“Daniel LaRusso’s gonna coach? Daniel LaRusso’s gonna coach!”
That one line about sums up what I was expecting Cobra Kai to
be. I was thinking it would be a
needless throwback to a series that should have ended when it did—with Mr.
Miyagi twisting John Kreese’s nose in the parking lot. Karate Kid II and III might as well have
stayed on the cutting room floor. The
Next Karate Kid? Never saw it, and I’m
sure Pat Morita also didn’t. And the
remake with Jackie Chan and Jayden Smith?
Never saw it, don’t plan on it either; but based on the preview, that is
probably the biggest insult to the franchise altogether. I mean come on, it takes place in China, is
about Kung Fu—how stupid do they think we are?
But I digress.
In 1998, Jonathan Silverstein and I did a project for our
high school statistics class. Which
decade was cooler, the 80s or the 90s? Silverstein,
it was well known, was obsessed with the 80s, but he still had friends (as it
said in our yearbook). The consensus of
the survey was that the 80s definitely had cooler TV and movies. And one of the most timeless bildungsromans
of the 80s was the first Karate Kid.
You all know the story.
Daniel is a nerdy kid from Newark, NJ whose mother moves to Reseda,
CA. Right away he earns the ire of a
biker/karate gang by hitting on the leader’s ex-girlfriend. After getting his ass kicked several times,
he gets bailed out by his building’s handyman—a simple fisherman from Okinawa
who likes to trim bonsai trees and catch flies with chopsticks. Mr. Miyagi prefers to use diplomacy than his fists. But when he realizes that John Kreese was a
man who teaches kids that the best defense is a good offense, and that karate
is about hitting first and hitting hard, Miyagi maneuvers Kreese into getting
his Cobra Kai to leave Daniel alone until Miyagi can train him to face them in
a tournament.
Right away, we contrast the Miyagi-do way and the Cobra Kai
way. Kreese said the best defense is a
good offense. He taught them how to
punch, and to never turn their back on their opponent. Indeed, Kreese has won accolades for his
fighting, especially from his days in the military. And we see that Kreese does
run his dojo like a drill sergeant. His
fighters are highly disciplined. One could
say there is no code of honor among the Cobra Kai. But theirs was a code of being badass.
The Miyagi way was the complete opposite. Okinawa is a small island where there is
nothing to do except fish and karate.
While Kreese is about yelling and drilling, Miyagi is about balance and
breathing. In fact, the Miyagi way is so
counterintuitive, it’s hard to believe it’s even karate! But my understanding is that this is how
traditionally karate was taught in Okinawa.
They didn’t start with punching and kicking; they started with balancing
and breathing exercises. Once you found
your center and learned how to properly breathe, the punching and kicking would
come to you.
Indeed, that’s how Daniel first learned. We all remember the Miyagi way, immortalized
as “this hand wax-on, this hand wax-off; don’t forget to breathe.” After a week of that, and Daniel losing his
temper, Miyagi famously demonstrated how “wax-on; wax-off” was all along
karate. Was it more effective than the
Cobra Kai method? Based on the movie,
one would think so. Daniel was a total
n00b, but by the time he got to the tournament, he was able to handle himself
in a fair fight. Of course, the Cobra
Kai play dirty. “Sweep the leg” would
not work against a more experienced karateka; but since Daniel was still
relatively new, it worked. But then,
Daniel pulls off a crane kick (which, to quote an old teacher of mine, is a second-degree
black belt kata, and you’d get your ass kicked if you tried it in a real
fight), winning the tournament.
That was then. Fast
forward 30-something years later.
When I was in yeshiva, one of my rabbis used to talk about
the time he was in synagogue and the guy sitting in front of him was talking
about that Yeshiva of Flatbush vs MTA basketball game from 20 years ago and how
he was still living in that moment. “What
a loser!” the rabbi said. Never getting
over a high school basketball game as an adult?
It appears, as the deux ex machina would have it, both Daniel LaRusso
and Johnny Lawrence are still living in that moment.
The tables have turned.
Johnny was the rich spoiled asshole, while Daniel was the working class nerdy
kid. Now, Daniel is a successful owner
of a car dealership chain with a nice house with a pool in Encino. Johnny is an alcoholic who can’t keep a job,
is estranged from his kid, and living in squalor. Daniel, years later, has changed his life for
the better. And Johnny’s life has spiraled.
For those of you who like How I Met Your Mother, you know
there are those who say that Johnny might have been the real good guy in Karate
Kid. The way events are portrayed in the
movie, it’s hard to sympathize with Johnny.
But now, Johnny is given dimension.
No, he is not a good guy. From
the get-go, we see that he is still an asshole.
