Cobra Kai ended its six-season run last month… and while the possibilities exist for further stories to be told with these characters, the main story – for all intents and purposes – has come to a close.
For those unaware, Cobra Kai is a spiritual successor to the original Karate Kid trilogy of films – by which I mean the first three films. There’s also a fourth movie with Hillary Swank and a “remake” of sorts with Jackie Chan and Will Smith’s kid, but neither of those are referenced or even touched upon in this series. In any event, the main character of this series is Johnny Lawrence, former All-Valley champ who once ate a crane kick in the face at the end of the first film and his life has gone downhill since then. So the crux of this series is basically Johnny getting his life back on track by bringing back the old Cobra Kai dojo and… stuff happens, afterwards.
The show started off on Youtube as one of their “Originals” series before moving to Netflix and would prove to be popular with the kids as it were. I had sampled the first two episodes when they were on Youtube, but I never got to watch the rest of it until it debuted on Netflix a couple years later.
Here’s a fun fact: I have never seen a lick of The Karate Kid films when I was younger. I’ve probably seen a few clips, highlights, and maybe know some of the familiar bits and bobs, but it wouldn’t be until more recent years where I’d actually sit down and watch these films in the first place. It was just one of those things that I knew about, but never really got around to seeing because there was so much other stuff that I was more interested in. This sort of thing happens, you know.
And yet when I saw the first episode of Cobra Kai back when it debuted on Youtube, it did a perfectly fine job of bringing the non-fan viewer up to speed on the premise of the show. Former rival gets his ass kicked and life goes to shit. Sees a kid get beat up and decides to open his old master’s karate dojo for the expressed purpose of teaching this kid how to defend himself. From there, things develop. The kid (Miguel) gains some confidence and an attitude, which invites more students to Cobra Kai. Johnny, a product of 1980s culture, is figuring out how the modern world works. Hilarity ensures.
Meanwhile, you have the titular Karate Kid of the first three movies, Daniel LaRusso. Now a car salesman with a wife and two kids, things are going well for this guy until he sees the new Cobra Kai dojo on a strip joint. See, Daniel and Cobra Kai have a history together that is anything but pleasant and Johnny used to be one of their top students. So he and Johnny have something of an antagonist relationship owing almost entirely to Daniel thinking that all Cobra Kai is bad Cobra Kai, all the while Johnny is just trying to get his shit together. Hilarity ensures.
And then there are the kids. Miguel, the son of someone living in the same apartment complex at Johnny, starts to fall in love with Samantha, who happens to be Daniel’s daughter. Meanwhile, Johnny’s estranged son Robby comes into play. Other kids are invited to Cobra Kai and develop attitudes of their own. Eli, a nerdy kid with a lisp, transforms himself completely by giving himself a mohawk, branding himself Hawk, and developing a bit of a mean streak. Hilarity… does not ensure. In fact, of all the elements, the kids is where the show’s drama starts to develop and where the shit, as the kids say, would hit the fan.
The first season of the show is a very basic, very straightforward inverse of the Karate Kid story. Kid gets beat up, learns karate from a former karate champ, participates in the All-Valley tournament to win the thing, defeating Johnny’s son Robby in the finals. Seeing Johnny’s students beat up Robby somewhat aggressively in the tournament due to his more “Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy” mentality of karate has him realize how much of an asshole he was being and rather than enjoy Cobra Kai’s victory, he’s in his office morose, which is made all the more complicated by the return of his former sensei, John Kreese (Martin Kove).
Naturally, he and Johnny also have a somewhat complicated relationship. Johnny was Kreese’s prize student until he was crane kicked in the face. Kreese and Johnny had a rather physical disagreement afterwards. Both go their own derelict separate ways. Now Kreese wants back in on the Cobra Kai thing, but Johnny is initially reluctant. He eventually brings Kreese in, but Kreese is still an evil bastard at heart and starts to take these kids towards a dark path, invites other unsavory kids into the dojo, and this results in the second season’s big setpiece, a high school brawl among all the high school students that sees Robby kick Miguel off a railing and on the floor, breaking his back and possibly not being able to walk again. Johnny is exiled from Cobra Kai, Kreese having completely taken it over.
