Using such a young kid totally distorts the character. The fights in the movies were pretty brutal. Remember Daniel’s knee injury during the match? Mr. Miyagi dulled the pain with his Japanese hand rub. A 17 year old is mature enough to decide that he wants to continue the fight. An 11 year old isn’t. It would be child abuse to push a child into a full contact match. :dubious: Heck in Karate Kid 2 that was a frigging death match! Daniel choose not to kill his opponent.
IN the first one he was a teen - he was even old enough to drive legally…
Snowboarder Bo makes a good point. The original was about being bullied in high school, when the lead is involved with the girl of one of the bullies. How do you translate that to preteens without being creepy and inappropriate? Depending on the script, its doable, but worth scrutinizing. The previews imply NewDanialSan has a bully his age but perhaps older, and a love interest.
Until I see the movie and the rest of the setting, the difference between the ages won’t concern me.
‘Kid’ obviously can mean any number of age groups, and just because he isn’t a teenager doesn’t mean that the movie is cast (or written) poorly - its a new story with new chars in a new place with the same overarching premise.
Awesome. 
Bad news…
For me, what really made the original Karate Kid, and my favourite part, is how the sensei makes the young apprentice do all these menial chores, the student gets angry and wants to quit, and then the sensei shows him how all these menial chores were actually cleverly disguised training. When young Daniel-san realizes this, the look on his face is priceless. I would hope that the remake will include something like this in its storyline.
I think that scene is pretty much in the trailer linked by the OP.
Not quite.
Wax on, wax off = Miyagi’s car gets waxed.
Brush up, brush down = Miyagi’s fence gets painted.
Oh, and Daniel gets muscle memory on skills that end up being “training.”
Put on your jacket, take it off =/= any benefit to Jackie Miyagi. That was the cleverness in the original that Arnold Winkelried was talking about.
this is surprising because this is a common theme spanning ALL martial arts. Jackie Chan himself has used “menial tasks leading up to muscle strengthening” in a lot of his movies, especially the earlier ones. it’s weird that they went with jacket on, jacket off.
I didn’t say the new one was clever, but it was obviously the analog to the waxonwaxoff in the first film. Then Jackie attacks the kid, who blocks all his moves and shoves him away, and the new kid looks very surprised, perhaps frightened, by what just happened. Same idea.
Because an 11 year old kid is eventually going to need to know the skills to effectively jacket off.
When it’s warmer, it’s easier to jacket off than on.
Karate Kid was out in theaters before my parents had even met. I saw it for the first time about two months ago and I enjoyed it. Earlier this month, however, I saw this:
This “remake” doesn’t take place in the San Fernando Valley, it doesn’t take place in the United States at all. The protagonist of the new Karate Kid isn’t even learning karate!
And I badly want to see it anyway. Sacrilege.
I’m actually looking forward to it as well, although I’ll wait for good street-buzz before I’d see it in a theater. The trailer looks good, but I can see that the movie could be awesome or a shitpile, and it’s too early to say which.
Oops, didn’t know there was already a thread on it. Threads get pushed back so quickly around here.
I’ve merged these two thread. I’d close this post with a Karate Kid quote, but I’ve never seen it.
And let’s not forget sand the deck (opposite circles to wax on/wax off) and paint the house (side by side)!
Yes, exactly. If someone told me “take your jacket off and put it back on 100 times”, I would just think “karate teacher with offbeat methodology”. In the original Karate Kid (I watched it again this week-end, in memoriam - I picked up a $5.00 copy at the grocey store a couple of years ago), Daniel-san gets to the point where he believes that Mr. Miyagi might be a con artist taking advantage of him to do slave work, or else that his karate teacher expects him to do all the work in advance payment of the lessons. I remember the first time I saw the movie, I was thinking that too!
I still laugh at the “paint the fence” scene:
Up and down, big boards right hand, small boards left hand.
(After a while, Daniel has finished one small section)
Daniel-san: I’m all done!
Mr. Miyagi - Paint whole fence! (camera pans to show the super-long wooden fence around the yard.)
(late afternoon)
Daniel-san: Done!
Mr. Miyagi: Both sides?
Daniel-san (disgusted look): No. Not yet.
Karate kid was a good movie.
When I saw it as a kid, it was great…identifying with the kid.
Saw it again a couple years ago…was amazed how I identify with the teacher and what I missed. When I saw it as a kid I didn’t really get into/empathise with the burned out cynical teacher or really see that the teacher grew so much from his association with the kid. I didn’t see that the teacher was really trying to drive the student away and was actually going to walk away right before the famous wax on/wax off scene. However, he stopped himself and turned around to motivate his student.
I didn’t see that before the wax on/wax off scene that the teacher was seeing if he was worth teaching…was waiting for the student to walk away or lose interest…was testing him.
It really was like watching a new movie…seeing the change in the old teacher.
So is this simply a way of Will Smith getting his kid into the movies? I guess we’ll find out if the kid can act huh? 