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Cobra Kai is to The Karate Kid as The Venture Bros. is to Johnny Quest (except y'know without all the other stuff in the VB mythos).

Purple

Purple

(She/Her)
So I've seen people talking about how this show Cobra Kai is surprisingly good, and having watched about a season and a half, I agree, but I was under the impression that it was like, a good compelling drama. And I mean, you can kinda make a case for that too, but MOSTLY it's a good black comedy taking the whole premise of The Karate Kid and calling out how absurd it is that anyone would actually be that emotionally invested in a regional children's karate tournament, and how there's no way anyone could remain interested in such as an adult without being some sort of totally lost in the past loser. Which would make it a mean-spirited parody if it weren't... also an actual direct continuation with basically every remaining living actor coming back to play the same characters.

So, the general all around '80s teen movie bully/star pupil of the Evil Karate School from yon 1984 sports movie is our protagonist, and we are straight up stating that losing that particular annual regional karate tournament for children is the defining moment of his life from which he has never recovered, and never will. And aside from having a kid he never sees at some point in there he never really tried to do anything else with his life, to the extent of never owning a computer, listening to any new music, or watching any new movies or TV, just assuming human culture peaked in the mid-80s and shutting out the world to the point where he basically just Rip Van Winkled into a 55 year-old while still being a mid-80s high school bully.

And he's just great. Like every line out of his mouth is a solid joke where the punchline is that he really is that dumb/naive/sexist/convinced he is a cool badass.

Who also manages to be a likable, generally morally righteous protagonist, in that special way that's really only possible if you are a ridiculous cartoon character.

Meanwhile the protagonist of The Karate Kid who ruined his whole life path by beating him once in a small annual regional karate competition for children has grown up to be... a fairly successful used car salesman who heavily leans on how he's locally known for winning that karate tournament as a teenager and putting karate based puns in his ads and giving out bonsai trees to customers and everyone kinda low key thinks the whole gimmick is kinda weird and sad and culturally appropriative.

Anyway, this intially pretty convoluted and eventually just increasingly convoluted series of events involving an ever-growing group of teenage kids and repeated damage to various bits of property gets our protagonist into a mindset that the best thing he can do with his life is to mentor some random kid he bumped into in the only way he knows how- Reestablishing the local Evil Karate Dojo with him as the only student and also not being particularly actually evil this time, but definitely being stylistically evil because like black gi with snakes on the back are just cool lookin' and the evil motto makes sense as life advice when you are a huge loser who peaked in high school as a villainous karate rival.

And then The Karate No Longer A Kid sees the name and is all NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I must drop everything I'm doing and ignore my pretty successful career and family to do everything in my power to stop the terror that is The Evil Karate Dojo from spreading its dark influence across the land once more! Typically rationalizing this Quixotic crusade by reminding everyone that when he was a teenager like 4 kids once pushed him down a hill and that's definitely the sort of thing that must be being taught in there. To this one pretty good-hearted harmless kid.

And from there the whole thing is basically just these two tumbling towards mutually assured destruction while everyone else in the world is still just baffled at all the energy and financial resources they're devoting to a conflict that has so little actual motive behind it for either of them that they pretty regularly start to bury the hatchet and become friends but then the ridiculous teen drama ball bounces over to make a fresh compelling case to each of them that no the other secretly IS totally evil and plotting against them and they must continue their convoluted plot for revenge that must involve teenage karate rivals fighting in a tournament to represent their opposed ideologies that they both sheepishly kind of admit they're mostly just winging form fuzzy childhood memories.

But yeah the whole show is super self-aware about it and just reveling in how pathetic they both are.

Also the ever-growing cast of teens is pretty consistently likeable and they manage to keep throwing a ton of fuel on the drama fire without the entirely too typical problem in shows that keep throwing drama at people to stop them from being friends of arbitrary secret keeping, instead going for the much more fun absurdly ridiculous coincidences. Like "I genuinely had no idea that my child destroyed your car and then I also accidentally adopted your child, these things just happen sometimes!"

Oh and also the teen swarm just kinda naturally turn into just like... straight up beat'em up enemies having ninja fights in the street as a natural byproduct of the arbitrary conflict and that's also just really fun.
 
I didn't have the slightest bit of interest in this show, but your write-up may have just convinced me to give it a shot. Thank you for this.
 
