The Karate Kid, Part II ...
... The ice-breaking scene.
The Karate Kid was always kind of a gravity-defying film, if you think about it, since the only truly inventive thing about it was the way in which it remixed cliches. If it had been more honest, its title would have been
Rocky Junior Takes Up Martial Arts Instead Of Boxing. It was one of those films that I wound up seeing in grade school, when the teachers wanted to give us a "free day," because it didn't have any naughty words or sex, but it had just enough violence to keep the little boys in class from getting bored. Plus, it had an upbeat Underdog Hero Beats The Bullies And Gets The Girl thing going on, which tends to resonate as strongly with grade school kids as anyone else. All in all, it was a decent, entertaining, mostly inoffensive little film, but not an especially great one, and not one that I probably would have asked my parents to take me to, and yet, it somehow gained enough of a following to spawn three sequels, of which only one was any damn good.
But to be fair to
The Karate Kid, Part II, not only was it good, it was one hell of a lot better than the original, which still stands up as an okay film, but which seems a bit cringe-worthy, in retrospect, in its somewhat one-note portrayal of Miyagi as The Inscrutable Asian Mentor To The White Hero. By contrast, while Part II retains much of the focus on Ralph Macchio's Daniel-San as the protagonist, it actually does a lot to develop the character of Miyagi, which allows the all-too-often criminally under-utilized Pat Morita to shine a lot more. I'm pretty sure I saw Part II with my Aunt Barb, again, when I was still a grade school kid (Barb was one of my favorite aunts growing up, because she always took me to movies and let me borrow her Time-Life books on
The Enchanted World and
Mysteries of the Unknown), and even as a little kid, I liked that Miyagi wasn't just a reactive cardboard cut-out adult, but that he had his own backstory, and his own drama during the course of the movie's plot. Looking back on it, it kind of reminds me of the parallel romance arcs of Marty McFly and Doc Brown in
Back to the Future Part III.
True story: The first time I saw this film, I was so ignorant of the outside world that I honestly thought that Okinawa was a purely fictional place, that they'd made up just for these movies, like Gotham City was for Batman. In my defense, I was still in grade school.
I love Yuji Okumoto as Chozen in this scene. The dialogue that's written for his character is consistently terrible, and his acting is so bad that it is - dare I say it? - bordering on the
Shatner-esque, and yet, he delivers his godawful lines with a courageous conviction, practically roaring his responses - even when they're only one word apiece, like "
YES!!!" or "
WRONG!!!" - as if valiantly attempting to compensate for how embarrassingly hackneyed each phrase is:
- "Let us FIND OUT, eh?"
- "There IS no other time!"
- "You go NOWHERE!"
- "You have a CHOICE - broken ICE, or broken NECK."
And yes, Chozen is a totally mono-dimensional cipher, but in a weird sort of way, he's actually sort of refreshing, because
he's not really a racial stereotype. I mean, let's remember, this was the 1980s, back when Asians were either scrawny, comedic, virginal computer nerds or backstabbing, cowardly, cerebral manipulators, so in that sense, by being a studly, thuggish, more-brawn-than-brains bad-ass bully, Chozen was actually
bucking the cultural trend of racial stereotypes traditionally ascribed to Asian villains in Western cinema. If nothing else, he's light years more of a credible threat than William Zabka as Johnny the
Aryan youth Cobra Kai in the original film.
The real tragedy of watching this scene now is that the three best actors in it are dead. Pat Morita was a talented and versatile actor, but most American moviegoers never knew, because he was so restrictively typecast that even interviewers would occasionally assume that his command of the English language was no better than Miyagi's (he was born in motherfucking
California, for Christ's sake). And if you want proof of how superior Part II was to the original film, consider this - the original film's arch-villain was played by Martin Kove, a.k.a. The Literate Man's Randall "Tex" Cobb, whereas Part II's arch-villain was played by Danny Kamekona, whose performance as Sato evoked the best of Erik Larsen's "dressed for success" portrayals of Doctor Octopus in the Spider-Man comics. Between the shades, the suits, the build and the
voice, every time Sato stepped into a scene, he made it clear that
somebody's shit was going to get fucked up, hardcore. In fact, fuck Rupert Everett - when they made the live-action
Inspector Gadget film, why the hell didn't they cast Kamekona as Dr. Claw? I mean, aside from the fact that he was already dead by then? Not only did he LOOK the part, with a granite slab of a face that could betray surprisingly subtle nuances of emotion, but all you have to do is imagine his voice - "
YOUUUUUU ARE COVERED" - growling, "NEEEEEEXT TIIIIIIME, GADGET ...
NEEEEEEXT TIIIIIIME!!!"
And, oh, Nobu McCarthy. Now, granted, every short, skinny white boy who saw Part II, myself included, zeroed in on Tamlyn Tomita, as Daniel-San's cute girlfriend, because much like the rest of the film, there was more than a bit of pandering to Mighty Whitey fantasies of tapping some hot Asian ass. It's weird to realize that the giggling teenage girl from that film was (and obviously still is) nine years older than me, which means that she's now 42 years old, and which, in turn, gives me a whole new reason to lust after her all over again, because she now looks like this ...
... Which, in turn, means HOLY SHIT MILF.
But, oh, Nobu McCarthy. Remembering what I thought and felt the first time I saw this film, I realize now that my MILF love dates back even further than I'd been consciously aware of, because I was, what, 11 years old, when I saw this film? And she was already just past
50 YEARS OLD. AND YET, when I saw the scenes of McCarthy and Tomita, I remember myself, not even consciously
thinking, but more
feeling like, "Daniel-San's girlfriend is
really pretty ... but
Miyagi's old lady girlfriend is kind of cute, too."
She was only 67 years old when she died (which suddenly makes me worried about Elisabeth Sladen's mortality), and time seems to have remained kind to her, even in her later years:
Tell me you wouldn't have.
P.S. As far as I can recall, "Rock And Roll Over You" is the only Moody Blues song I've ever enjoyed, and I have to attribute that to its use as the background music in this scene alone.