Letters To Parade: In Which We Ponder The Horror Of Being Ralph Macchio

It used to be that every Sunday I sat down and wrote a brief -- as in, somewhere around 3,000 words -- post about the fucktards who write into Walter Scott's Personality Parade in Parade Magazine with unimaginably moronic questions. And when I say "fucktards" what I really mean -- or meant -- in most cases was the editorial staff who made up the questions, since most of the letter writers clearly didn't exist. Though, of course, many, many, many of the letters were written by real people, since I still get emails about once a week asking me to remove their names from the posts in question because, well, it turns out they don't like having high school crushes Googling their names and finding out that they wrote a mythical person a question about whether or not, you know, the corpses on CSI are real dead people or, worse, important questions about immigration reform getting all of those damn immigrant Brits off of our TV screens.

But as Neil Diamond once said, used to be's don't count anymore. I've stopped reporting on Parade for several reasons, not the least of which is that they seem to not be using as many fucking idiots to write their fake questions anymore, which is nice, but also because the magazine is so small now that I frequently can't find it in my Sunday LA Times and end up inadvertently throwing it away along with the coupons for the discount on the Wagon Wheel appetizer plate at Black Angus before I have the chance to be annoyed by the contents therein. I also suspect that my wife occasionally hides the magazine in hopes of not getting my blood pressure up now that I'm 40. But by and large, when I do read it, I find that the questions and answers in Personality Parade are still fucking stupid but are now, more often than not, not as egregiously ruining the very fabric of America, and thus I've decided that my hard work for lo so many years actually paid off. That or I'm just numb now. Could be either one. 

At any rate, that's how I felt until this morning. I woke up early, around 11am, and sat down on my sofa to watch football and drink coffee in hopes of finally digesting the fowl beast living in my gullet these last several days. I placed the Sunday LA Times -- minus the sports page and the book revew -- beside me on the sofa and for a few hours my cocker spaniel slept peacefully on top of it. Life seemed good. The Raiders were winning. Things in my stomach seemed to be traveling a sure path. Birds sang. Eventually, however, my dog got off the couch and I found myself staring face-to-face with Parade. Oh, what the fuck, I thought, how bad could it be?

Q: Would Ralph Macchio ever do another Karate Kid movie?—Stephanie Whitley, Smithfield, Va.

I'm sure Stephanie Whitley is a very nice person. I'm sure she's spent a lot of her hard earned money buying up all the Betamax copies of the original Karate Kid movie she can find. Why, I bet sometimes she even stands in her back yard and does the fucking crane while thinking about the local toughs she's going to take down at the next big karate fight featuring rival, uhm, karate teams. In fact, I bet she's just a big fucking Ralph Macchio fan in general, probably stood outside in the freezing rain for hours waiting to get into the earliest showing of Crossroads and still thinks Steve Vai is an evil guitarman sent by Satan to hurt poor Ralph. There are probably times when she just thinks, you know, stay gold. And that's great. That's brand loyalty right there. It's what made Coke, Kleenex, Xerox and Scientology what they are today. 

But for fuck's sake, Stephanie, the Karate Kid is about...a fucking kid. See, it's right there in the title. And if you don't believe me, go see the remake with Will Smith's fucking kid playing, you know, a kid, who learns, you know, fucking karate. Because he's a kid. And because the movie is called The Karate Kid. That's how that works. See, the problem here Stephanie is that Ralph Macchio is 50 years old. He made The Karate Kid 27 years ago...which means he wasn't even a kid then, he was 23, which is a cruel irony...and one would think that a sequel where his son learns to fight off neighborhood thugs by learning the great art of getting-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you would be a natural, right? I'm sure somewhere on the internet there's a fan fiction story all about that, maybe even one where the kids from Twilight enlist Ralph's help to fight...uh...whoever they need to fight. Is it elves? Mermaids? Well, anyway, the point is that it's a fucking stupid idea but it's the only reasonable way to incorporate an AARP-aged Ralph back into a fucking Karate Kid movie. 

The larger issue here is that I'm concerned Stephanie thinks other formerly-young stars will be returning to their fame-creating roles where they played young people, so let me disabuse her of the following: No, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper will not be reprising their roles in Little Rascals: The Revenge. No, Levar Burton will not be in a very special Roots Christmas special...because he already did that...nor will he be in Roots 3: Kunta's Vengeance or a Roots video game. No, Benji will not be returning to the big screen in Benji: The Possession. In fact, no actor who gained fame doing anything before turning 25 should be forced -- by money needs or fan demands -- into any project that has a colon in the title unless they have an inoperable disease and thus have decided to help spur research into finding a cure for the inoperable disease by appearing in said project.

I'm sure Ralph agrees with me, at least sub-textually:

A: “No, I don’t have a desire to,” says Macchio, 50. “It seems like a different franchise now.” The father of two is working on a teen driving safety campaign for State Farm in which he teaches his son, 16, the rules of the road (watch the video below). He’s also producing a reality show about Gypsies for the National Geographic Channel, due in the spring.

Just fyi, "It seems like a different franchise now" is code for "Are you people for real? I mean, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? You think I'm fucking William Shatner? Get a fucking life, you fucktards! It was 27 years ago. How would you like to climb into the life you had 27 fucking years ago? Why don't you take your fucking question and shove it up your top-loading VCR, okay? Leave me be. Just leave me fucking be. And stay gold, bitches."

 

 

Comments

[warren murphy]

tod is always hilarious.
warren murphy