Having devoured and delighted in every moment of this series, I can safely say that Purple is not embellishing anything in terms of tone or content.

I am half expecting someone to throw a Hadouken before the final episode
 
This show is at its best when it leans in to the absurdity. But it has depended on just enough teenage angst for its drama that there is this persistent nagging sense of dischord when I watch it.

So I'm at this place now where I just want to see ridiculous karate antics but there's also this small voice in the back of my mind saying shouldn't like all of Cobra Kai be arrested after that home invasion? How on earth have charges not been brought against Kreese? and that largely comes from this divided tone the show sometimes has.
 
Also - how many times is Daniel going to like, in a huff, show up at Cobra Kai to have a terse discussion with whomever?

The answer is: many
 
If there's a better argument against nostalgia pandering than this show I'd love to see it. I don't mean this as a knock on the series for the reasons Purple has already said.
 
It really is just downright paradoxical how much love AND hate (but especially hate) it has for the original movies.
 
Having now finished the 3 presently existing seasons of this, yes it's still very good and I have further random thoughts/sales pitches:

Hands down the best actual character arc is the one kid who everyone makes fun of for his highligh visible cleft palette surgery scar, which the protagonist also makes fun of and says he'll be stuck with for life if he doesn't offset it with something even more noticeable like a crazy face tattoo or an eyepatch or something, at which point he promptly storms off, his spirit evidently crushed, only to show up again the next day having fully taken that to heart and getting a giant brightly dyed mohawk. Which totally works as advertised and he becomes like the coolest kid in school and people start calling him Hawk.

And then this happens.
259039709-288-k469160.jpg

Of course then, season 2 spoilers I suppose, he just kinda progressively becomes more and more semi-arbitrarily evil to the point of being the most irredeemably cartoonishly villainous character other than the grown adult who shows up that season and just straight up wants to turn everyone into a murderous street gang or possibly army of neo-nazi child soldiers.

And then by the end of season 3, he finally flicks off the evil switch right in the middle of a big set-piece finale brawl and yay I can go back to enjoying Best Child without the moral complication of him going all pure evil. Which unfortunately I can't do with Second Best Child who's just really cool and sympathetically jaded except for the bit where she keeps trying to literally murder like half the cast with nearly no actual real motive.

Also in season 3, due to the whole bit where a Metal Gear villain shows up to recruit most of the kids as murderous child-soldiers and all the protagonist has a brainstorming session to rebrand with "the only animal badass enough to take down a snake" and presents the most amazing of logos:
eagle-fang-karate-t-shirt-cobra-kai-season-3.jpg
 
I started watching this (had it in the back of my head, thanks to this thread). Love it, it's amazing. Wanted to watch one episode, watched five, because I couldn't stop, and only did because I have some stuff to do.

It's hilarious, and also feels quite good. I'm, like always, conflicted when I see bullies finally get beaten up by their former victim. Violence isn't the solution and all that, I shouldn't like that. But bullies are horrible people, watching scenes like that just feels good.

Can't wait to watch more. Thanks for the thread!
 
Have taken a long break, for no reason at all, and am now in the middle of season 3.

Season 2s ending was just mean. And now, the show is so sad, there is always some horrible person doing some horrible stuff. There is still a lot of dumb, stupid, fun stuff that happens, and that people do and say, but I'm so tired of people bullying others. Really takes the fun out of the show.

Oh, just saw the part where Daniel shows the other car-guy the middle finger, because he and his wife have a plan to save their business. Which consists of simply going to Japan and talking with their former partners, which doesn't work, of course. Plan, yeah, right.
 
Great season. They toned down the intensity of the violence, and there is general less of the stuff, where bullies attack other people at work or at home. Nearly nothing of that, which I'm grateful for.

Elsewise, it still got the same humor and is basically the same show it always was. The tournament battles were great (as all the battles in this show are, they are so nicely choreographed), and probably come closest to a tournament battle in the original Dragonball. Like, I know nothing about Karate in real life, but the battles seem realistic enough to me, and feel like this is what you get, if you took the battle of Roshi vs Goku or Tenshinhan vs Goku and take out the fantastical stuff. Really fun and exciting to watch.