The third season season Johnny and Daniel put aside their differences to try and find Robby, who’s on the run. Eventually, Robby is caught and put in Juvi. Daniel’s car business is having financial problems, which forces him to go to Okinawa to seek some help. There, he runs into Kumiko – the former love interest of the second film. Both reunite and eventually run into Chozen, the big bad of said second film and also one of Daniel’s deadliest foes… except Chozen isn’t the bad guy here. He has seemingly turned a new leaf and even teaches the same style of karate that Mr. Miyagi – Daniel’s dearly departed sensei – taught Daniel, but is more privy to secrets that Daniel does not have. Chozen and Daniel have a fight that sees Chozen emerge victory, using pressure points to defeat Daniel and end the fight in the same fashion as their last battle… by honking his nose.
So, yes, Chozen really had turned a new leaf and during a touching scene, reveals how he had almost committed suicide after his actions against Daniel years ago until his uncle showed him the light. And in this one moment, both former rivals put aside their past differences and become good friends. It shows a bit of evolution in these long-time characters and also a tease that maybe, just maybe, Daniel and Johnny can patch things up… which they eventually do. And when Kreese proposes a challenge to pit his Cobra Kai against their combined dojos (Daniel re-opened Miyagi-Do while Johnny opens up Eagle Fang), the third season ends with both senseis and both dojos working together.
It takes a while, though. Both Daniel and Johnny have drastically different teaching styles and they don’t always gel together. This merging of styles affects the kids, as Miguel spends more time with Daniel doing stuff while Samantha decides to adopt more of Johnny’s style, which doesn’t sit well with ol’ Dad. Meanwhile, Kreese invites Terry Silver back into the fold. Silver, the cheesy bad guy of the third film who goaded Daniel to fight again and even brought him under his wing in a ruse to beat the kid down mentally.
And… stuff happens, I guess. I’m not going to do a full season-by-season breakdown of the whole series because then I’d be turning this into a synopsis. But I touch on these four seasons for a reason and that’s to provide some context as to why Cobra Kai works as a “legacy sequel” series or whatever you call it these days.
Cobra Kai has its share of callbacks and flashbacks to the first three Karate Kid films – the Hillary Swank one-off and Jackie Chan remake are never brought up – but it does a meaningful job of bringing some of these legacy characters back into the fold and not only developing them further into more fleshed out characters, but also building on the backstory a little bit.
The new characters brought into the fold – mainly the kids – are also intriguing people who start off simple, but undergo so many changes and evolutions that they become more interesting characters. The development of the three “main kids” as I call them – Miguel, Samantha, and Robby – is the crux of this film. Each character start off in a different place in life and come out of it fully realized and altered by their experiences throughout the six seasons
Ultimately, for all the additional new characters and lore added to the mythos of that Karate Kid film franchise, Cobra Kai is the story of Johnny Lawrence and his quest for redemption. His efforts to pull out of the rut that he had fallen into after his tournament loss, trying to get his life back on track, and most of all, getting to do it on his own terms. It’s Johnny coming to the realization that his teachers didn’t always have the best of intentions, coming to terms with his role in life, making up for all the mistakes he’s made over the years, and most of all, making the most of this second chance that’s been given to him. By the end of the series, we see Johnny married with a newborn daughter, his student and son from another marriage on the same page, his rivalry with Daniel resolved, and his dojo on top of the world, thanks to his win .
Cobra Kai is a series that embraces and celebrates its legacy without making any of it feel like soulless fan-service. Everything clicks.
Cobra Kai simply… works.
If anyone says otherwise… well, all I will say is…
QUIET!
dtm666 