Johnny Tsunami

Disney Channel premiered Johnny Tsunami on July 24, 1999. It was directed by Steve Boyum and written by Ann Knapp and Douglas Sloan. Brandon Baker plays Johnny "Pono" Kapahala II, a surfer whose grandfather is the famous Johnny Tsunami (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). When his father, Pete (Yuji Okumoto), gets transferred, the family moves from Hawaii to Vermont. The new town has two schools: private Skyline Academy, whose skiers are called the Skies, and public Maple Valley, whose snowboarders are the Urchins. Johnny gets enrolled with the skiers, but snowboarding feels more like surfing to him, and a new friend, Sam Sterling (Lee Thompson Young), teaches him how. His friend Emily (Kirsten Storms) is the headmaster's daughter.

When Pete cracks down on the snowboarding and the new friends, and Sam learns his Marine father is being transferred to Iceland, the two boys run away to Hawaii on a cargo plane. Johnny's grandfather brings them back and turns out to be a great snowboarder too, and Johnny ends up racing a skier named Brett. If Johnny wins, the snowboarders get to ride the skiers' half of the mountain. If Brett wins, he gets the family's Tsunami Medal. Baker later summed up the film for Vice as a family going through a hard time and a kid with a difficult father, with "some racial and social issues" in it too. Many of the ski and snowboarding scenes were shot at Utah's Brighton Ski Resort, and parts were filmed in Hawaii. Fastball's "The Way" is on the soundtrack. The film was nominated for a 2000 Humanitas Prize.

A sequel, Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, followed in 2007. When Disney+ launched in November 2019, Vice reported, interest in Johnny Tsunami came back so strongly that Baker's IMDb STARmeter spiked. He had left acting by then and now works as a wedding officiant in Colorado. He told E! News that people still come up to him saying he was in "that Johnny Tsunami TV show," and he tells them, "No, I think you've just seen it so many times that your memory believes it as such."