Pop Culture Happy Hour - Karate Kid: Legends And What's Making Us Happy

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

The Karate Kid has been sequelized, serialized, spun off and rebooted, and now it's back, as Karate Kid: Legends. The new film stars Ben Wang as a kid who's mentored by Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, reprising their roles from the franchise. But at its heart, the movie is about a kid who must train hard, learn life lessons, and kick a bully hard in the face.In honor of Toy Story's 30th anniversary, we're ranking the Pixar movies. What do you think is the best Pixar feature? Vote now! We'll talk about the results in an upcoming episode. Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The Karate Kid has been sequelized, serialized, spun off, and rebooted, and now it's back as Karate Kid Legends. The new film stars Ben Wong as a kid, a karate kid, if you will, who's mentored by Jackie Chan and Ralph Machio. I'm Stephen Thompson. Joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Denver, hey, Walter.

Hey, Stephen. It is a pleasure to have you here. So the Karate Kid's cinematic universe has, appropriately enough, many branches. Starting with the original 1984 film, which starred young Ralph Machio and Pat Marita as the Sensei Mr. Miyagi, the series has taken us through many training montages, mentorships, love interests, and karate tournaments, and route to where we are now. The new film, Karate Kid Legends, ties many of those threads together. It's devoted to the lore of the original movie, but also to the 2010 remake starring Jackie Chan.

and it nods to the TV series Cobra Kai. But in the end, what really matters is the by now very familiar bones of the story, an underdog kid who moves to a new place and has to improve his martial arts skills in order to face down a bully. This time it's Ben Wong playing Li Fong. This story is more complicated than that. Of course, Li Fong is also trying to save a local pizza place run by his new love interest's dad, played by Joshua Jackson. There's also some business about lone sharks, a dead sibling, an overbearing mom,

in a big karate tournament. And of course, Jackie Chan and Ralph Machio show up to help out. But at its heart, this is the Karate Kid Redux, a new film in which a new kid must train hard, learn life lessons, and kick a bully hard in the face. Karate Kid Legends is in theaters now.

Walter Chow, you've been following the Karate Kid franchise for as long as I have. What do you think about this new movie? I have no recollection of the new movie, although I have seen it twice. It is so formulaic. It is so perfectly immodulated. You know, I compare it to an IKEA catalog. There's something truly artful

about making something that's so functional. And at the end of it, it's just, it's astonishing to me that after six films, it's 60-some episodes of Cobra Kai. 40-some odd years. Over 40 years, my entire life really watching movies, that they're still making the same movie. And there's something at once reassuring about that, but also something kind of depressing about. it, I guess. It's like, you know, if you have that pair of slippers that you really love, there's really, it's worn in, and it smells just the way you like, it's got your toe holes in it, you know, all that stuff, it's very comfortable. It's also kind of depressing that you still have that. So there's that for me with a new karate kid. I call it generations, just like when

they melded the two timelines and Star Trek for a while. There's something about this that it's just sort of, it feels inevitable now. Like, this will always be a thing in our lives. you know, like taxes or death. Yeah, I had a similar reaction to this. I mean, one thing that I've found remarkable watching this film is that basically every karate kid's story is the same, right? Plucky Underdog goes through training montage to kick bully in face. That is the plot of every karate kid's story. Whatever lore you attach to that, you know, Pat Marita died ages ago.

So now they sort of have to have some kind of nod to him as this iconic figure in this franchise. Ralph Machio is known almost entirely for playing Daniel Laruso and the original karate kid and then kind of revisiting that role over the course of basically every time he's been asked to do so. All of the window dressing around it is ultimately just about a kid learning how to kick a bully in the face. and to me, all that stuff about calling back to the history of the 1984 film, all this affection for the 1984 film, tends to revolve around lore and less just kicking a bully in the face. And to me, I just want to watch the bully get kicked in the face. Everything else is completely disposable.

