Why Cobra Kai is So Great

By: Mr. Pak

(Image courtesy of https://thekaratekid.fandom.com/wiki/Cobra_Kai_(Season_1))

Imagine it is 1984. Back in those days, parents were not so overly protective of their young children. While we had crazies trying to abduct us and lace our halloween candy with drugs and razor blades, our parents didn’t coddle us. You didn’t have to wear a helmet when you rode your bike. You walked to school on your own. You played tackle football on the street, and if you got hurt, you just walked it off.

“Is that bone sticking out of your skin?”

“Oh man! It is.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yeah!. A lot!”

“Can you walk it off?”

“I think so.”

And back in 1984, it was perfectly acceptable when you’re ten for a parent to drop you and your pals off at the mall and pick you up eight hours later. And just like that, you and your gang of friends were left to fend for themselves all day. (We would be fine. We had seen the assembly about Stranger Danger. )

Now imagine ten year old Charlie “Killer Korean” Pak and ten year old Gary “the Great” Egbert having an argument about whether or not they should watch a movie titled The Karate Kid. When you grow up watching Bruce Lee marathons and Kung Fu theater on Saturdays, you take your martial arts films seriously. So a martial arts film called The Karate Kid starring the short clownish Asian guy from Happy Days as a karate master, doesn’t give you a lot of confidence that this movie will be any good.

So there we are at the mall in June of 1984. School just let out for the summer and like a rocket booster on the space shuttle, we burned up all our pent up summer vacation energy in the first couple days. We were now bored, so we decided to watch a movie. There was no internet. There was no information about any new releases except for movie reviews that would appear in the newspaper. When you’re ten, there are only two ways to judge a movie: the title and were you bored enough to watch it.

Our great debate was about whether we should waste our little funds on watching a movie with an incredibly stupid title, even for us little kids, or spend our remaining money on more candy and more soda and more arcade games.

I don’t remember who was arguing what, but our boredom won the argument. I just remember that we both begrudgingly agreed to watch a movie with the dumbest title of all time.

We had both made our judgement about the movie before the opening credits even rolled. There was no possible way that a film called The Karate Kid could be anything but bad.

Two hours and seven minutes later after watching Daniel LaRusso victoriously crane kick Johnny Lawrence in the face to win the All Valley Under 18 Karate championship, I was secretly plotting how I would crane kick Gary in the face the first chance I got. And I knew he was thinking about doing the same thing to me. It was just about who could get the first opportunity to strike. After all, we also learned something else very valuable from the movie: Strike First! No Mercy!

That summer the whole Lost Tree gang was crane kicking each other. It was a glorious time to be a ten year old boy. I remember several times Gary and I walked up to Tim Lo’s front door. One of us would ring the doorbell and the other hid on the side. When the front door opened, the other would jump out from where he was hiding and bam! Crane kick to Tim Lo’s face!

It didn’t take long for us to make sure and check that it wasn’t Tim’s mom that answered the door. Turned out that that woman had no sense of humor!

And that’s how it went all summer.

Is that David Kushner walking down the street? Quick. Let’s sneak up behind him, Bam! Crane kick to the backside!

Is Steve Patriarcha taking out trash? Wait for him to finish and go inside. Crash! Crane kick the trash cans! (We eventually stopped doing this because his crazy mother would punish him for it.)

Is that Erin O’Neal? Quick! Let’s crane….no, wait. She’s a girl. Us boys would have this philosophical debate many times. Why is it ok for her to hit us but we can’t hit her? You can’t hit girls. We all knew this was a universal truth, but most important of all, she let us use her basketball net whenever we wanted. Thus the Erin Rule was established and could never be broken.

When school resumed in the fall, we were delighted to find all the boys in the fifth grade were doing the same thing we were. Every fifth grade boy was hell bent on trying to crane kick their buddies. Besides that, every time the teacher called up a student to her desk, someone would shout out, “Put him in a body bag!” Every time two boys were about to throw down, someone would shout out, “Sweep the leg!” When some kid got to erase the chalkboard, someone would tell the other kid to “wax on, wax off!”

