Nostalgia for those films and the deceptively basic (but actually tenaciously deep) joys they brought means 1980s films are, once again, having a comeback, with the third Bill & Ted film getting released next month in the UK, a fifth Indiana Jones apparently creaking out in 2022, and the official sequel to Dirty Dancing now in the works.īut it’s The Karate Kid – seemingly the most simple of 1980s blockbusters – that has unexpectedly had the most satisfying afterlife with Cobra Kai, the ludicrously enjoyable series that started on YouTube and has just been bought by Netflix. If I’d been trying to grab that gold ring every chance, maybe I would have had more In the 1980s, a young person could become a huge star with just one movie and, to a large extent, those movies still define those actors: Tom Cruise had Risky Business, Matthew Broderick had Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Michael J Fox had Back to the Future and Macchio had The Karate Kid. It is hard to convey just how stratospherically famous Macchio, now 58, became when The Karate Kid – in which he played plucky lower middle-class teen Daniel LaRusso, crane-kicking the snotty rich kids – came out in 1984.
And if I’m in a Japanese restaurant and a fly is in the building, I have about nine seconds to get out,” he says, referring, of course, to the legendary Karate Kid scene in which Daniel (Macchio) catches a fly with chopsticks. “It’s a rare sporting event I go to when I don’t hear You’re the Best Around. But, yeah, it is pretty often,” Macchio tells me on the phone from his home on Long Island, sounding every inch the cheerful suburban dad he has been for the past three decades. “It might have been a day when I was sick and stayed in my room all day. In the past 36 years, there has been, Ralph Macchio says, just one day, maybe, when someone hasn’t mentioned The Karate Kid to him.