One Underseen William Zabka Movie Raises A Bewildering Karate Kid Question

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 of the type of guy who would pester the charming underdog of an ’80s teen movie. In that case, he’s probably a tall, beefy blonde whose parents definitely had a photo of Ronald Reagan hanging above the TV in their living room. It’s not Zabka’s fault that he became the blueprint for this character type, but when looking at the landscape of high school movies from the decade, it certainly seems like every casting director was looking for “a Billy Zabka type.” In some instances, that meant straight-up hiring him.

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 an aspiring young journalist named Terri Griffith (Joyce Hyser) who decides to pose as a boy named Terry and attend a different school after she fails to land an internship at a newspaper, believing it to be because she’s a woman. Terri takes lessons from her perverted little brother Buddy on how to act like a guy, and despite her smaller stature, she assimilates to her new school without a hint of suspicion. She makes friends with an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), she catches the eye of a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and she becomes the new target of the school bully, Greg Tolan, played by Zabka.

It’s not odd that Zabka would again play a bully in a high school movie, but it is odd that when the girls at Terri’s new school discuss her appearance, they all compare “him” to Ralph Macchio. “Dresses like Elvis Costello, looks like the Karate Kid … I’m gonna get him,” as Sandy puts it when she catches a glimpse of Terry … while their classmate Greg looks suspiciously like Johnny Lawrence.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, comparing Terri’s appearance to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly just a very cute in-joke to poke fun at Zabka’s casting, and we were meant to let out a sensible chuckle and move on from it. However, I am /Film’s resident chronic overthinker. I’m the one who wrote an entire article about how “Casper” is actually a deeply upsetting movie if you think about it for more than five minutes and dove into the psychological justifications for the talking raptor in “Jurassic Park III.” So, of course, hearing this throwaway line immediately sent me spiraling into the greater “Karate Kid” multiverse of hypotheticals. Why isn’t anyone at this high school acknowledging that the big man on campus looks just like Johnny Lawrence? If the “Cobra Kai” universe has expanded to include the Jackie Chan reboot of “The Karate Kid” along with the current Miyagi-verse, does this mean that “Just One of the Guys” is also a part of the extended “Karate Kid” universe? Ergo, could Greg Tolan be to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O’Connor is to Agatha Harkness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

It goes a little deeper than just the joke. “Just One of the Guys” was released by Columbia, the same studio that put out “The Karate Kid” the year before. According to director Lisa Gottlieb in an interview with Mental Floss, the production intentionally wanted Terry to look like Macchio. “We saw the physical resemblance and went with it,” she explained. “Remember that Columbia was the studio that made the ‘Karate Kid’ movies and the first one was a giant hit as we were prepping.” Allegedly, the line was in the film before Zabka was cast as Greg because once they saw Hyser with the short hair, the resemblance was too uncanny not to reference.

This made “Just One of the Guys” the second in what is colloquially now known as “The William Zabka Bully Trilogy” where he was cast as a brutish blonde picking on smaller students with dark hair, including “The Karate Kid” and “Back to School.” However, the latter doesn’t reference the “Karate Kid” or Ralph Macchio in any way, so it’s the outlier of the group.

40 years after its release, “Just One of the Guys” is both an archaic product of its time and a groundbreaking work of unintentional queer cinema. Zabka as teenage Johnny Lawrence is, in many circles, a lesbian icon, with many androgynous women styling their hair after him in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the drag performance of Joyce Hyser was a massive awakening for many butch women and transmasculine people, and Terri’s brother Buddy referring to her as an “androgynous sleaze bucket” has ended up on plenty of crafts and merchandise by queer artists. Sure, it hasn’t aged all that 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 movies made today are too afraid to tackle.

It’s highly doubtful that there will ever be a reference to “Just One of the Guys” within the canonical universe of “The Karate Kid” and “Cobra Kai,” but if there’s ever a scene where someone runs into Johnny Lawrence on the street and confuses him for their high school’s prom king Greg Tolan (hopefully played by someone from “Just One of the Guys”), I apologize in advance for my future inability to ever shut up about it.