The Hero’s Journey in Karate Kid.

I’ve always loved revisiting the Karate kid ever since I first saw it as a child. My little kid’s imagination would always envision myself in Daniel’s place, learning Karate and beating the bad guys, be the hero and show everyone up. But honestly in all my re-watches I never noticed the presence of the Hero’s journey template, which I think I only did now watching it with a critical eye, but also because I knew to look for it. In retrospect maybe the presence of Hero’s journey is what makes so many viewers unconsciously just root for Daniel as a hero so deeply, because we as viewers would like to accomplish that hero’s journey ourselves someday and watching an underdog, which Daniel undoubtedly was at the beginning, gives us all hope that maybe we can too.

We see this journey start for Daniel right at the beginning where he has to leave his hometown (his ordinary world) and he does so very reluctantly but because his mother describes their new world as an amazing new experience (an adventure one might say) and in spite of not wanting this move to begin with Daniel goes along with it for his mother, and there right on his first day he meets the man who would become his mentor Mr. Miyagi.

I personally love the relationship between Mr. Miyagi and Daniel the most in the entire movie. There is just so much Mr. Miyagi sees in Daniel that he cannot in himself and I think that is what made Mr. Miyagi take the first step forward in their friendship. This friendship slowly grows into a Mentor/Mentee role which is executed so brilliantly because as Mr. Miyagi says, “There are no bad students, only bad teachers’’ and Mr. Miyagi is the perfect teacher Daniel could have to help him grow and get balanced. And in a way I think it also lets Mr. Miyagi grow as he finally lets someone in and proves how much Daniel means to him by giving him the patch sewn by his late wife and his old dog tags. The opposite of Mr. Miyagi when it comes to teaching or a Mentor, I think it’s safe to say, is Mr. Kreese or Sensi as he is most commonly referred to, who only ever teaches the importance of winning no matter the means to do it.

It is only when Daniel is faced with the challenge of the Tournament that he starts to view Karate as a way of Defense rather than the tool for fighting he first thought of it as. I think this might have been the most important lesson that Daniel as our hero could learn from this experience as it made him realize that, just because you have the power to start a fight does not mean you should, as we often see the Cobra Kai do, and that the best reason to fight is to stop fighting. We see this arc coming to completion in the final fight where Daniel, even after being injured and being faced with major obstacles, decides that he needs to fight this one time so he wouldn’t have to keep fighting other times and winning this fight would be what would turn his world around.

This last fight I think because of this reason holds great importance as this is what determines if Daniel gets to make the new beginning as his new ordinary now, if the reward of winning is what will make him an equal in the eye of his enemies (which I sense it does when Johnny hands Daniel the trophy), that completing this one, whether win or lose would make him a better man, a changed man to both others and himself and this is where we see him complete his hero’s journey.