Never saw this one all the way through as a kid. It is truly strange. A few highlights:

-It takes place roughly nine months after the end of the first movie, and in that time Ralph Macchio appears to have aged 15 years and Martin Kreese has gone from the owner of the most elite karate dojo in Southern California to a destitute loser.

-The film begins with Kreese swearing revenge against this teenager and his kindly old friend who beat his student fair and square in a karate tournament. But Kreese is barely in the movie after that. Instead, he basically farms out his personal vendetta to a rich benefactor, a slimy businessman who disposes of toxic waste for a living, but drops everything he’s doing to engineer an elaborate scheme to tear Daniel and Miyagi apart while he sends Kreese on vacation. So it’s a revenge story by proxy, where the character who wants revenge is not the character actually executing the revenge plan. Just one of the weirdest premises for a movie ever.

-In the meantime, Daniel throws away his college education (for the second time in the series!) to spend all his savings on Mr. Miyagi. In this case, he helps him start a bonsai tree store. Miyagi hesitates for a minute, then gladly accepts his teenage student’s money. (In Part II, Daniel spends his college tuition money on a plane ticket to Japan with Miyagi, then conveniently wins in all back in an ice-breaking bet.)

-Ralph Macchio’s wardrobe is comprised exclusively of billowy button-downs tucked into the most unflattering mom jeans. He looks terrible. It’s costuming malpractice.

-The movie ends with the same karate tournament as the first one, one year later. But as a time and budget saver, the tourney supposedly instituted a new rule where the defending champion (Daniel) only needs to fight once. Forget the fact that no athletic competition would do something like that; the bigger problem is that the training montage of Daniel working his way up the tournament set to “You’re the Best” is the best part of The Karate Kid. They had the chance to do it over, and they threw it away. It’s just so dumb.

-Speaking of the tournament: When it finally arrises, the sign in the background reads “ALL VALLEY KARATE CHAMPIONSHIPS” with “UNDER EIGHTEEN” in smaller letters above it. So Daniel is supposed to be under 18? I’m pretty sure he turned 18 in the birthday scene in the first movie. If he’s under 18, why isn’t he in high school? Did he drop out to go hang out with Mr. Miyagi full-time? In a related story, Ralph Macchio was 28 when this movie came out.

-The whole film is a pile of reheated trash, but there’s this one absolutely remarkable shot, this epic image of Daniel and Miyagi training on a cliff where the camera, presumably on a helicopter, starts right next to them and pulls back until they’re tiny specks in the distance. It’s this awe-inspiring moment. It gave me legitimate chills. Then it was back to the movie about the middle-aged karate teacher trying to beat the crap out of a middle-aged-looking teenager.