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Thanks to his performance as Johnny Lawrence in The Best Kid, William “Billy” Zabka’s appearance embodies the epitome of every 1980s movie bully. Suppose you close your eyes and think of the type of guy you see in 80’s teen movies who annoys the attractive losers. In that case, he would probably be a tall, stocky blonde, and his parents would no doubt have a picture of Ronald Reagan above the TV in the living room. It’s not Zabka’s fault that he became the blueprint for this type of character, but looking at the high school movie landscape of this decade, surely every casting director was looking for a “Billy Zabka type”. It seems like it was. In some cases, that meant hiring him directly.
Zabka’s follow-up to his breakout success with “The Best Kid” is “Just One of the Guys,” a forgettable teen comedy directed by Lisa Gottlieb. A loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the film centers on Terry Griffiths (Joyce Heiser), a young aspiring journalist who, after failing a newspaper internship, is forced to pretend to be a boy named Terry. and decided to attend another school. , I believe it’s because she’s a woman. Terry is taught how to act like a man by his twisted younger brother, Buddy, and despite his short stature, he blends into his new school without question. She befriends an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), catches the eye of a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and becomes the new target of school bully Greg Tolan, played by Zabka.
It’s not weird that Zabka plays a bully in a high school movie again, but it’s weird that when the girls at Terry’s new school discuss her looks, they all compare “him” to Ralph Macchio is. “He’s dressed like Elvis Costello and looks like the Karate Kid…I’m going to get him,” Sandy said upon taking one look at Terry…while class Mate Greg looks suspiciously like Johnny Lawrence.
A Karate Kid joke could shed light on the world of Cobra Kai
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Before we get too ahead of ourselves, comparing Terry’s appearance to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly a very cute joke meant to poke fun at Zabka’s casting, and we let out a sensible laugh and told the story. I should have stopped. But I’m /Film’s resident chronic overthinker. I’m the guy who wrote an entire article about how unsettling a movie Casper actually is, if you spend more than five minutes pondering and digging into the psychological validity of Jurassic Park III’s talking raptor. So, of course, upon hearing this throwaway line, I was immediately spiraled into the larger multiverse of “The Karate Kid” hypotheticals. Why doesn’t anyone at this high school notice that the big guy on campus looks like Johnny Lawrence? If it has been expanded to include the current Miyagi verse, does this mean that “Just One of the Guys” is also part of the expanded “Best Kid”? ” Universe? So is Greg Tolan to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O’Connor is to Agatha Harkness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
It’s not just a joke, it’s a deeper story. “Just One of the Guys” was released by Columbia, the same studio that released “The Best Kid” the previous year. Director Lisa Gottlieb said in an interview with Mental Floss that the producers intentionally tried to make Terry look like Macchio. “We saw the physical similarities and decided to go with that,” she explained. “Keep in mind that Columbia is the studio that made the movie ‘The Best Kid,’ and the first movie was a huge hit just as we were preparing it,” Zabka reportedly said. This line was in the movie before he was cast as Greg because once he saw Heiser with short hair, the resemblance was so eerie that he couldn’t help but reference it.
This makes “Just One of the Guys” the second of what is now colloquially known as the “William Zabka Bly Trilogy,” in which he also wrote “The Best Kid” and “Back ” and was cast as a cruel blonde who bullies a small black-haired student. To school. ” However, the latter is an outlier among the group, as it does not mention “Best Kid” or Ralph Macchio at all.
The Legacy of Just One of the Guys
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Forty years after its release, Just One of the Guys is both a product of its time and an unintentional milestone in queer cinema. Zabka, who plays the teenage Johnny Lawrence, was a lesbian icon in many circles, and in the 1980s many androgynous women styled their hair after him. Meanwhile, Joyce Heiser’s drag performance was a huge wake-up call for many butch women and transmasculine people, and Terry’s brother Buddy called her an “androgynous sleazy bucket,” which led to her becoming a queer feminist. Many crafts and products created by artists began to be used. Granted, this film isn’t that old from a modern perspective of understanding gender identity, but it touches on themes of sexism and gender performance that even films made today are too scared to tackle. , there is a sincerity that I can empathize with, warts and all.
I highly doubt there’s a reference to “Just One of the Guys” in the canon universe of “The Best Kid” and “Cobra Kai,” but someone encounters Johnny Lawrence on the street. If there was a scene, I would be confusing him with high school prom king Greg Tolan (hopefully played by someone from “Just One of the Guys”), but I won’t be able to shut up about this in the future. I would like to apologize in advance for this.