Also, the last episode was amazing and made me go "Aww" a few times, because heartwarming things happened. They humanized a few characters who were basically just EVIL, up to now. Including super evil Cobra Kai coach, which blew my mind. As did the twist at the end, were EVIL coachs friend betrayed him, and leads Cobra Kai now in a superevil way, I guess.

But ANGRY GIRL finally got some help and found parts of her humanity, which gave me joy. ANGRY BOY finally got over his daddy issues, and they hugged.

Sorry, I'm just really bad with names. Point is, I love this show and this season. Looking forward to S5.
 
I started watching this and it rules. I took a break to watch the actual Karate Kid movies. They were good too. Mostly 1 and 3. The second one is kinda eh
 
Yeah, I appreciated that they tried to do something different from the first movie, but it didn't work for me. Turned it off somewhere in the middle. That said, the third one didn't work for me either. *shrug* Do love the firsth, though.
 
Finally got around to watching Season 4.

Much like how Season 3 seemed to move to address some lingering issues from Season 2, but then just made more of its own, Season 4 does address some issues from Season 3. Specially I'm thinking of how BS it is that Tori keeps getting away with literal crimes and how the track she's on just isn't sustainable in a setting where there is still, ostensibly, law enforcement and consequences. The break-in and attack at the LaRusso's isn't hand-waved, exactly, we DO see the family adjusting with an intrusive security system early on but after one or two mentions it's never considered again. At the very least the break-in is treated like a big enough deal and is the apex of the BS Tori gets away with. She doesn't so much face consequences this season as finally take a step back and re-examine her path. Which is good because if they escalated from the end of Season 3 the only place for Tori to go would probably be straight up murder and it would kind of put a damper on the funtimes karate nonsense, y'know?

There was also the one appearance of Aisha, which really felt like a rush add to the season. As if they were not expecting there to be as large an outcry from her removal in Season 3 as there was and hastily added in a scene for her in Season 4. She was a fairly important link in the Sam/Tori rivalry, not to mention one of Johnny's good students who likely would have gone with him to Eagle Fang if she stayed, so it was good to see her, even if all she did was give Sam advice on how to better deal with Tori, which she went on to immediately ignore. Good talk, Sam.

But anyway, fun season over all. Terry Silver was a great antagonist to watch chew some scenery, and the surprise reveal of Chozen appearing again after his cameo last season at the end there is a neat hook. (can we get Hilary Swank to pop in before this show concludes just to complete the classic Karate Kid movie loop?)

I am really getting tired of Danny and Johnny nearly coming to terms but then exploding at each other over some minor transgression or misunderstanding or whatever, though. They held it together this season for several episodes, which is a new record for them but in the end still ended up fighting and splitting up for the latter half, but then make up AGAIN in the finale. Can't wait to see what stupid argument splits them up again next time!
 
Found out that season 4 was out, decided to watch one or two episodes and, uh, watched the whole thing in one go. Loved it, as always, even though I miss the time when this all was just a dumb rivalry between two guys, stuck in the past. Maybe I'll write something longer another day, when it's not nearly midnight, but for now, I just want to say that it became quite a bit more Shonen Anime. Which fit the show nicely, it has the best Dragonball fights I have ever seen, in a non-animated show. I mean, it's anime in more than just the fight scenes.
 
Just finished Season 5 and it really is the best season of the show by far, mainy because it seems to directly address all of my main criticisms of previous seasons:

-No more Danny/Johnny wheel spinning with them starting to pal up only for a disagreement or misinderstanding to bring them back to square one.

-Actual consequences for a change!

-Very little focus on teen relationship drama. It's still there and is relevant in places but nowhere near as front and center as it used to be.

The fights are great, Silver makes a great over the top central baddie, Chozen was fantastically used all season, characters actually grow and fences are mended, and it still ends with enough hooks for a sixth season if it gets one but still feels satisfying as an ending if this is it.

Biggest weakness of the season, however, are the very first two episodes unfortunately. The Miguel searching for his father subplot goes absolutely nowhere and just kind of wastes time. If anything should have been cut or rewritten in S5 it's that.

Still though, great fun. A+ Karate times.
 