And so to me, the mechanics of this film, all the pieces that they're kind of putting into motion to get us to the point where the bully gets kicked in the face, feel sort of needlessly complicated. This film kind of takes us through this whole subplot involving the dad who runs the pizza shop, re-learning how to box and kind of working with the kid to relearn how to box. And then there's kind of an underground boxing thing. And then they just completely kind of abandoned that whole storyline to get to the tournament

in which hopefully a bully gets kicked in the face. It felt like you could feel them adding things to fill time. to get us to the logical culmination of this ultimately very, very simple story. Yeah, you know, there's something that's sidiose about that, though. There's such ease to this story. It's so primal, you know, it was directed the original one by John Aviltson who had done Rocky, of course. And I think he saw karate kid as the sort of same kind of thing. But for a younger audience, there's something insidious about the ease of it because it's so familiar and so attractive.

It's such a lovely mythology that, you know, I was taken by it when I was all over. years old. I think we all were karate kid. It was a giant head, I think. I got the tingle that you get every time during the tournament. Here's the problem, though. Like, Pat Marita didn't have an accent. You know, he wasn't a native Okinawa and he didn't, you know, all those things, all that culture is like used as is boled in a very unfortunate way, I think, for Asian Americans in the United States. And 1984 was also the year that short round appears in Indiana Jones. He was a great character, but if that's the only time that you see in Asian person and the Asian kid in the American cinema, that's tough. Long ducked on, the same year. Exactly. The same year, 1984, you know, what's the happening at hot stuff? And that kind of stuff leaves a real scar on how we perceive an entire community. The choices for us as Asian Americans are either comic relief.

And he still see that showing up, like, how I met your mother had a whole episode in Yellowface. Right. We have this lingering damage that a Mr. Miyagi Sensei character has, teaching a white boy. how to do karate and stand up and kick the bully in the face. And everyone loves to cheer for an underdog, Walter, what's the problem with such a positive stereotype? Well, our culture is not a costume that you guys get to put on and off. And it's also not this sort of shortcut to storytelling, which often these films, to your, you know, very on point, eloquent point, is really facile.

It's really just sort of this structure to put these on. And now you have Ben Wong, who is delightful. He is amazing. He should have a different. career then playing a quote-unquote karate kid. There's a real damage, persistent cultural damage, that something as popular as the karate kid actually does to the Asian American community. There's a part of me that's super proud. I love the karate kid. I love Pat Marita's performance. He should have won an Oscar for the first one. I say it without any kind of irony at all. He was

amazing in it. But the first movie really deals with Japanese internment in the United States about sort of shameful legacy of how we treat veterans. It has real depth to it. Pat Marina really carries that film. But I think the big misunderstanding about the power of the first film that they never really quite get back to again, even in the second one, which I think is pretty strong, is how powerful the Miyagi character is as a resident alien who loves old cars, who misses his family, who mourns an America that we all kind of mourn.

There's a lot of wonderful Americana and nostalgia. and pride and being an American in those movies. What is happening in Croixie Kid Legends now? It's a kid who, again, is bullied. Again, it has a girlfriend that the boy doesn't like him having. Again, there's a tournament.

We're replicating exactly the wrong parts of the original movie, the stuff that made this really special. I think that's a really interesting point, that the original 1984 film, you know, for its faults, is a very soulful film. And, like, once you lose

Pat Marita, do you then try to find other kind of soulful reverberations of that story? Or are you simply retelling the story with a new Asian mentor? And having that new Asian mentor be Jackie Chan, who is from Hong Kong, who they have to then labor to kind of retrofit this backstory with the aid of technology to kind of create a bond between the Jackie Chan character and Mr. Miyagi so that you have some kind of narrative thread to the original film instead of telling a new story, finding some new soulfulness. Yeah. Well, I think Jackie Chan in the last one, the reboot, right, was phenomenal in this role in a really bad film, right? He's phenomenal in it. Because of that soulfulness that you imagine, he really brings a sense of regret.

and a sense of grieving. And there's so much you can read into that. I mean, Jackie Chan has tried so many times to break into the American market. And usually he's cast as a sidekick to Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson. The biggest star, arguably, in Asia, comes to the United States as a sidekick

where he's the butt of so many jokes. So now he's playing in a movie called the Karate. Karate is a Japanese art. He practices Kung Fu, right? And so there's already this cultural, like, tension that happens when he brings Jackie Chan into this. To your point, they try to resolve with the CGI Pabmarita in the opening.

