Cobra Kai Season 1
When I first saw the trailer for Cobra Kai, distributed by YouTube Premium, my first reaction was shock. It’s been 34 years since the first Karate Kid film, an 80s classic both in style and content. It’s one of those classics that you can offhandedly reference, and almost everyone will understand what you’re referencing (particularly the name Mr. Miyagi, and the phrase “wax on wax off”). I was interested to see how this would go – and interested to see that television series are actively picking up on narratives from the past and canonizing it, even as long as three decades later. I thought Cobra Kai was going to be a comedic, almost parodic version of the characters we saw in the original. I was hearkened back to the episode arc where William Zabka appears on How I Met Your Mother, which was particularly memorable due to Barney’s unpopular take on who the real hero of The Karate Kid was (spoiler: he thinks it’s Johnny Lawrence).
The premise of the show is that we are predominantly given Johnny Lawrence’s point of view, and the way his life has turned out all these years later. No longer a spoiled rich kid, he lives in relative poverty, is an alcoholic, and isn’t doing much with his life. Daniel LaRusso, on the other hand, is an incredibly successful car dealer, whose billboard-plastered face haunts Johnny. Johnny is still a bit of an ass, honestly, but viewers empathize with him nonetheless. His character becomes much more three-dimensional in Cobra Kai than in The Karate Kid, demonstrating how the choices of his past have affected him and the way he learns to recalibrate his own values in the present. The addition of Miguel, a kid who lives in Johnny’s complex, a scrawny teen in desperate need for self-defense skills, reinstates purpose in Johnny’s life when he decides to open up his own dojo. Pretty soon, we see that the show is not just about Johnny’s PoV, but switches back and forth between Daniel’s as well.
I soon realized, shortly after starting the series, that this show was going to be a lot more serious than I’d initially thought. In fact, it’s turned out to be one of the best written shows I’ve seen in the recent past (if you don’t believe me, look at the RottenTomatoes, ImdB and Facebook ratings). It’s incredibly intriguing to think that, perhaps, the HIMYM arc might have planted the seed of the storyline of Cobra Kai. After all, this show is nothing if not about the power of perspective. Watch the trailer for Season 1 of Cobra Kai below:
What really hooked me, and presumably every other viewer, is in fact the title: it’s Cobra Kai, not Karate Kid. Yet, the show pulls no punches in taking its audience on a wild ride – one minute you’re rooting for Johnny, the next you’re rooting for Daniel. Sometimes you root for both of them at once: sometimes you root for neither of them. The character development, not just of the old rivals but its teen characters as well, is stellar – Miguel, Robby, Samantha, Eli (later “Hawk”), and Aisha all have compelling story arcs that I personally couldn’t predict from a mile away.
And that’s the key: the show isn’t predictable in the slightest. Every time I thought I knew what would happen, the show surprised me by zagging instead of zigging. One of the major issues I have with a lot of current television and film is the predictability of the plotlines, but Cobra Kai takes careful time to layer each character with the right amount of empathy, darkness, and goodness. In other words, the show portrays humanity the way it realistically is, a grey matter area instead of the black and white world that was utilized in the original films.
Because more often than not, things are not black and white, and that’s what I believe is the true message of the show. The way one person sees and lives their life might not be inherently right or wrong, but can be seen as such from the perspective of another person. Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence are constantly at odds with each other, but when you really get down to it (which we actually see in S1E9), they’re more similar than they are different. However, there is so much history and baggage associated with their pasts that it’ll be interesting to see whether they ever get over it. Needless to say, it’s refreshing to see Daniel be just as much of an asshole as Johnny can be, and to see Johnny be just as endearing and kind-hearted as Daniel can be. Also, I’d like to take a second to acknowledge how badass it is that Ralph Macchio and William Zabka are still in excellent fighting shape, even being in their mid-50s.
It’s truly a show that I’ve never seen the likes of before, because we see so many perspectives and overlapping ideologies that I could truly understand where each and every character was coming from. Johnny starts the show by adhering to his old Cobra Kai ways and the Machiavellian maxim that came along with his training (“Strike Hard, Strike First, No Mercy”). However, he progresses into a character who actually questions and changes his values, even well into his middle-age-hood. Daniel exhibits the same behaviour; though he comes from the endearing Miyagi-Do background, he makes some pretty questionable decisions throughout the series, and is often ignorant to the way his actions come across. Without spoiling too much, the same character development is mirrored in Miguel and Robby’s characters, taking unexpected twists and turns all while maintaining a firm sense of believability.
On a side note, I appreciate the way diversity is portrayed in the cast. Taking on somewhat of a “colour blind casting” approach, we have Miguel who is Latino and one of the main characters. Aisha is African-American, and even the main high school bully/love interest to Samantha, Kyler, is East Asian. Though the show is still predominantly white, I hope to see more PoC characters down the line. What I appreciate, though, is that showing more diversity such as this, ie. showing characters of different ethnicities playing protagonists and antagonists all at once is really important in the way of representing PoCs realistically.
Ultimately, the show still maintains elements of 80s corniness while simultaneously updating it and keeping it palatable to the current times. It pushes boundaries in some ways, because Johnny’s main issue in Season 1 is that he’s stuck in the past. The misogynistic, sexist, oppressive gender stereotypes are very much part of his vernacular, but this is juxtaposed and challenged nicely by the “woke” students he teaches, who in turn teach Johnny that things are not the way they used to be.
Cobra Kai is easily one of my new favourite shows because it couples drama with a compelling ability to straddle the line of “good” and “evil”, and somehow blur it on both sides. We are given reminders of the original film, but tonally the show is much more sophisticated. Nostalgia of the past is paired with hope for the future, mixing the Miyagi-Do ideology of balance and defense only with the “No Mercy” ideology of Cobra Kai. The result? One of the most thought-provoking series I’ve seen in a long time.
Season 2 premiered on April 24th, and reviews are already saying that it’s just as good if not better than Season 1. I’m excited to see what new twists and turns are to come!
~ Z ~
Feature photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
