The show drove high and low. The first season saw the explosion, and the second season collapsed, but the first season is really worth watching.
Each episode is 30 minutes, concise and clear. The first plot adopted is the traditional "Falling Dog Revenge" routine in the 1980s and 1990s, but! But why is it so novel in this age?
"The Karate Kid" in 1984 is a vulgar story in the comics: the thin boy Daniel, who is helpless after the transfer, only the kind little girl Ali and him be friends. But there was another golden retriever boy Johnny who liked Ali, and he began to bully Daniel. Johnny's family is rich and powerful, has a bunch of friends, and also learns karate. He is the winner of life in the eyes of elementary school students. Daniel was rescued by a sweeping monk, he learned art from his teacher, and gained magic skills by practicing a bunch of weird skills and defeated Johnny.
This bad story in the East touched countless thin American primary school students and became a hit.
According to the "bad guys gushing out infinitely" routine, Daniel's road to dominance of the world can be compiled forever, but the sequel to the original movie was quickly written down and fell into the quagmire of the collapse of the combat system. In the third part, Daniel's enemy has become a Japanese gang. The enemy is upgraded too fast, the combat level of the protagonist group begins to be distorted, and the story is also out of the background of "American school bullying", which is not good to watch.
35 years later...
This TV series has begun.
The original crew of the movie opens a new story. As you can imagine, a group of middle-aged people are starting to get second grade again.
In the design of the TV series, after the movie timeline ended, Daniel used the self-confidence that karate brought him to realize the American dream without hindrance. Now he owns a chain car dealership, and his wife, Jinse, like a model, is harmonious, one son and one daughter, and a swimming pool. Big house, hobby to collect antique cars. The only trouble is that my son has been playing games for a long time.
After failing in a karate match, Johnny has repeatedly fallen, gave birth to children out of wedlock, and ran away fearing marriage. Now he and his son are like enemies. It also explained that Johnny used to misuse the money from his stepfather, and now his mother is dead, the relationship is also quite embarrassing. To no avail, he went around doing small jobs, was bullied by rich people, and was under pressure from middle-aged men.
——This entry point is actually a bit funny. Because it means that everyone has been changed their lives by a youth sports game 35 years ago and has been unable to come out. Fortunately, the TV series also admits that this is a joke. People in the series discuss from time to time, "Sit down and talk like adults, right?" But of course this kind of reflection cannot have any influence on the plot, otherwise the two sides will fight fiercely. Can't proceed anymore.
The inevitable adult perspective has also become the biggest weakness of the plot, that is, if the people in the play do not know karate, then they must sit down and talk, and their contradiction has long been resolved. Just because they are all karate, they will fight if they don't agree with each other, and some people will be injured in the fight, so the contradiction continues endlessly.
In the end, the audience had to realize that soldiers are also a weapon, but they can't let children learn karate.
This weakness was not obvious in the first season. The first season is the continuation of the movie. It is said that the two sons participated in a karate competition at the same time. The theme of the battle is competition, and karate is reasonable at this time.
However, "The World's First Tournament" cannot be held year after year. After two violent organizations appeared in the school (the protagonist and the two gangs of them), campus bullying probably also disappeared, so the second season is like all youth dramas The same, the quarrels involved in teenagers' love disputes. The most unbearable thing is that, in order to make the selling point of "Pretty Girls Versus", the climax of the second season has been pushing up the plot of "Why did you ask my boyfriend to screw the bottle cap for you", which was vulgar to the bottom.
In contrast, the first season adopts the clichés of the 1980s youth films but looks fresh. Including and not getting caught up in: learn magical skills to slap faces, bad young people to be good, children’s innocent obsession to save adults, poor boys and rich girls, class contradictions, isolation due to appearance defects, and the trendy but essentially old-fashioned "Internet" Bullying (previously beaten in the toilet)" and "children of South American immigrants were bullied (previously children from single-parent families were bullied)".
The freshness of these sections is that they have stepped on the red line of political correctness, so they are rarely seen in TV dramas nowadays.
For example, the stalk "being bullied because of a defect in appearance" can be regarded as an old stalk as old as the history of human civilization. However, most of the American dramas nowadays dare not show people attacking a person's fat, hare lips, wearing glasses and other defects, because it is inevitable to say insulting appearance defects in film and television, even if these words are spoken by bad guys, they are not acceptable. As a result, the bad guys in American TV dramas are no longer bad, and the slaps are not good enough.
However, in reality, a hare-lipped and shy child will still be isolated in school. If he is told about being bullied, the teacher will instead expose his complaint in the form of "no name, but know who it is". Most of the classmates pretend to treat flawed people equally, as the moral education pretends, but never eat at the same table with him. In the future, he will enter society in the same way. Everyone will pretend not to see the difference in his appearance, but he will never get the same job opportunities and social opportunities as others.
This drama uses the "uncomfortable" way to puncture this layer of window paper. When Hawk is reborn from the ashes, the "sweetness" pursued by the action film is cool enough. What's more interesting is that the plot simply pushes him to the opposite side, turning his self-confidence into a kind of offensiveness, almost becoming a new generation of bullies. This kind of very reasonable arrangement is fresh in American dramas.
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