It's actually an outtake that they kind of dub in, I think. They try to bring it in and say, oh, Danielson, two branches, one tree. It's like, oh, okay. You don't have to speak like this all the time. You know, you're not Yoda. All in the service of saying all Asians are the same. Right. We're a monolith. You know, hey, you know, all that talk about. Those are just the sensitive Asians. We're actually one culture. It's like, yeah. No. Yeah.

At the end of the day, it's like Jackie Chan shouldn't be actually in this franchise. He's better than he should be. I think the good parts about this movie or, you know, when Ben Wong actually pulls out the street fighting, it really is kind of Jackie Chan-esque. It's kind of fun. He's his props. He's dancing around. He's jumping on tables.

And that's awesome. And I wish that it had sort of stuck with that vibe. I really think this new movie wanted to be a new Ninja Turtles movie, you know, with the pizza and the... The delivery kid and the gong fu and whatever. That's teenage mutant Ninja Turtles kind of. But there's not enough of that. There's not enough fun.

You know, most of it is lore that we don't care about. Here's the dad who used to be a boxer and he used to do this. And there's lone sharks and there's a whole underworld. And then halfway through, he's injured and he's out of the movie for the rest of the movie. Now we're kind of focus on the tournament and now they're going to contrive to get Ralph Machio in. Oh, boy. I don't even know how he gets there. but all of a sudden they're there.

There's a lot of people materializing from very different places. They kind of regurgitate some of the plot lines from Cobra Kai. I think everyone's looking for the same kind of thrill that they had in the past where we felt like you know exactly what you're going to get. There's no surprises. There's no requirement that you invest in it. And so, indeed, they don't give you anything to invest in. I mean, who was the bully in this?

I was just about to make this point. The bully... I mean, the original bully Johnny is so iconic that he starts to be kind of becomes the center of the whole show. But who's this guy, Stephen? Well, this is the thing. When you think about that original character of Johnny, played by William Zabka,

who was such a compelling character that they spun him off into his own show and gave him deeper and deeper and deeper lore, you could not possibly do that with the bully in this film. And even there, like, the structure is the same. It's bully with even worse, Sensei. He's also a lone shark?

What is his motivation? I have no idea. If you harken back to the original karate kid, Johnny Lawrence is so like, you know, he's mean, but he really is jealous of Elizabeth Shue going off with his twerp, you know, Daniel Laruso. Johnny, at the end of it, has real second thoughts. He's got real misgivings about what he's being asked to do.

He's reluctant. Right. When he does it, he's not happy about it. There's this wonderful cutaway shot. Oh, I only know because I've seen it, The original tried to get over 100 times, but there's the scene right after he loses the tournament, but then he looks at Macho, at Daniel, and there's sort of like an admiration in a way and regret, too. He carries so much in that performance.

Can you say that about the bullies and any of the other ones, really? Maybe chosen and the second one's pretty good. But other than that, again, we're focusing on the wrong things. We're just looking at these sort of stock characters for Daniel to kick in the face. And boy, that's just, there are very limited returns for me from something like that. Well, you talk about limited returns. I mean, this same phenomenon runs through the Rocky franchise, right? Where every time you do a sequel, you have to sort of one up what you've done in the previous film.

And eventually the stakes become sort of life and death. And here you have, you have this bully where he's not just a bully. He's a bully who, like, sucker punches. He's a bully who cheats openly in tournaments. It's still satisfying to see him get kicked in the face, but the story isn't as interesting. There's something about the cultural zeitgeist about Rocky that I think Karate Kid was trying to mimic. They're trying to do the same sort of things to say, each successive villain is representative of one of the great evils of this country. With Rocky, they're dealing with race issues and they're dealing with cultural issues.

