The Karate Kid (1984) on Netflix
Daniel LaRusso moves from New Jersey to Los Angeles with his mother, and Johnny Lawrence's Cobra Kai friends bully him. The handyman Mr. Miyagi agrees to teach him karate.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.4/10274,762 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Daniel LaRusso, seventeen, leaves Newark, New Jersey, with his widowed mother Lucille for the Reseda neighborhood of Los Angeles. At a beach party he meets Ali Mills, a cheerleader from Encino, and draws the hostility of her ex-boyfriend Johnny Lawrence, the top student at the Cobra Kai dojo, where John Kreese trains an aggressive style of karate. Johnny's friends make Daniel their target. Daniel asks the apartment handyman, Nariyoshi Miyagi, to teach him karate; Miyagi declines, but takes him to the dojo, where he asks Kreese to call off the harassment and proposes a bargain: Daniel will compete in the Under 18 All-Valley Karate Championships against Cobra Kai's students, and the bullying stops while Miyagi trains him.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Karate Kid (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- William Zabka won the role of Johnny Lawrence with an audition in which he wore a headband, walked up to and grabbed director John Avildsen while telling him to watch his mouth, then left the room and returned to say it was Johnny, not Billy.
- Joe Esposito's "You're the Best", heard during the tournament montage, was originally written for Rocky III but rejected by Sylvester Stallone, who chose Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" instead.
- The studio first wanted Toshiro Mifune, star of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Seven Samurai, for Mr. Miyagi, but he did not speak English. Pat Morita was rejected for his Happy Days comedy roles, then grew a beard, auditioned again with an accent based on his uncle's, and got the part.
- Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr., Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer, Emilio Estevez, Nicolas Cage, Anthony Edwards, C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Eric Stoltz and D. B. Sweeney were all considered for the part of Daniel before Ralph Macchio was cast.
- Helen Hunt and Demi Moore were considered for Ali Mills, but Elisabeth Shue won the part partly on the strength of a widely popular early-1980s Burger King commercial. The film was the screen debut of both Shue and William Zabka.
- Producer Jerry Weintraub had optioned a news article about the young son of a single mother who earned a black belt to defend himself from bullies, and screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen drew on that article and his own life for The Karate Kid.
- The title had to be cleared with DC Comics, which owns a character called Karate Kid, a Legion of Super-Heroes member created in 1966; permission for the film and its sequels came in 1984.
- The film made Ralph Macchio a teen idol on the covers of magazines like Tiger Beat and revived Pat Morita's career, bringing him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor after his comedic role as Arnold on Happy Days.
