No Surrender Cinema: The Karate Kid (Animated Series)
A shrine that bestows magical powers upon those who possess it. Daniel LaRusso jump-kicking his way out of a volcano. Is this one of Terry Silver’s coke-fueled hallucinations? No, it’s just a small taste of what goes down in a forgotten piece of The Karate Kid franchise. Grab yourself a bowl of cereal and get ready to relive the Saturday morning adventures of Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-san as No Surrender Cinema covers The Karate Kid cartoon!
Debuting on the NBC Saturday Morning lineup on September 9th, 1989 (a mere 2 months after The Karate Kid Part III hit theaters, and part of a lineup that included the first season of my all time favorite show, Saved By The Bell), The Karate Kid animated series has nothing to do with anything we learned from the original film trilogy. Yes, Mr. Miyagi and his young protégé Daniel LaRusso are still the heroes of the story, but gone and never mentioned are characters like Johnny Lawrence, John Kreese, Chozen, and Mike Barnes. Instead of showdowns with bullies and All Valley Karate Tournaments, this version of The Karate Kid has Miyagi and Daniel-san looking less like the versions of them we know, and more like Indiana Jones and Short Round. Instead of being confined to California, the duo, aided by an Okinawan girl named Taki (who as a youth I mistook for Kumiko, and I wonder why they didn’t use Kumiko given the similarities) travel the globe in search of a stolen shrine. It turns out that it’s not just any shrine either; it’s a mystical artifact that has no specific power to speak of, that way the magic can be used to further the plot of that particular episode.
Because the creators play fast and loose with what the shrine exactly is, each episode finds the heroic trio facing dangers that they would have never faced in the film series. As they venture through exotic locations like the jungle, the Himalayas, and New Jersey, they face off against a variety of foes that intend to use the shrine for nefarious means. This includes a tribal chief who turns himself into a jaguar, a Hong Kong gangster who hypnotically enslaves people, and Daniel’s original bully who, according to the show, is the person that Daniel fears the most. This might be the most obvious sign that the cartoon isn’t following the format of the films, because after dealing with psychopaths like John Kreese and Terry Silver, a dopey hood named Brick shouldn’t strike fear in the heart of the All Valley karate champion.
Like the majority of cartoons at the time, each episode contains a moral lesson, with Miyagi taking the opportunity to offer sage advice to the friends they make along the way (and the viewers at home). The episodes are predictable and formulaic as you’d expect a Saturday morning cartoon to be; each week, our heroes would track the shrine down, find themselves embroiled in a fight for possession of it, and after vanquishing their Foe of the Week, they’d fail to retrieve the shrine, leading into the next adventure. Unfortunately for fans of the show, the quest was short-lived, as the cartoon lasted a mere 13 weeks, coming to an end on December 16th of that year (my 9th birthday!) in an episode that saw the good guys shrunken down to insect size by a bullied child before resolving the situation (and yet failing to obtain the shrine once again). It’s a known fact that I’ve found myself enjoying many a show that was either canceled quickly or ended on a cliffhanger, and animated series are no exception.
Perhaps the reason that the show ended show abruptly is because it wasn’t originally planned for NBC Saturday mornings. The original pitch for The Karate Kid was for it to enter first run syndication with a 65 episode, 13 week, Monday through Friday scheduled. No one was going for that, but NBC did agree to pick up the show for the 1989 fall season. Rather than an extended run, we got 13 weeks of one episode every weekend, and when Season 1 wrapped, that was all she wrote. That’s short-lived by most standards, but it’s still nearly triple the output we got from Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, a cartoon that is arguably more memorable that this one, despite The Karate Kid franchise having been established as a pop culture phenomenon for several years at this point.
The sad thing about The Karate Kid, especially for fans like myself who were looking forward to it, is that it’s so obviously an in-name only tie in hoping to cash in and get the younger generation’s eyes back on the franchise. You could replace Miyagi and Daniel-san with anyone else and it wouldn’t change the rest of the episodes one bit. G.I. Joe’s, Ninja Turtles…insert any other popular cartoon hero of the time period and you’d get the same results. It’s also notable that other than Pat Morita voicing the introductions of every episode a la Stan Lee and 80’s Marvel cartoons, no one from the film series had anything to do with their animated counterparts. This does give us a nice piece of Bulletproof Trivia, because fans of this site might be interested to know that the actor who does Miyagi’s voice, Robert Ito, played Koga in Pray for Death! That means everyone’s favorite ninja Sho Kosugi is just one degree of separation away from the the Miyagi-Do dojo! Now that’s a crossover I would love!
The one area where The Karate Kid cartoon improves upon its live action predecessors is in the action sequences. Obviously being animated allows for a lot more leeway, but with a 23 minute run time, we’re not going to waste time on Daniel-san’s emotional growth…we’re just going to watch him kick some ass! Daniel LaRusso has never been as badass as he is here in this cartoon; he’s surfing torpedoes, jumping onto planes, and kicking plenty of bad guy butt. There’s even an episode where a youngster tells him he’s cooler than Chuck Norris! In what universe!? I guess the same one where his uncle is an FBI agent helping him stop a band of Mexican supervillains, because that’s definitely a thing that happens. Sure, it’s not as cool as Chuck Norris battling ninjas in space, but I’ll give the writers points for their creativity. It’s certainly better than watching him plant bonsai trees and avoid confrontation. What kid would watch that?
Cobra Kai managed to expand upon everything we knew and loved about The Karate Kid films and became an pop culture juggernaut in its own right, and had it not be for its success we might not have gotten a chance to experience this small slice of Karate Kid history again! There’s even a nod to this show in Cobra Kai where you can spot the Macguffin…uh, shrine…inside Chozen’s dojo! Luckily for you, dear reader, you can watch The Karate Kid cartoon right now, because it has returned to free streaming sites such as Tubi and Crackle! Several episodes are also available on Youtube, but for those of you who appreciate physical media, there has sadly never been an official physical release. So if you’re looking to get a taste of the first Karate Kid based TV series, long before Cobra Kai revitalized the franchise for a new generation, sit back and embrace the craziness that this cartoon provides.
