MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Daniel LaRusso's crane kick that he used to win the All Valley Under-18 Karate Tournament was an illegal kick.
One of the all-time great "contrarian" film take is J. Matthew Turner's extremely popular 2015 YouTube video, “The Karate Kid: Daniel is the REAL Bully," where he argues that Ralph Macchio's lead character, Daniel LaRusso, is the actual villain of The Karate Kid...
While Turner wasn't the first person to make the joke (there was a whole recurring bit on How I Met Your Mother about Barney Stinson insisting that Johnny is the true hero of The Karate Kid, even having Johnny's actor, William Zabka, in his wedding party), his video was so popular that it was clearly one of the major influences on the creation of the hit TV series, Cobra Kai, which follows Johnny and Daniel's rivalry into present day.
However, just like Macchio and Zabka's appearances on How I Met Your Mother (where Barney accuses Daniel of winning due to an illegal kick)...
the whole point of these bits is that they're JOKES. I wrote an article a while back about how these contrarian takes are great, but you shouldn't actually take them seriously, and yet that's precisely what has happened. Revisiting the Daniel/Johnny rivalry from Johnny's perspective is a great idea and it has worked wonderfully in Cobra Kai, but it doesn't change what actually happened in the movies. Daniel clearly wasn't the bully in the film and he also clearly didn't win the big fight due to an illegal kick.
RALPH MACCHIO THROWS SOME KINDLING INTO THE ILLEGAL KICK FIRE
When Cobra Kai was about to debut, Macchio was asked by The Wrap about the kick and he replied, “No hits to the face was clearly something when the referee made the list of things what not to do." He then added, "If that didn’t happen, I don’t know if we’d be talking about that movie 34 years later.”
Here's the fight...
I don't see the ref saying ANYthing about no hits to the face in the video, by the way.
After Cobra Kai was a hit, though, Macchio was on The Tonight Show last year where Jimmy Fallon asked him some questions about the films, including “At the end of The Karate Kid you famously win the All-Valley Karate Championship with the crane kick. Was the kick actually legal?”
Macchio replied, “Here’s my theory — no here’s the truth. Here’s the truth. It’s been a while and I’ve been fighting off these theories a long time. Listen, Mr. Miyagi was the ultimate teacher, so, and LaRusso had him as his trainer. And as the superior trainer– he’s basically the human Yoda. You don’t bet against Yoda. You don’t bet against Miyagi. That number one. Number two, I would say, is that LaRusso, how did he train? He trained over a couple of weeks time by household chores, never having the ability of privilege to have a sparring partner. His opponent there, bud, was like, you know, in combat-ready training for years for this event." He then pointed out the illegal leg sweep by one of the Cobra Kai fighters and concluded, “And if you look at the tape, not only, does the does the ref say ’point, winner.' A win is a win — [Johnny] literally arguably charged, ran into the kick. LaRusso had nothing to do but defend himself.”
However, we really don't even need to go that far, as the answers are all clear in the film itself. Daniel oddly didn't actually check on the rules of the tournament until they were literally AT the tournament, and it was his girlfriend, Ali, who explained, "Everything above your waist is a point. You can hit the head, sternum, kidneys, ribs."
And then, in the tournament, kicks to the faces were REPEATEDLY counted as legal points!
Here's Johnny Lawrence getting a point from a kick to the face...
And later, here is Dutch getting a point from a kick to Daniel's face...
I personally think that Johnny actually kicks Daniel in the face in literally the final match! But I'll admit, it's not exactly clear from the camera angle where Johnny's kick landed on Daniel's body...
I think he got Daniel in the face, but I could be wrong. It's not really important, though, because the earlier kicks were as plain as day.
The trouble clearly comes from when people turn to the REAL life rules of these karate tournaments, and one of the big rules for under-18 karate tournaments is that you're not supposed to actually be hitting people outright. The USA National Karate-do Foundation explains that, "Traditional Karate techniques delivered full-power can cause extremely serious injury, even death. Karate competition is a sport, and for that reason some of the most dangerous techniques are banned and all techniques must be controlled." In other words, you're only supposed to show that you CAN kick a guy in the face, you're not supposed to actually outright kick him in the face.
But, again, that's the rules in REAL LIFE. In the films, the rules are clearly different, because guys are actively hitting each other throughout the tournament. Some of the other real life rules that were ignored for the film are that there is no way that Daniel would be allowed to compete in the state he was in, and also, Cobra Kai would likely have been penalized for their bad behavior, as TAUNTING is even considered a violation.
And, of course, there's little chance that Johnny would have been allowed to keep competing after the move he pulled on Daniel's knee. That, though, also falls under "the real life rules are unimportant, as the film has clearly defined rules and they were followed in the film itself." The film says that Johnny's move was just a warning-level move, so then I guess it was just a warning-level move.
So no, Daniel's kick was not an illegal move, even if Cobra Kai sort of seems to treat it as if it was (as the show is clearly buying into the fan debate over the years, but as I wrote recently, the show also retconned some of Johnny's tournament history past, as well, so it's not always the best authority on the Karate Kid films).
The legend is...
STATUS: False
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