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Cobra Kai (2018)

The 80s were such a great time.
Super Mario, Back to the Future, MTV, Guns n Roses, Calvin Harris had love for you if you were born then - the positives didn't stop.
Or atleast that's what I'm led to believe.
I wasn't born in the 80s.

However, I have experienced some of its iconic contributions to pop culture. Karate Kid was one of them. The original. Not Jaden Smith's version.

Karate Kid was released in 1984 and was destined to be a cult film from its inception. It's the classic sports rags to riches formula and its terribly cliched. But it's so sincere and earnest in its quest to show us a winning story that you overlook it's flaws and just embrace it for how feel-good the movie really was. You had this likable lead character that you really wanted to win, this horrible villain you really wanted to lose, this Yoda-like sensei that you adored - it was perfect.
It wasn't a great cinematic experience, it was just a movie that made you feel so, so good - the ultimate guilty pleasure.

So when YouTube Red announced that they were reviving it for a series set over 30 years after the original, two thoughts came to mind -
What in the world was Youtube Red?
How monumentally bad is this going to turn out?

To answer the former, YouTube Red is YouTube's answer to Netflix and Prime - it's a paid streaming platform for original content that never took off. I can't imagine why seeing as YouTube's paid channel subscription service did so astoundingly well when it came out some time ago.

Now with regards to Cobra Kai and how bad it truly was - well it wasn't.
I was as surprised as probably anyone else was.
This was bound to fail. This was supposed to be the equivalent of how bad New Coke bombed when it came out in the 80s.

But what Cobra Kai does is retain that corny, cliched, yet irresistibly sincere storytelling that made the movie such a hit.

The best thing the story does is avoid any sense of repitition by switching up the leads. We aren't focusing on Daniel anymore. He's done well for himself since the All-Valley Karate Tournament. He's a successful car salesman, has a happy family, he's even part of a country club. Everything's worked out for him. He's used his Miyagi skills to market himself to the top of the food chain. He almost has it so good that you kind of dislike him for it. This is where it gets interesting.

Our villain from the original - Johnny, is the star of the show (as you would've guessed from the title). Life hasn't been too kind to him. Life has passed him by and his best years are clearly behind him. You'd feel sorry for him if not for the fact that he still seems to be as much of jerk as he was 30 years ago.

However, purely out of nothing but jealousy towards his counterpart Daniel, Johnny starts to change. He reopens his old Cobra Kai dojo. He wants to teach the skills he was taught in the past to the kids of today.

Now he ideally should just focus on improving himself rather than trying to achieve second hand personal growth through coaching skills but where does that make for entertaining content? He's trying to redeem himself and in doing so becomes a better person.

This plotline would've made any other show illicit eye-rolling levels of cringe worthiness, however like I said, the show somehow manages to keep the heart that the original had and to be completely honest, that's all the original had, and it worked - so why shouldn't this?

William Zabka and Ralph Macchio are integral to maintaining this sincerity that the show has. Their performances make the show seem less of a parody of the original than an actual, viable continuation of the series.

Cobra Kai shouldn't have worked but then again, who would've thought that waxing a car would've helped you learn karate 30 years ago?

4/5