And this was the fall of 1984. Crane kicking each other every chance we got, and it was ok. Just like it was ok during recess to play “tackle.” Tackle was a combination of football and rugby except that a ball was optional. You just ran around and tackled anyone and everyone and tried your best not to get tackled by someone else. The only rule was to not fall on the broken pieces of glass that littered the playground. If you did, that was your fault and not the tackler’s. Amazingly enough, the teachers on duty never stopped us playing this violent game and didn’t worry at all. If a kid got hurt and began crying, they just looked at him and would just say:

“Walk it off.”

And this is how it was. That is until one day a fifth grader named Leo ruined it all.

Leo was not particularly liked and didn’t have a lot of friends. He was odd and quirky. One moment he was overly sensitive and would cry a lot. The next he would be overly aggressive. (Bipolar disorder was not a thing back then.) So there was an unspoken rule. You never picked on Leo. It just wasn’t right. Unfortunately a new kid in school didn’t know the rule, and one day he got into a fight with Leo during recess. This wasn’t one of those fights when kids just push each other because they don’t really want to fight. This was a real fight and fists were flying. During a tense moment, Leo put his fist down, lifted up one knee and bent the other, and raised his arms parallel to the ground and his fingers pointed down - the crank kick position.

You see, whenever we did the crane kick to each other, it was out of fun. It was boys being boys. Leo, who clearly at the age of ten, did not understand that the fictional karate moves in movies would not work in real life. But he was losing the fight and looked to the crane kick to win the brawl with one last ditch all out desperation move - just like Daniel Larussa did at the end of The Karate Kid.

Poor Leo. There he stood balancing on one leg. His eyes locked in on the other kid staring at him with such intensity that his head was shaking. The other kid lowered his fist after realizing what Leo was trying to do. He tilted his head as if to say, “Are you kidding?” When he realized Leo wasn’t, he shrugged his shoulders and raised his fists back up.

To this day, many of us think he punched out Leo not for the original reason that started the fight. Instead, he just had to know. And at that moment, as we all were shaking our heads in disbelief, we were all thinking, “Don’t hit him. Leo doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But we didn’t say anything. We also had to know the answer to the question every boy in E.T. Hamilton’s fifth grade class was wondering at that exact moment.

Would the crane kick actually work in a real fight?

Seconds later, Leo was on the ground bawling his eyes out, and that was our answer. It was also the end of our obsession with The Karate Kid. Teachers came running. While we little kids could get away and do just about anything, fighting wasn’t tolerated. If you got in a fight, you got in real deep trouble!

So that one brief moment of painful reality ended our carefree imaginations. Crane kicks weren’t something funny we did to each other. Movies weren’t real. Kids get hurt in fights. Fighting wasn’t cool.

And this was life at ten in 1984.

Fast forward to 2021 when a fat, balding and looking much too old for his age Gary Egbert and a still vibrant, handsome, and a head full of hair Charles Pak are talking on the telephone discussing their love for Cobra Kai. Neither can get over their shock over how amazing the show is.

One of us goes on to make the assertion that Cobra Kai is the greatest show on television. The other is not willing to go that far.

The handsome one is right.

Cobra Kai is the greatest show on TV Right Now.

That night I presented Gary a dissertation on the theme. The Karate Kid trilogy was all about seeking and finding fulfillment. In the first film Daniel is seeking balance in his chaotic life. The second is about the need of community to make you whole. The third film is about seeking courage to overcome fear. So while The Karate Kid films were about seeking fulfillment, Cobra Kai is the complete opposite. The show is about dealing with loss and yearning for something that cannot be had again.

