Thanks to his performance as Johnny Lawrence in “The Karate Kid”, William “Billy” Zabka’s appearance exemplifies the archetype of all 1980s movie bullies. Suppose you close your eyes and think about the kind of guy who would bully the charming outsider in an 80s teen movie. In this case, he’s probably a tall, burly blond guy whose parents probably had a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging above the television in their living room. It’s not Zabka’s fault that he became the model for this type of character, but when we look the landscape of high school films of the decade, it certainly seems like every casting director was looking for “a Billy Zabka type.” In some cases, this meant hiring him directly.

Zabka’s follow-up to his breakout role in “The Karate Kid” is an oft-forgotten teen comedy directed by Lisa Gottlieb called “Just One of the Guys.” A loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the film centers on a young aspiring journalist named Terri Griffith (Joyce Hyser) who decides to pose as a boy named Terry and attend another school after failing to drop out an internship in a newspaper. , believing it is because she is a woman. Terri takes lessons from her perverted little brother Buddy on how to behave like a man, and despite her small stature, she assimilates into her new school without the slightest suspicion. She befriends an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), she catches the attention of a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and she becomes the new target of school bully Greg Tolan , played by Zabka.

It’s not strange that Zabka is playing a bully again in a high school movie, but East strange that when the girls at Terri’s new school discuss his appearance, they all compare him to Ralph Macchio. “Dresses like Elvis Costello, looks like the Karate Kid… I’ll get him”, as Sandy says when she spots Terry… while their classmate Greg watches suspiciously like Johnny Lawrence.

Before we go too far, comparing Terri’s appearance to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly just a very cute joke to poke fun at Zabka’s casting, and we were supposed to let out a reasonable laugh and move on. However, I am a chronic /Film overthinker. I’m the one who wrote an entire article about how “Casper” is actually a deeply moving film if you think about it for more than five minutes and immerse yourself in the psychological justifications for the talking raptor in “Jurassic Park III”. So, of course, hearing that throwaway line immediately sent me into the greater “Karate Kid” multiverse of what-ifs. Why doesn’t anyone at this school recognize that the big man on campus looks like Johnny Lawrence? If the “Cobra Kai” universe has expanded to include Jackie Chan’s reboot of “The Karate Kid” as well as the current Miyagi-versedoes this mean “Just One of the Guys” is Also part of the extended universe of “Karate Kid”? Ergo, could Greg Tolan be to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O’Connor is to Agatha Harkness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

This goes a little further than just a joke. “Just One of the Guys” was released by Columbia, the same studio that released “The Karate Kid” the previous year. According to director Lisa Gottlieb in an interview with Mental threadproduction intentionally wanted Terry to resemble Macchio. “We saw the physical resemblance and we accepted it,” she explained. “Remember, Columbia was the studio that made the ‘Karate Kid’ movies and the first one was a huge success while we were preparing. Apparently the line was in the movie Before Zabka was cast as Greg because once they saw Hyser with short hair, the resemblance was too uncanny not to reference it.

This made “Just One of the Guys” the second in what is now colloquially known as “The William Zabka Bully Trilogy” where he was cast as a brutal blond preying on smaller students with black hair, including “The Karate Kid” and “Back”. at school.” However, the latter makes no reference to the “Karate Kid” or Ralph Macchio, so he is the outlier of the group.

40 years after its release, “Just One of the Guys” is both an archaic product of its time and an unintentionally groundbreaking work of queer cinema. Zabka, as teenager Johnny Lawrence, is, in many circles, a lesbian icon, with many androgynous women styling themselves after him in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Joyce Hyser’s drag performance has been a massive wake-up call for many butch femmes and transmasculine people, and Terri’s brother Buddy, calling her an “androgynous sleazebag”, ended up on many crafts and merchandise of queer artists. Sure, it hasn’t aged very well through a modern lens of understanding gender identity, but there’s an empathetic honesty – warts and all – to its themes of sexism and gender performance that even films made today are too afraid to tackle.

It’s highly unlikely that there will ever be a reference to “Just One of the Guys” in the canonical universe of “The Karate Kid” and “Cobra Kai”, but if there is ever a scene where someone If one passes Johnny Lawrence on the street and mistakes him for their high school prom king, Greg Tolan (played, hopefully, by someone from “Just One of the Guys”), I apologize advance for my future inability to keep quiet this subject.