The star of beloved 80s favourite The Karate Kid has shared a couple of the more far out proposals for sequels that preceded Cobra Kai.
None other than Daniel-San himself, Ralph Macchio, has been chatting to Jimmy Kimmel about two of the weirder ideas for Karate Kid sequels that never got off the ground. 1984’s The Karate Kid was a sensation, spawning a number of sequels which offered diminishing returns until the franchise stalled in the mid-90s with The Next Karate Kid (starring double Oscar-winner Hilary Swank).
Naturally, interest in reviving the series remained and Macchio has revealed a couple of the stranger story proposals that were put on the table before being rejected.
In the first one, he tells Kimmel that at one point there were plans to revive the Mr Miyagi character back from the grave, saying: “Well, you know, Miyagi comes back as a ghost, and leaves [leads] you from the heavens.”
Pat Morita, who famously played Miyagi, died in 2005 so we imagine that idea was probably floating around before then, possibly in the late 1990s as executives looked to restart the series.
That version though, pales into comparison with the next idea which would have been a Karate Kid/Rocky crossover: “Two writers, they remain nameless,” recalls Macchio, “who would say, hey, listen, this is it! What if Rocky Balboa had a kid, and you had a kid, and you from Newark, and him from Philly, and Mickey and Miyagi would come together.”
That one falls squarely into the ‘films we wish we could see but should have absolutely never happen’ category.
Of course, The Karate Kid series would go on to be successfully resurrected as an episodic show, first for YouTube and later for Netflix, telling a legacy-based story that has pleased fans of the original and garnered plenty of new younger viewers too. Still though, Kid of Larusso vs Kid of Balboa with Macchio in one corner and Balboa in the other… we know it’s a bad idea but we still can’t help half-wishing that it had happened….
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