Turning movies into TV for kids isn’t always easy, especially when the source material wasn’t exactly made with kids in mind. For every Men In Black: The Series, Godzilla: The Series, and The Real GhostBusters you get the various RoboCop cartoons, James Bond Junior, and while I very much enjoy Rambo: The Force Of Freedom, it is a show that kind of misses the point of First Blood and the other various Rambo movies, created because movie studios can’t stop themselves from advertising R movies during sports and family time programming and had to placate the kids somehow…and selling toys to make money.
If you thought Cobra Kai was the only series set in the classic Karate Kid timeline (Daniel in Japan versus Will Smith’s kid in China), you haven’t of The Karate Kid, produced by DIC and airing for one season on NBC’s Saturday morning line-up. The show does a good job with the characters, but the plot is kind of off because it does the same thing all the Double Dragon adaptations do and shoves in magical elements where none originally existed because that’s what they think sells martial arts to kids.
The plot features Daniel and Mr. Miyagi (neither of whom are voiced by their live-action actors) joined by a girl from Okinawa named Taki. They’re seeking a magic shrine that can heal the sick but in other hands gives other abilities. Usually it falls into the hands of some mixed up kid, they show him that he doesn’t need it, and something happens so the shrine gets lost because the plot needs to continue to the next episode. Some of the ways they lose it is kind of embarrassing, really. Tonight we see the first episode, as our trio finds the shrine in South America and meet a teenager trying to save his village and prove himself in a manhood trial. Of course it ends up in the hands of bad guys because it’s not a Karate Kid story if Daniel doesn’t get to karate somebody. Enjoy.
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