With Karate Kid, they're dealing kind of with wealth gap and class issues. There's something here that you could possibly impact if only the movie characters. more about developing anybody else, you know, rather than establishing some kind of lore and a couple kind of cute sequences where Ben Wong is learning New York and getting a girlfriend and delivering pizza. You know, there's kind of a diverting, if completely forgettable. But I think there's substance here that they're ignoring. But if people keep coming, they're going to keep pumping it out. And that's, I live in Colorado. We have a baseball team called the Rockies. Oh, boy. The worst baseball team in Major League baseball this year.

And people keep going. And that kind of reminds me of the Karate Kid franchise is that they'll never stop putting out this product if you never stop voting with your pocketbook. Right. So yeah, I guess that's my long way. It involves the Rockies. Ending on both Rocky and the Rockies. Up next, what is making us happy this week. Now it's time for our favorite segment of this week and every week.

What's Making Us Happy This Week? Walter Chow, what's making you happy this week, buddy? Well, I am listening to this recording that was recorded in March 2023 in France of Stravinsky's Rosignolle. It's his Nightingale opera. And she appears that the Nightingale and so many great poems, you know, John Keyes has a note to the Nightgale. All those things. So I love Nightingales. Stravinsky did an opera that's not well-known.

It was mediocrely received, I think. And there's a new production of it, and they recorded it, and they've released it now. The soprano in it, who plays the Nightingale, is Sabine DeVille. She is remarkable. She's asked to sing like a bird, and the precision and clarity of her voice is really stunning. But the more that I listened to it and the more that I got into it, the more I was astonished by its complexity, and the places that you could take the story, which is essentially of a Chinese emperor who is kind of brought back to life by the song of the Nightingale.

and he offends the Nightingale, and to replace her, he has a clockwork Nightingale created for him, but doesn't do the trick, that doesn't do the same thing, and doesn't sound the same, and doesn't fill him with the same sort of emotion. Upon his deathbed in the third act, the real Nightingale returns and sings them back to life, essentially, and there's a little clip that I pulled of that sequence in which she returns to the Emperor near death. So Igor Stravinsky's Les Ross Niel is really making. me happy.

Wonderful. Thank you, Walter. I'm a simple man, the simple needs. One of my favorite TV shows, absolutely without regret or shame, is Survivor. And this week, they announced the cast of an all-star season to acknowledge Survivor's 50th season. Now, they do two seasons a year of Survivor. Survivor has not been around for 50 years.

But it has been around for 25 years. This new cast that they've announced is essentially it's kind of fantasy football of Survivor. You get to kind of dream game out your ideal cast, kind of spanning all the eras of Survivor going all the way back to season one. The cast is predictably a mixed bag. Some of my absolute all-time favorites are on there. Surrey Fields, Aubrey Braco. Mike White, creator of the White Lotus, will return to Survivor. I happen to feel that reality TV, Mike White, is the best Mike.

White. I'm a reality TV nerd. I'm just looking forward to geeking out about not only season 50, which will come in 2026, but season 49, which is coming in the fall of 2025. Survivor has become truly my favorite sport. And so having this big announcement of new, big Survivor news with some of my favorites, some of my least favorites, coach, and a few that I would not have cast at all. And that's always part of the fun, is having, is having those debates about. So what is making me happy is the promise of Survivor Season 50. Here's to many, many, many, many more seasons of my favorite sports. So, Steve, and I actually hear for Season 50, they're bringing in a plucky new contestant.

His name is Daniel Lu Russo. I'm confident there'll be some face kicking. There are several Survivor contestants over the years that I would not mind seeing get kicked in the face. We've got one last thing before we go. Today is the last day to vote in our poll picking the best. Best Pixar films. We'll be doing a ranking in an upcoming episode. You won't want to miss it.

Make sure to vote now. We will have a link in our episode notes. That brings us to the end of our show. Walter Chow, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced by Hufsafah and Mike Katzif and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music.

Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next week.