There's a famous skit from the beloved British comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look in which David Mitchell's character, decked out in full SS regalia, takes stock of the skull insignia on his uniform and asks his fellow officer a pertinent question: "Are we the baddies?"Now, thanks to a new video that surfaced on YouTube earlier this week, fans of '80s martial arts movies are faced with a similar question, albeit with fewer Godwin-esque implications: Is Daniel LaRusso, the titular Karate Kid himself, the real baddy of the classic 1984 family film?The zeitgeist has been dancing around this issue for some time now. How I Met Your Mother touched on it in "The Bro Mitzvah," (season 8, episode 22) when bro expert Barney Stinson argued that Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai was the true Karate Kid, and not "the scrawny loser from New Jersey who barely even knows karate." Community posited that Daniel was merely a one-dimensional catalyst for the film's true hero: Mr. Kesuke Miyagi in "Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing" from season 6. "Noriyuki Morita was nominated for an academy award for his performance," the director of a community theatre production of The Karate Kid declares at one point in the episode. "Ralph Macchio? Showed up."But "The Karate Kid: Daniel is the REAL Bully" takes things one step further, systematically (and hilariously) breaking down and analyzing the ways in which Daniel, "a violent sociopath who moves to a California town and begins tormenting a local boy and his friends," instigates and exacerbates all of the conflict in the film.After three decades of unabashed celebration of Daniel LaRusso, it's finally times for the Karate Kid fans of the world to do some soul searching and philosophical waxing on and off. Is Daniel a hero, or is he really just the martial arts world's answer to the Nice Guy?Watch the video and decide for yourself.
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