You may have heard about Hollywood’s latest rabbit punch to our collective forehead, namely the remake of The Karate Kid. I certainly have, and I’ve seen any number of by lines exclaiming that it’s “better than the original!” Well, that may be.

I won’t rant here and establish my cred as a child of the 80’s by insisting that the original was better, but I will ask you to think this through: Since it first came out, The Karate Kid has been used as the unsung source material for at least two other movies, namely Never Back Down and Sidekicks. The fact that there have been three multi-million dollar reproductions of the movie where a boy learns to substitute martial arts for puberty is concerning in and of itself. But it’s also important (1) to parse out the specifics. Think of this as a sort of a detailed balance sheet of the creative bankruptcy we all support every time we fail to wait until we can just pirate a movie off the internet. Continue reading →