I wasn’t really into The Karate Kid growing up. I spent most of my time watching movie either going with horror or over the top action movies, with a healthy dose of Disney movies sprinkled throughout. The first movie in the franchise that I saw was The Next Karate Kid, which was rented by my mom when it came out on VHS. That wasn’t really the best movie in the series to start with. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I finally saw The Karate Kid movies, and I kinda wish I had seen them when I was younger. While I appreciated them at that time they would have been some of my favorite movies growing up. That’s only partially because of my love of Pat Morita from Happy Days.
I finally started Cobra Kai during my time waiting to restart the Marvel Netflix shows, which they have announced where they’re going. I’ve finished the first two seasons, the two that were actually put out by YouTube, and I appreciate what has been done with the world. William Zabka’s take on an older more weary Johnny Lawrence is what draws you in. The lessons that were beaten into him by John Kreese and Cobra Kai keep coming back to bite him while he tries to bring back the dojo. He slowly realizes that he has to change what he was taught to make his students better than he was, not only as students but people in general. He’s also continually in conflict with Daniel LaRusso, who he views as the bad guy in his story. Both buttheads through their conflicting styles of karate, which leads to two separate showdowns. One at The All Valley Karate Tournament (The First Season) and the other at the first day of school (The Second Season). The end of the second season leaves everything in disarray
The first two seasons of Cobra Kai are really good. The one thing about it is that it relies so heavily on clips from the movies it feels like an overreliance on them. There are times when it works well but there are other times that it feels tedious. I look forward to seeing where the next two seasons go. You can stream Cobra Kai on Netflix. I give the first two seasons of Cobra Kai 8 training dummies out of 10.