Yeah, I really figured with the whole "sees a photo of him and his mom on his phone thing" they were setting up for him to pop up unexpectedly as a new villain later. Which... I guess they could if they do another season, but... if we're actually setting up another season we wouldn't have gone and resolved every single plotline involving those wacky violent teens. Especially not in such a frankly haphazard way.

Like, hey, sure, the main appeal of the show is watching over the hill karate-obsessed losers be walking train wrecks, but I ALSO want to see teenagers becoming a new generation of karate obsessed losers who nearly kill each other. This was a nearly Hawk-free season, and there wasn't ANY accidental stealing of anyone's father-roles! If they weren't trying to bring it all in for a nice clean ending, they are SLIPPING.
 
Anyone been watching this final season? The first five seasons were a fun ride, but I think this concept has very clearly run its course.
 
Yep, and you're never going to believe this, but they cause new ones, too.

Karate: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
 
Finally watched Season 6. I wanted to wait for all three parts to be out before I started it.

Overall, some quibbles aside I'm very impressed this series even exists and they mostly stuck the landing. The last season wasn't perfect, a whole lot of the side characters got overshadowed in the last five episodes, and there was at least one (admittedly cool) unearned moment. By this I mean Kreese getting a redemption. He pulled a loooooot of shit to just be given a heart-to-heart with Johnny. I can buy he was rattled to his core by Kwon's death, and I think the reason it felt rushed was because, well, the events of the last five episodes were very rushed. If Kreese had half a season to come around then it might have landed better. Absolutely baller way to go out though.

Biggest 'ehhhhhhh' moment of the series was the CG Mr. Miyagi, though. I understand they had the support of Pat Morita's family, and as I understand it one of his grandkids was the physical stand-in. It was probably always going to happen, pretty much everything Daniel did the entire series was based around his admiration for him so there was probably no avoiding it.

But anyway, despite some awkward moments the series ended on a pretty high note. And I appreciate the final callback. "You're alright Lawrence."

EDIT: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the final season did continue one thing that always annoyed me throughout the series: Johnny and Daniel fighting again over a misunderstanding or some other stupid nonsense. Thankfully it was finally put to rest when Miguel called them out on it at long last.

I'm fine with them always having some tension, they're two very different people and instructors after all, but the show went back to that well a few times too many I think. Glad Miguel basically channeled the audience in that moment.
 
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I felt like season 5's ending worked as a really good capper to the entire show, and the start of season 6, accordingly was real slow. They basically completely failed to stir up any real over the top teen drama, nor the according constantly shifting allegiances that, very dumb or not, are really important to keep this show rolling. And then what it does bother seeding out there are a bit too heavy-handed? Like you can't NOT have Tori as the ultimate winner after killing her mom off and you have to give Miguel a win because he's the main teen character and missed out on a lot of development time being off doing Blue Beetle. Plus they also gave him a mom thing. So everyone else is just kinda stuck in brought-low-through-disharmony land and I'm kinda just checking my watch? Doesn't help that we're also trying to establish a bunch of newly introduced characters as big rivals but not really developing them at all.

The ending of uh... season 6-2 I guess though was very good. Just "hang on, this current scoreboard/team setup doesn't really allow for the ending we're clearly setting up. How are they gonna get on course for that?" and then boom, riot out of nowhere! Whole tournament invalid! Also the evilest kid accidentally fatally stabs himself with the plot knife!

And then yeah the back third gets back to firing on all cylinders with the weirdly obsessed old guys and the impressively convoluted setups and it also remembers the most important things about this show, which even the really good season 5 finale kinda forgot: This is very specifically a show about positive life-changing magic of, specifically, Evil Karate. And also Johnny just kinda living eternally in the shadow of losing the big fight at the end of that series of movies I really should actually get around to watching already.

And honestly, the incredibly convoluted absolute BS rules this tournament has to have to make this plot work are really quite hilarious. Like, do I even have all of these here?

