One overlooked film by William Zabka raises an amazing question for the Karate Kids

Thanks to his performance as Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid William “Billy” Zabka's appearance shows the archetype of all 80s film bullies. Let's say you close your eyes and think of a guy who could pull off the adorable fail of an 80s teen movie. In that case, he's probably a tall, buxom blonde who must have had a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging above the TV in his parents' living room. It is not Zabka's fault that he became a drawing of this character type, but by looking high school movie landscape of the decade, it certainly seems that every casting director was looking for a “Billy Zabka type.” In some cases, this meant hiring him immediately.

Zabka's follow-up to his breakout role in The Karate Kid is an oft-overlooked teen comedy directed by Lisa Gottlieb called Just One of the Guys. Adapted from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the film centers on aspiring young journalist Teri Griffiths (Joyce Heiser) who decides to pose as a boy named Terry and attend a different school after failing to land an internship at a newspaper. , believing it to be because she is a woman. Terry learns how to act like a guy from her perverted little brother, Buddy, and despite her smaller stature, she fits in at her new school without a hint of suspicion. She befriends an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), sets her sights on a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and becomes the new target of school sweetheart Greg Tolan, played by Zabka.

It's not weird that Zabka would play a bully in a high school movie again, but yeah is strangely, when the girls at Terry's new school discuss her looks, they all compare “her” to Ralph Macchio. “Dresses like Elvis Costello, looks like the karate kid…I'm gonna get him,” as Sandy says when she sees Terry…while their classmate Greg looks suspiciously like Johnny Lawrence.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, the comparison of Terry's appearance to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly just a very nice joke to poke fun at Zabka's casting, and we were meant to laugh it off wisely and move on. However, I am /Film's permanent chronic over-thinker. I'm the one who wrote the whole how-to article “Casper” is actually a very disturbing film if you think about it for more than five minutes and dig deep the psychological basis of the talking raptor in Jurassic Park III. So naturally, hearing that throwaway line immediately catapulted me into the greater variety of “Karate Kid” hypotheticals. Why doesn't anyone at this high school recognize that the big man on campus looks just like Johnny Lawrence? If the “Cobra Kai” universe has expanded to include Jackie Chan's reboot of “The Karate Kid” along with the current Miyagi versedoes that mean “Just One of the Guys” is also part of the extended “Karate Kid” universe? So could Greg Tolan be to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O'Connor is to Agatha Harks 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. According to director Lisa Gottlieb in an interview with Mental Flossthe production deliberately wanted Terry to look like Macchio. “We saw the physical resemblance and went with it,” she explained. “Remember, Columbia was the studio that made the 'Karate Kid' movies, and the first movie was a huge hit when we were getting ready.” The line is believed to have been in the film before that Zabka was cast as Greg because once they saw Heizer with the short hair, the resemblance was too uncanny not to refer to.

This made “Just One of the Guys” the second in the colloquially known as “The William Zabka Bully Trilogy,” where he was cast as a brutal blonde who preyed on smaller students with dark hair, 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 group.

40 years after its release, “Just One of the Guys” is both an archaic product of its time and a pioneering work of unintentionally weird cinema. Zabka as the teenage Johnny Lawrence is a lesbian icon in many circles, and many androgynous women in the 1980s styled their hair after him. Meanwhile, Joyce Heizer's drag performance was a huge wake-up call for many feminine women and transmasculine people, and Terry's brother Buddy, who calls her “androgynous killer mug,” has landed a lot of queer artist creations and merchandise. Sure, it hasn't aged so well through a modern lens of understanding gender identity, but there's an empathetic honesty — warts and all — about themes of sexism and gender equality that even movies made today are too afraid to tackle.

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 mistakes him for their high school prom king To Greg Tolan (hopefully played by someone from “Just One of the Guys”), I apologize in advance for my continued inability to shut up. about it.