Sitting around watching old movies used to be one of my hobbies. Watching terrible movies and heckling them online with friends is how I came to get my online moniker “Torgodevil” from the dearly beloved Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now whenever I watch one of those classic movies I remember loving in my childhood, all I can picture is how I wish the guys from MST3k were watching it and commenting on how bad it is too. Rifftrax has ruined me for passive entertainment. I mean, I could come up with funny stuff to say, but that’s their job.

Case in point, “The Karate Kid“. This was a formative movie in my childhood. I was in elementary school when “The Karate Kid” this was at the height of it’s popularity. There are things I remember vividly from the movie:

  • There is a scene where the kid, Daniel, gets his ass kicked by thugs wearing skeleton costumes. It always terrified me that gangs of skeleton bullies were roaming the high schools of America.
  • There were some training montages, like “Wax on, Wax off.” and when he caught a fly with chopsticks.
  • A guy yells, “Put him in a body bag!”. That guy looked exactly like one of my cousins, which freaked me out.
  • There was also that weird thing where Mr. Miagi, the Japanese guy claps his hands together and starts rubbing them in some room during the karate tournament.
  • Daniel was fine, despite being “put in a body bag” and kicked that bully in the gut to score a winning point in some tournament.

That’s like four scenes. The movie is 2 hours, 6 minutes long, including the credits. I must have forgotten a lot in the past twenty years. Watching it again, there are a few awkward subplots about his mother moving out to get a new job, Daniel’s insecurity moving to a new city, and being poor. All of which forces Daniel to lie all the time. He also happens to take severe beatings whenever he approaches Elizabeth Shue, who likes him for some unfathomable reason. There are long stretches with nothing happening, and no one being kicked in the face at all! I forgot that happened. I know I had access to a fast forward button, but there is a lot of “not Karate” in “The Karate Kid”. Where are the Rifftrack guys to make fun of this?

Maybe with some luck they will tackle this movie. There is a remake of The Karate Kid, which will undoubtedly be horrible. Perhaps that will prompt them to go back and mock the original version, like when there was a rifftrax for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They occasionally do requested 1980′s classics, like Red Dawn too, so there is always a chance that The Karate Kid might get riffed on sometime in the future too. My imagination has grown lazy, and I want funny people to make fun of things that are bad for me. Is that so wrong?