching the complete Karate Kid Saga.

Oh yes, friends. My life is now complete. Here's a picture of the inside of my head at roughly 10:40 this morning:



Yes, the true Holy Trilogy, and the Apocrypha. I found it used at Manifest this morning and immediately did what the RZA would refer to as Holy Mathematics: Eight hours of work. Four movies. Very few customers. Sounds to me like the formula for an awesome day.

The day began at eleven with Daniel's journey to Recita and ended at seven, halfway through Academy Award-winner Hillary Swank's performance in The Next Karate Kid.

Now I've already spoken at length about The Karate Kid, but I haven't really addressed its sequels too much.

Except for the scenes in the beginning where Miyagi makes John Kreese punch the car windows and then utterly ruins his life in front of his students, Karate Kid 2 doesn't do it for me. And those scenes were actually filmed as the ending to Karate Kid, until the filmmakers (including John G. Alvidsen, of Rocky fame) realized that they were making the best movie of all time and they could probably squeeze a sequel out of it. It did, however, spawn an awesome British toy commercial that you REALLY ought to watch.

The plot, in case you haven't rushed out and bought it yet, is this: Daniel and Miyagi go to Okinawa, where one of Miyagi's old friends, Sato, wants to kill him. They eventually work it out, but Daniel has to fight Sato's student, Chozen, in a deathmatch--COUNT DANTE STYLE! The Crane Kick is not as undefendable as previously advertized and Daniel has to beat Chozen down using the secret Miyagi Drum Technique, which basically consists of him punching Chozen in the face until he falls down.

My favorite moment of the day, small as it may seem, happened at about five. This guy walked into the store and walked up to me, looking over at the TV.

"You watching Karate Kid?" he asked.

"Nope. Karate Kid III."

It's my favorite of the sequels. Kreese, his life having been utterly ruined by Miyagi, contacts his buddy from the 'Nam, Terry Silver, who is one of the best supervillains in the history of film. Not only is he a devious karate master who actually rubs his hands with devilish glee at one point, but he's also a millionaire who made his fortune dumping toxic waste. He's awesome. Anyway, he hires Mike Burns, the "Bad Boy of Karate," to force Daniel to defend his title at the All-Valley Karate Tournament in a plan to utterly humiliate him and drive him apart from Mr. Miyagi.

A quick note about this. Karate Kid was made in 1983. Karate Kid III was made in 1989. That's a six year difference. But in the actual movie, only nine months have passed. It's the next year's All-Valley Tournament. Weird.

It was during our screening of III that the Cap'n made his apperance. I'd run out to grab some drinks at the time, so Tug got the full brunt of his nonsense, which I then heard about:

"He started talking about how they were breathing wrong. Yeah, because he used to go to bars and just get in fights all the time. They knew this guy who wouldn't call the police, he'd just charge them for whatever they broke. But then they found out that he was just having his kids rebuild the furniture in the back, so they told a cop, who didn't care. And not only did that story not have a point, but I'm pretty sure that he made it up as he was talking."

Yikes.

As for The Next Karate Kid, it's pretty rough. It's the only one that I've never actually seen before.

I did, however, own the novelization when I was twelve. And that's real.