geekosystem

The Avengers wasn't a bad movie. It certainly had flaws, though it did incredibly well, and, like any movie, there were certain sections that they cut out, repackaged, and generally changed. One of those scenes that apparently had much fiddling was the opening. Now, the opening of The Avengers is kind of an odd yet perfectly suitable sequence. What would the movie have been like if that beginning had, instead, been looking back from a point where all the devastation of the third act had already happened? Well, now we know; at some point, they shot that scene and it's now on the Internet your viewing pleasure. This is that alternate opening scene that never came to be.

So it turns out The Karate Kid director John Avildsen hung onto a lot of old rehearsal footage from the early days of filming the best coming-of-age martial arts film of all time. (Sorry, Surf Ninjas, but it's true.) Now, courtesy of Avildsen's YouTube channel, you can get a peek at more than an hour of behind-the-scenes, never meant for primetime Ralph Macchio goodness. The result is a treasure trove of shaky footage that puts most other special features to shame. Above, you can check out the early, raw version of the Cobra Kai assault that gets the film's narrative chugging along. In the interest of fair warning, the dialogue is more foul-mouthed than the final cut, and may be NSFW if your W is particularly uptight about that sort of thing.