Thanks to his performance as Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid William "Billy" Zabka's appearance exemplifies the archetype of all 1980s movie thugs. Suppose you close your eyes and think of the type of guy who would torment the charming outsider in an 80s teen movie. In that case, he's probably a tall, stocky blonde whose parents definitely had a photo of Ronald Reagan hanging above the TV in their living room. It's not Zabka's fault that it became a blueprint for this type of character, but when you look at it the high school movie landscape of the decade, it certainly seems like every casting director is looking for a "Billy Zabka type." In some cases, that meant hiring him directly.

Zabka's follow-up to his starring role in The Karate Kid is an oft-forgotten teen comedy directed by Lisa Gottlieb called Just One of the Guys. A loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the film centers on an aspiring young journalist named Terri Griffith (Joyce Heiser) who decides to pose as a boy named Terry and attend another school after she fails to land a newspaper internship. . , believing it was because she was a woman. Terri takes lessons from her perverted little brother Buddy on how to act like a boy, and despite her smaller stature, she assimilates into her new school without a hint of doubt. She befriends an insecure guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), catches the eye of a girl named Sandy (Sherilyn Fenn), and becomes the new target of school bully Greg Tolan, played by Zabka.

It's not surprising that Zabka would play a bully in a high school movie again, but there it is is It's strange that when the girls at Terri's new school discuss her looks, they all compare "him" to Ralph Macchio. "Dresses like Elvis Costello, lookin' like a karate guy... I'm gonna get him," as Sandy says when she sees Terry... while their classmate Greg looks on suspicious like Johnny Lawrence.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, comparing Terry's looks to Ralph Macchio was almost certainly just a cute joke to poke fun at Zabka's casting, and we should have let out a reasonable smile and moved on. Anyway, I'm /Film's resident chronic overthinker. I'm the one who wrote a whole article on how "Casper" is actually a deeply disturbing film if you think about it for more than five minutes and get stuck the psychological justifications for the talking raptor in Jurassic Park III. So, of course, hearing this throwaway line immediately sent me spiraling into the greater multiverse of a hypothetical "Karate Kid." Why doesn't anyone at this high school admit that the big man on campus looks just like Johnny Lawrence? If the "Cobra Kai" universe has expanded to include Jackie Chan's reboot of The Karate Kid along with Miyagi's current versedoes this mean that "Just One of the Guys" is also part of the extended "Karate Kid" universe? Ergo, could Greg Tolan be to Johnny Lawrence what Agnes O'Connor is to Agatha Harkness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

It goes a little deeper than just a joke. "Just One of the Guys" was released by Columbia, the same studio that released "The Karate Kid" the previous year. According to director Lisa Gottlieb in an interview with Mental threadthe production deliberately wanted Terry to look like Macchio. "We saw the physical resemblance and went with it," she explained. "Remember Columbia was the studio that made the Karate Kid movies, and the first one was a huge hit while we were getting ready." Allegedly, the line was in the movie before Zabka was cast as Greg because once they saw Heiser with the short hair, the resemblance was too uncanny not to mention.

This made Just One of the Guys the second in what is now known as William Zabka's Thug Trilogy, where he was cast as a brutal blonde who picks on smaller, dark-haired students, including The Karate Kid and Back . at school." However, the latter doesn't reference The Karate Kid or Ralph Macchio in any way, so it's the farthest from the bunch.

40 years after its release, Just One of the Guys is both an archaic product of its time and a groundbreaking work of unintentional queer cinema. Zabka as a teenage Johnny Lawrence is, in many circles, a lesbian icon, with many androgynous women modeling their hair after him in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Joyce Heiser's drag performance was a huge wake-up call for many butch women and transmasculinists, and Terry's brother Buddy, who calls her an "androgynous lay bucket" ended up on a lot of queer artist craft and merchandise. Sure, it hasn't aged so well through the modern lens of understanding gender identity, but there's an empathetic honesty — warts and all — in its themes of sexism and gender performance that even movies made today are afraid to tackle.

It's highly doubtful that there will ever be a reference to "Just One of the Guys" in the canon universe of The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai, but if there ever is a scene where someone runs into Johnny Lawrence on the street and mistakes him for the prom king at their high school Greg Tolan (hopefully played by someone from "Just One of the Guys"), I apologize in advance for my future inability to ever shut up about it.