by Whitley Albury, Staff Writer

The Karate Kid was a big deal in the 80s. I mean, I don’t know that first hand (early 90s baby here), but ask my parents, or anyone from their generation, and they’ll automatically go back to 1984. I feel like the argument could be made that Karate Kid was THE film that took martial arts films into the mainstream. Not that there weren’t already plenty of martial arts films before the mid-80s, but they were a very niche genre that never really made it to blockbuster level before 1984.

The story as to how the original trilogy got made is as wild as you’d expect. Paramount Studios really wanted a movie series similar to Rocky, but, well, different. Enter Robert Kamen. He based the entire trilogy on his own life, mixed with an old news story about a kid with a single mom, who won a black belt in a karate tournament. Kamen got beat up at the World’s Fair in 1964 by a group of other teens, and went on to learn karate as self defense. Yes, that was the wildest sentence that I never expected to read. He took his own experiences of studying first under a former Marine, who was absolutely brutal, and then under a Japanese man who didn’t speak English at all but taught him how to be gentle even while learning self-defense. Karate Kid was the movie that kick started his writing career, and launched so many others’. Pat Morita’s career was revived because of these movies, and Hillary Swank’s role in The Next Karate Kid is considered her breakout performance. Hell, they even got permission from DC to use the name Karate Kid!

The core of the story comes from Daniel LaRusso (played by the still-lovely Ralph Macchio), a fish out of water, who just moved from New Jersey to southern California. His parents just got divorced and he’s an easy target. The East Coast/West Coast argument was very much a thing back then, which blows my mind, because I thought it was only reserved for hip-hop. Daniel keeps getting into fights with rich, popular Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka, who has truly just gotten better with age). All we know about Johnny in the original film is that he’s a dick who feels threatened by Daniel’s presence. After Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), Daniel’s apartment complex handyman, promptly kicks the entirety of Cobra Kai’s asses, Daniel wants to learn how to fight like him. Enter John Kreese (Martin Kove, who still terrifies me, even though I’m sure he’s a teddy bear), a Vietnam Marine vet and the sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo. Again, all we know from the films is that he’s an absolute nightmare, and brutal in his teachings. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy.

Those are words that Johnny sticks to throughout his life, and after losing the All Valley Tournament to Daniel, Kreese nearly kills him. Johnny had looked up to Kreese as almost a father figure since joining Cobra Kai when he was a kid.

Fast forward thirty-four years, and that brings us to Cobra Kai, opening on Johnny as a man in his early fifties. He’s still clinging to his adolescence, because he listens to the same music, drives the same car, and has the same core personality. Only now, instead of being the rich, popular kid… he’s become a handyman, living in a shitty apartment in Reseda. His new neighbors are a small family: a grandmother (Rose Bianco) and mother (Vanessa Rubio), both immigrants, and a son, Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña). Miguel is a nerdy kid, new in town, and just awkward. Sound familiar? Johnny saves him from getting his ass absolutely handed to him by a group of rich-kid bullies, and then gets arrested for physically assaulting teenagers. We’re in the 21st century now, of course there’s consequences. But now Miguel wants to learn karate from Johnny specifically.

The series allows us to spend more time with characters in the original trilogy and get their backstories. Obviously, we know all about Daniel, but we get more insight into Johnny and Kreese. Johnny’s own story is very similar to Daniel’s, because his biological dad wasn’t in the picture. He just got lucky because his mother married a rich, older man (Ed Asner). And Kreese’s backstory is just as sad. He was bullied as a poor teenager, enlisted to go to Vietnam, and lost the love of his life while he was a prisoner of war. The song remains the same across each generation, the key is the only thing that changes. Johnny wanted to be like Kreese, up to a point, and he’s spent a lot of time thinking about everything that went wrong. There’s the saying that “hurt people hurt people,” and the series keeps that at its heart. Meanwhile, Daniel owns the most successful car dealerships in the valley, lives in a nice house with his wife and kids, and has the life he dreamed of.

In the original trilogy of films, there’s a very clear line of good and bad. In Cobra Kai, the line is blurred. Johnny, in a way, becomes a hero because he’s (slowly) unlearning all of his problematic behavior. He’s fixing his past by helping Miguel and creating his own dojo. There’s a lot of back and forth as to whether Cobra Kai can ever be “good,” just because of all the harm Kreese did in the 80s. There’s this theme of how bullying can have such long lasting impacts, and how important it is to break the generational trauma chain. Miguel does become a bully because of taking Johnny’s advice a little too literally, and then Johnny deals with the emotional fall out of that. He’s neglected his own son (Tanner Buchanan), and because of not knowing how to try to repair that bond, he focuses all of his fatherly efforts on Miguel. So, there’s still the sense of not being able to truly solve every problem.

Is the series still as cheesy as the original movies? Of course it is! But that’s part of the charm. There are absolutely cringey moments throughout, both from the adults and teenagers. But hey, that’s part of the charm and “lessons” of the series. It’s earnest, without crossing the line into absurdity. Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald, the creators of the show, went into it wanting to infuse comedy, but without a slapstick or parody feel. The fact that it started on YouTube Red, before moving to Netflix, is also one of those absolutely bonkers decisions. There were talks with other streaming platforms before making the decision to go with YouTube, and it’s still unclear as to why, unless it’s because they were the first to offer a meeting. Executives made some weird calls about not wanting the series to continue beyond three seasons on YouTube, but that ended up working out for the best for everyone involved in the Miyagi-verse. Season one was the most in-demand streaming series on YouTube, and once seasons one and two hit Netflix, it was the most-watched series on the platform.

It works out well as a series, with each episode only being 30 minutes long. There isn't an overabundance of training montages, but the ones that are there feel just right. Each season so far has pulled characters from the original trilogy, with nuggets thrown in from the video games and animated series. Does it still have its problems? Sure. It is weird, and a valid argument, that this is an entire cultural phenomenon based on an East Asian martial art with three white men as leads. There are attempts to try to diversify the students, but it’s still pretty much white. There could be a plan for the future, though. With season five being officially confirmed last year, it’s safe to say that the nostalgia that comes with these messy, complicated characters continues in the 21st century.