  • You are totally allowed to coach a team if you are a wanted felon who has escaped from prison.
  • Team members can be freely substituted at absolutely any time, and can even switch from one team to another between events.
  • There is enough time between events that people can fly from Germany to California, hit a hospital during visiting hours, have a bit of teen drama, and fly back.
  • After finding out an entire team was using performance enhancing drugs and disqualifying them, rankings are adjusted by just deleting them from the roster and grabbing whoever was highest in points prior to elimination, rather than reverse the status of every individual event the disqualified team competed in.
  • In the event of a kid getting freaking stabbed in the chest with a knife, we can totally just put things on pause, change the venue, keep the scoreboard, with the weird ad hoc adjustments from disqualifying a whole team, and just run the last couple events.
  • We can also full on substitute out basically an entire team for one from another country, which formally is a newly formed one that just used the same name as this other team, and I think was also like legally fully dissolved, and let someone who was already coaching another team in this same tournament take over coaching for it, and bring along a team member from another team, but still keep the points from this other team from which we are only retaining one member. Although honestly this one maybe gets a pass because the remaining events just involve 2 kids per team and one of those kids, again, freaking died. Gotta let a lot of stuff slide to honor the memory and all.
  • In the event of a tie on the scoreboard, rather than fighting until the next point, or giving extra weight to a clear 2-0 shutout between the only participants left in the thing, we have this absolutely bonkers "you know what let's have their coaches fight" bonus match. Like... that's pretty great as an ending to this show, but holy crap could you imagine an actual children's sports event of absolutely any kind actually having a rule like that? How unbelievably unsatisfying and enraging that would actually be!

But yeah, great ending to a weirdly enjoyable show that should not have worked nearly this well.

Also? It really bugs me that the one real stand-out child actor who really made a hell of an impression and I'd like to see him go on to other things is the one I absolutely will not ever possibly recognize if I see him in something else unless he improbably still has an incredibly outlandish mohawk in it.
 
Bonus, I DID watch those 3 movies this show is based on!

1- I feel like I've legitimately seen this entire movie in the form of random clips of scenes... which is almost certainly true from having seen Cobra Kai before that. It's... really straightforward, and I think the most notable thing about it is how INCREDIBLY ABRUPT the ending is. Just, Danny wins tournament boom credits. It's almost as if test audiences or producers or something didn't like the ending they shot and thought it wasn't happy enough and awkwardly lopped everything off after the big victory moment.

2- Oh hey! There's that actual ending to the first movie they totally shot and cut from it, wedged in pretty awkwardly at the start of this one. And yeah, this is a way better ending. There's a nice message here about not being a competition obsessed jerk or obsessing and such, and we're starting to establish Kreese as a character of note with some sort of dark grudge. That could carry a sequel... but oh, we're not doing that? We're taking a vacation in Japan and making something that's thematically nothing and awkwardly orientalist? OK.

3- This is what I'm here for! Weird bafflingly obsessed Evil (not-yet) Old Karate Men! Taking things too far! Corrupting the youth with Evil Strip-Mall Karate! This is the one to watch! It kinda picks up right after uh... that orphaned ending of the original, with Silver just kind of appearing out of nowhere, furious that some random kid won a tournament, and taking a leave of absence from running an evil corporation to tell his old friend Kreese who really should be a character of some kind in these movies all things considered to fake his own death while he establishes a whole backstory as not a rich evil jerk with a really just insane overly complicated revenge plot, and the moment where it comes to fruition and he just starts cackling about it and other villains just sort of appear to join in is honestly one of the most delightfully surreal moments I've ever seen.

I also find it kind of interesting how all 3 of these have a The Girl who is Gotten In The End, and needs to be written away between movies because... Hollywood is bad like that, but manages to do so in ways I kinda like, if we really have to?
1- "Yeah so I got a new car and a new girlfriend but then I let my new girlfriend borrow my new car and she immedately wrecked it!" - good realistic teen stuff.
2- "I was totally going to take this girl I met back from Japan with me but turns out that's just not a thing you can do." - sure isn't.
3- "OK before we even start dating here I need you to know I have a boyfriend back home in another state so this is a temporary fling." - preemptive!

The other thing I find amusing watching these after the series is just...
"Now that I'm an adult, I'm living my life the way I'm sure Mr. Miyagi would have wanted. Running a car dealership and coaching kids to dedicate their lives to karate tournaments."

Flashback 30 years or whatever:
"OK, you won your fight against that jerk, now I really want you to just never ever fight again, and definitely don't get into the tournament scene. Now I'm gonna help you go to college so you don't get stuck like me doing odd jobs and selling these cars."

Doesn't even feel like it's out of character for him based on how he is in the old movies. Danny just... sucks like that.
 
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