Karate Kid: Legends is a movie with a mission — to expand the long legacy of The Karate Kid back onto the big screen after five previous installments, and the fan-favorite Cobra Kai TV show. But why should such a thing be kept back for Daniel-San and his cohorts, when there’s literally a decade of movies aimed at kids from the 1980s that are primed for revival and rediscovery by the now middle-aged faithful? For your consideration, friends: three more ‘80s cinematic classics that someone should rewatch and reboot as quickly as commercially possible.

This is For Your Consideration, in which we try to come to terms with the inescapable fact that, honestly, there’s too much out there to have time to watch, read, or hear everything — by making some suggestions about things that you might have overlooked but would enjoy, anyway. Think of it as recommendations from a well-meaning friend.

It’s been 39 years; it’s time to give Ferris Bueller another Day Off

Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller was the ideal company for one day of escapism — a day when the normal rules didn’t apply, and you could end up in a big parade singing for the masses if you really wanted to — but surely I’m not the only person who wondered what he’s be like on every other day of the year; what was Ferris like when things didn’t all end up going his way? If Karate Kid: Legends shows the aftermath of Daniel’s teachings at the hands of Mr. Miyagi, who’s to say that there’s not a story in finding out where Ferris ended up in middle age — and whether or not he’s still as filled with self-confidence as he was, way back on that one day off. Let’s see the mid-50s Ferris take a day off from work and watch what happens. (If nothing else, the technology has improved so much in the past few decades that he’d definitely be able to fake being sick a whole lot easier.) Watch this classic and let your mind run free at the possibilities.

Available to stream on Paramount+

After 40 years, doesn’t the world deserve a second Breakfast Club?

The Breakfast Club might be John Hughes’ best movie not only because it felt so universal at the time — who among us didn’t try to fit themselves into the nerd, jock, princess, basket case, and criminal classification at one time or another? — but because it was very purposefully constrained in its timeframe: we never found out what happened to the group afterwards, allowing the cynical and optimistic viewers to imagine their own versions of the aftermath and come away satisfied. Now that it’s been four decades since the movie was made, however — and that the US has arguably more fragmented into its own divisions since the ‘80s — it feels like the time would be right to see what happened to the group years later, and if they could manage to find common ground in today’s America. In order to refresh your memories before coming up with your own version of what happened next, check back in for one more bout of Saturday detention like you’re Ally Sheedy with a worse haircut. After all, no-one has a better haircut than Ally Sheedy in this movie.

Available to stream on Netflix

We’ve made it 38 years without going back Over The Top, and we need to fix that

Okay, here’s one out of left field. The Karate Kid made America’s youth marital arts crazy when it was first released, so you could be forgiven for believing — as filmmakers did at the time! — that the same trick could be achieved with movies about different sports. Or things that were, well… sports-adjacent. Enter Over The Top, better known as ‘That Sylvester Stallone movie about a truck driver who’s competing in a professional arm wrestling tournament, which I guess is a thing?’ The 1987 original movie is a fever dream that never quite manages to come together, but is all the more fascinating and enjoyable because of that — and if any movie deserves a decades-later sequel that tries to build a larger mythology out of what was there, it’s this one. Check out Stallone in this and tell me that you don’t want more. I dare you. Hell, more than that — I’ll arm-wrestle you about it.

Available to stream on Prime Video

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