Johnny is an anachronism of the 80s, when casual racism, sexism,
classism, and just being a dick in general, was a lot more acceptable. Johnny has not, and will not, get with the times. And it’s not just him telling his acolyte to
listen to Guns N’ Roses. It’s like
Johnny is stuck in that time warp, where he doesn’t know about social media, or
about what kids are into these days.
Sorry to get political, but I bet Johnny voted for
Trump. What our generation needs, he
said, is to stop being a bunch of pussies.
Indeed, karate was considered a very manly thing back then. Elvis Presley was notoriously a huge fan of
karate. I know, Sterling Archer has
called karate “the Dane Cook of martial arts”, preferring Krav Maga (where there
literally are no rules—perhaps more akin to the Cobra Kai way).
But this show is not just about Johnny and Daniel rekindling
their rivalry. It’s not just about
Johnny trying to not be the next John Kreese (but inevitably holding his mantle),
while Daniel becomes a new Miyagi. It’s
the next generation too.
And here’s where the show got it right. In some of these next generation shows (I’m looking
at you, Fuller House), the kids are not that interesting. The plot lines between them are too
contrived, the callbacks are overdone, and no one really cares about the drama
between them. It’s like they are living vicariously
through their parents, reliving their lives.
But the writers don’t bother to make them compelling. Not in Cobra Kai.
First, we have Daniel’s kids. Anthony is kind of that side character who
isn’t that interesting. But his
daughter, Sam, she is in her own right an interesting character. The rich girl who is embarrassed by her
father. She starts off as that mean
girl, but pretty quickly we see there’s more to her than that. And then, she begins to fraternize with the
enemy. And that becomes the impetus for
a lot of the drama.
Miguel Diaz is the breakout character. An Ecuadorian-American who just moved from
Irvine, falls in with the nerds, and gets his ass kicked by the rich
assholes. Starts off like Daniel. But his savior was not Mr. Miyagi; it was
Johnny Lawrence. Similar to Miyagi,
Johnny is at first reluctant to take on Miguel; and Miguel’s mom doesn’t want
him learning karate either. However, as
inevitable as it is, Johnny becomes Miguel’s sensei, and Miguel becomes his top
student.
Finally, we see from the inside, how Cobra Kai really
worked. Johnny is much more nuanced than
Kreese, who was pretty much just an angry douchebag. We don’t have all that much of a backstory
for him (yet: season 2, perhaps?) Johnny is not a bad guy. He just has a lot of demons. And he loses many students because he tries
running his dojo the same way Kreese did.
But those who stick with Sensei Lawrence begin to become pretty badass. Some for the negative (“Hawk”, who gets a
full back tattoo and a Mohawk, becomes a bully himself).
In the movie, it was pretty black and white: Miyagi good, Kreese bad. Daniel the flawed hero, Johnny the dick who
was pretty much what Kreese made him. In
the end, good triumphs, Daniel wins for Miyagi-do, and Cobra Kai is
shamed. Miyagi, good teacher, following
old code of honor from Okinawa, cutting bonsai trees, and focusing on balance
and breathing. We all got to know the
Miyagi way quite intimately.
In this show, we see further glimpses of the Miyagi
way. Daniel ends up training Johnny’s
estranged son. No rowboat this time, but
a tree. Either way, Daniel shows him how
balancing and breathing are the most solid foundation to karate. And the “wax-on wax-off” is done very
silently and subtly. They didn’t
overkill it. But we, the fanboys, knew
what was going on, and we smiled as Daniel showed him how all this time he was
teaching him how to block.
But then, at the climax, in the tournament, we revisit the
question of whether the Miyagi-do way really is superior? While the movie made it look like it was, in
this show, we see some of the shortcomings.
We see that Sam is willing to sit back and critique both methods (“you
shouldn’t have swept the leg, it was too obvious” and “you telegraphed that
kick”). So we see that Johnny’s method makes
the Cobra Kai into tough fighters, and they go far. But some, like Hawk, take it too far and end
up fighting dirty (to Johnny’s chagrin).
In the final faceoff, Miguel ends up winning. But it was a tough fight. Indeed, Daniel’s student pulls off the
one-handed double kick that Daniel could never pull off—his secret was the
half-pipe on a skateboard.
But the twist, oh the twist.
Turns out that all this time, John Kreese was looming in the
background. Or was he? Johnny said that Kreese is dead. Was he?
And is Johnny really all along trying to please his old sensei? And Daniel wants to reopen Miyagi-do. But Miyagi only ever had one student (I’m
only counting Daniel LaRusso). A whole
dojo for Daniel? Definitely not the
Miyagi way. But I am interested to see
where he goes with this.
I don’t know how this show holds up without the nostalgia
factor. But if you were a fan of the
original movie, you must see this show.
It’s not even a question.
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