130 – The one about The Karate Kid

Posted on by

Welcome to episode 130. Today, we talk about Karate Kid!

The Karate Kid is a 1984 American martial arts romantic drama film directed by John G. Avildsen and written by Robert Mark Kamen, starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita and Elisabeth Shue.

Join Scott, Randy, Brian and Ibbott as they chew their bikes out for being the worst ever.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

- Direct MP3 Download
- iTunes Link
- RSS Feed

Special thanks to Audible.com this week for sponsoring the show. As usual, a HUGE thanks to Scott Fletcher, the official announcer of Film Sack Central. Hey! Why not leave us a nice review on iTunes if you like the show?

Up next? Follow us on twitter to find out!

33 thoughts on “130 – The one about The Karate Kid”

  2. They have Highlander 2: The Renegade Edition is on streaming. This could be the first chance for filmsack to do an original and a sequel. I haven’t seen it, but read that they restructured it and took out the alien stuff.

  3. Larry Drake, Yahoo#1 at Beach, that was the scene when Mr Miyagi karate chops the tops off the bottles that were resting on his wheel arches.
    Excellent sack.

  5. Guys, loved the Karate Kid podcast. One minor quibble, though: The guy who yells “Get him a body bag!” is Tommy. The guy who takes out Daniel’s knee is Bobby. So there was no instant remorse/change of heart involved.

  7. A brilliant episode. I could almost taste the nostalgia for this movie, and the time it evoked, for Randy. One of the great thing about this podcast is that the group are all around my age, so when they talk about movies from their youth, it’s mine as well, so its great to compare and contrast our respective lives.

    Side note: have spent the last 4 months catching up with all the episodes (mostly out of order – it’s how I roll, apparently) and this episode was one of the finest. Looking forward to hearing many more and hopefully The Hitcher sooner rather than later!

  9. My boyfriend has maintained for years that Daniel is just a punk kid who basically brings on all of his own troubles. It was fun to hear you guys also touch on a lot of Daniel’s bratty actions and bad attitude.

    • Just wondering — did your boyfriend ever have to move a great distance as a kid?

      It seems to me that Daniel’s characterization was based almost entirely on this one thing. He was wrecked by it. He wasn’t necessarily a punk before he had to move, and perhaps a lot of his punk behaviors were just reactionary.

      • No. He never had to move any great distance at all. I think this goes back to maybe understanding where Daniel was coming from more when you view the movie as a kid (don’t we all have angst about SOMETHING at that age?) and then seeing it again as an adult. You pick up on things that you didn’t notice or you view them differently. As a kid, Daniel’s action seem normal. As a guy who is slowly turning into THAT old man in the neighborhood, you see Daniel as a punk kid who is trashing his bike (making lots of noise to disturb the other tenants), vandalizing school property (by flooding it with water), and wrecking a perfectly fine evening at the country club.

        • yeah but even as a kid i thought he was dumb to dump water on that dude’s head. pro tip: if you don’t want to get beat down, don’t start shit you can’t finish :D

        • Wait, Daniel wrecked a perfectly fine evening at the country club? Not the douchebag who was assaulting his girlfriend on the dance floor?

  10. Wow…had no idea the same guy directed Karate Kid and Rocky. Are we sure he didn’t have a hand in The Dark Knight Rises also?

  11. Buddy Revell is one of the most awesome bullies ever. I heard you Brian, you will not be silenced!

  13. Pingback: Personal Musing 9/11/12: AI War continued gaming, Greenlight approves 10 games, other musings and much more… « A Paladin Without A Crusade…

  16. I like you guys was young and impressionable (14) when this movie came out and remember loving it (as well as Part II). My desire to see it again or the sequel has always been “no thanks” as I figure the memory is probably better than the reality. But, your sacking has almost made me want to revisit it, mostly to see young and beautiful Elizabeth Shue.

    Now, while I’ll admit she still looks pretty fine considering her age, I find her the most annoying actor on CSI right now. She constantly has this expression on her face like she just ran 20 blocks to shoot her scene and really wishes she could just rest for a minute first.

    Has anyone questioned why the “bully” was so prevelant in the eighties, but seems to be fairly missing from current movie culture? It seems with bullying such a main stream topic it would be much easier to put a character across as truly evil by making him a bully. My initial thought when Scott asked “Best Bully” was BIff Tannen, because he was so cartoony a bully that you hated him even though you never, ever once thought he would win.

    And that for that rundown (by Randy I think?) of future sacks. I will definitely be tuning in each week. Keep on sackin’ boys.

    • If you were to take 80s movies as a genre, I’d say they were almost universally about the underdog. The bad guy was always the one in power. Either rich parents, the all-American frat boys, the crooked Mayor, the Corporation, or the school bully. Anyone who had power over the hero. And the hero almost universally “won” either by getting the bad to accept them, or by getting a crowd of people to support them and down out the villain’s protests. Usually this was done through some performance art, but a Karate tournament counts, I’d say. The underdog hero still exists of course, and is still often the protagonist, but I think we stopped thinking we could win over the school with a cool rap number and a fog machine at the talent show.

  18. You see, guys? Not all 80s films are shite! (joke, lol. Seriously, it’s a joke)

    And I’m with Scott on ID4, I hate it. Oh, Bulletproof starring Busey? Awesome bad movie! I quite liked Predators and Prince of Darkness is good. It’s the middle entry of Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ the other two films being The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness which is very underrated.

    If you guys are interested, Total Film magazine have this list of 50 best unintentionally hilarious films of all time, some obscure bad ones in there and some you’ve heard of and a couple you have sacked!- http://www.totalfilm.com/features/50-most-unintentionally-hilarious-movies-of-all-time

    Jimmy B, out! :D

  19. Great show as always guys. After you mentioned Ralph Macchio looking younger than his age I checked out another of his films that I loved growing up ‘The Outsiders’ from 1983 which also starred C.Thomas Howell. When you compare their IMDb photos it’s amazing to think that Ralph is older by 4 years.
    Keep up the good work. Jen from Bracknell UK

Comments are closed.