One overlooked film by William Zabka raises the mind-boggling question of karate kids

Thanks to his performance as Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid William “Billy” Zabka’s appearance epitomizes the archetype of all 1980s movie bullies. Suppose you close your eyes and think of a guy who would take on a charming underdog from an 80s teen movie. In that case, he’s probably a tall, curvy blond whose parents definitely had a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging above the TV in their living room. It is not Zabka’s fault that he became the blueprint for this type of character, but when looking at scenery from high school movies since the decade, it certainly seems like every casting director has been looking for a “Billy Zabka type.” In some cases, that meant hiring him right away.

Zabka’s follow-up to his breakthrough role in The Karate Kid is director Lisa Gottlieb’s oft-forgotten teen comedy Just One of the Guys. Free adaptation of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. The film centers on an aspiring young journalist, Terri Griffith (Joyce Heiser), who decides to pretend to be a boy, Terri, and attend a different school after she fails to get an internship at a newspaper. , assuming it’s because she’s a woman. Terri takes lessons from her depraved younger brother, Buddy, on how to act like a guy, and despite her smaller stature, she assimilates into her new school without a hint of suspicion. She befriends an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), she catches the eye of a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and she becomes the new target of school bully Greg Tolan, played by Zabka.

It’s no surprise that Zabka will play a bully again in a school movie, but yeah there is Surprisingly, when the girls at Teri’s new school discuss her looks, they all compare “him” to Ralph Macchio. “Dresses like Elvis Costello, looks like the Karate Kid…I’m gonna get him,” Sandy says looking at Terry…while their classmate Greg looks suspiciously like Johnny Lawrence.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, the comparison of Terri’s looks to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly just a really cute joke to make fun of Zabka’s choice, and we should have smartened up and walked away from it. However, I am /Film’s resident chronic overthinker. I’m the one who wrote an entire article on how “Casper” is actually a very moving film if you think about it for more than five minutes and dig deeper the psychological rationale behind the talking predator in Jurassic Park III. So, of course, when I heard that throwaway line, I was immediately transported back to the larger multiverse of the “Karate Kid” hypothetical. Why doesn’t anyone at this high school recognize that the big man on campus looks just like Johnny Lawrence? If there is a Cobra Kai universe. expanded to include Jackie Chan’s The Karate Kid reboot along with Miyagi’s current versedoes that mean “Just One of the Guys” is too part of the “Karate Kid” expanded universe? So, could Greg Tolan be to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O’Connor is to Agatha Harkness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

It goes a little deeper than just a joke. “Just One of the Guys” was released by Columbia, the same studio that released “The Karate Kid” a year earlier. As director Lisa Gottlieb said in an interview with Mental threadthe production deliberately wanted Terry to look like Macchia. “We saw the physical resemblance and went for it,” she explained. “Remember, Columbia was the studio that made the ‘Karate Kid’ movies, and the first one was a huge hit when we were getting ready.” Allegedly, the line was in the movie earlier Zabka was cast as Greg because once they saw Heizer with short hair, the resemblance was too uncanny to pass up.

This made “Just One of the Guys” the second in what is now colloquially known as “William Zabka’s Bully Trilogy,” where he played a gruff blond who picks on young, dark-haired students, including “The Karate Kid.” and “Back”. to school”. However, the latter makes no reference to The Karate Kid or Ralph Macchio, so it’s an exception to the pack.

40 years after its release, Just One of the Guys is both an archaic product of its time and a groundbreaking work of unintentional queer cinema. Zabka as the teenage Johnny Lawrence is a lesbian icon in many circles, with many androgynous women styling their hair after him in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Joyce Heiser’s performance was a huge wake-up call for many queer women and transmasculine people, and Terry’s brother Buddy, who called her an “androgynous sissy,” ended up on a lot of queer artists’ products and merchandise. Sure, it hasn’t aged well in terms of modern understandings of gender identity, but there’s a sympathetic honesty to its themes of sexism and gender performance—warts and all—that even modern films are afraid to address.

It’s highly doubtful that there will ever be a reference to Just One of the Guys in the canon universe of The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai, but if there ever is a scene where someone runs into Johnny Lawrence on the street and confuses him with their high school’s prom king, Greg Tolan (hopefully played by someone from “Just One of the Guys”), I apologize in advance for my future inability to shut up about it.