VOTD: What If Daniel LaRusso Is The Real Bully In 'The Karate Kid'?

In the fourth season of How I Met Your Mother, it's revealed that all-around ladies man and bro Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) has a completely different view of the 80s classic The Karate Kid than most people. In Barney's eyes, the good guy is teenage Cobra Kai student Johnny Lawrence, played by William Zabka, and he's defeated by the "scrawny loser from New Jersey who barely even knows karate."

While this is an amusing bit that shows you how skewed Barney's perspective is on a variety of things, a new video attempts to illustrate that The Karate Kid bully may really be Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), as he is reponsible for instigating a lot of the conflict and tensions that exists between the two characters in the movie.

Here's an alternate perspective on The Karate Kid from J. Matthew Turner:

While the point of this video is to offer a contrarian viewpoint to who the hero really is in The Karate Kid, you can't deny that there are some good points made about how reckless Daniel LaRusso is, creating problems in his new home.

As a kid I always that LaRusso was a bit of a brat for being so whiny and bitter about moving away from New Jersey to California, and that clearly fuels some of his anger towards Johnny Lawrence in the movie. And while Johnny isn't really that likable of a guy, he never really gets out of hand until LaRusso escalates things.

Of course, even if you can blame LaRusso for a lot of the fights that take place between them, Lawrence goes a little overboard with retaliation, not unlike the ongoing joke about The Karate Kid went overboard by making William Zabka a recurring guest star on How I Met Your Mother in the final season (but I digress).

On a final note, it's also a little ridiculous (though purposefully amusingly so) to call Mr. Miyagi a demon sorcerer, but we don't know all that much about him, so anything is possible. Maybe that will end up being the subject of an inevitable prequel that shows us the origin of Mr. Miyagi.

UPDATE: Just for fun, here's comedian Patton Oswalt's The Johnny Lawrence Story, which links several of William Zabka's movie roles into a singular tale:

What do you think of this view on The Karate Kid?