Cobra Kai gets criticized for relying on nostalgia as a gimmick to draw viewers. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. If you are going to blame Cobra Kai for using nostalgia, then you have to criticize every sequel ever made. But what Cobra Kai does so well is that it masterfully uses two types of nostalgia to hook viewers. For those of us that grew up with The Karate Kid and lived through the 80s, we certainly loved seeing Daniel, Johnny and Ali reunited. We love the call backs to 80’s pop culture zeitgeist and anachronistic use of 80’s politically incorrect attitudes in 2021. But we are also moved, maybe more, by the melancholy yearning that persists throughout the series about what both Daniel and Johnny have lost in life. Johnny has not only lost his youth as a result of losing the tournament 30 years ago, but he squandered his adulthood and every meaningful relationship he ever had. Now, in his 50’s, he has nothing. Daniel is no better. Despite becoming a successful businessman and becoming wealthy, he is completely lost without his best friend and mentor Mr. Miyagi. Daniel does not know what to do. He has no answers as he was always the student. There isn’t an adult who hasn’t felt like these characters have. And it’s impossible to root against them as they struggle to overcome this sense of loss.

There’s more to love in this show than just the themes that connect to us. The teen characters in Cobra Kai are just as fascinating as the adults. Being around teens all day, I have to say that Cobra Kai has maybe done the best job of presenting the most realistic take on what it is like to be a teenager. The teens in the show aren’t presented as sharp mature adults taking on adult problems. (If you want an example of a ridiculous presentation of teens, watch the Friday Night Lights tv series.) The young characters act exactly how real teens act. They need guidance. They can be manipulated. They are driven emotionally. They rely on loyalty. They need companionship. They get taken for granted by adults. Adults don’t understand them but not because adults are distant and robotic. Adults don’t understand them because they have their own problems and don’t understand the rules of youth in modern day society.

Of course, there’s also the karate. It’s easy to criticize the element of martial arts in this show. Let’s be honest. You see towns and cities devoted to basketball and football. You don’t see towns obsessed with karate. You definitely don’t see karate gangs going to war with each other. This is something you have to accept with a grain of salt. After all, it is a tv show. On the other hand, the notion of rival gangs and the violence that occurs is something that plagues American youths in every city.

If there is a criticism of the use of karate in Cobra Kai, it is that it seems to abandon the principles taught by Mr. Miyagi in the original films. During the last two seasons of Cobra Kai, the focal point of karate has shifted away from a system of self defense and more towards a necessity for survival. This is the same perspective The Karate Kid Part II took. In the film, a young Mr. Miyagi believed so strongly in the belief that karate is for self defense only that he ran away from his home to avoid a fight. And in this film, Miyagi spends a great deal of time teaching Daniel about how real the violence of karate can be. But in the film, the use of karate in real life fighting is a result of self defense. In Cobra Kai, the teens engage in karate fights as if it’s just an afterthought. They do it because they can. Miyagi’s principles are conspicuously absent and missed.

In a time when we are bombarded with super heroes, zombies, aliens, and cookie cutter forensic crime shows, it’s a refreshing change to see a show centered in reality. Our onscreen entertainment seems to focus on telling us stories about what we wish we were capable of doing and about characters we wish we were. Cobra Kai works because it’s a show about ideas and themes that we can all relate to and with characters that are like us. Every personal journey a character in the show takes is one we have all taken.

It’s hard to exactly place my finger on what makes Cobra Kai such an entertaining show. In terms of artistry of direction, writing, and acting, it will never be compared to such great shows like Breaking Bad. After all, Breaking Bad was a brilliant show.

It’s an interesting test. If you tell someone you loved Cobra Kai and how amazing it is, and that it’s a crime it has not been nominated for any Emmys, they will wholeheartedly agree with you or stare at you with scoffing disbelief. On paper, it seems like a show not really worthy of a lot of thought and analysis.

On paper Cobra Kai sounds like a losing formula for a television show. How it even got past the initial pitch - a sequel to an 80s film that would star two washed up has-been actors - is amazing in itself. Just like the original source material, The Karate Kid on paper sounded like it would be a box office failure - a silly title and a karate master played by a clownish comedian sitcom actor could never be a hit with an audience. But in both cases, something extraordinary happened as paper turned into onscreen magic. The Karate Kid was one of the most successful films of 1984 and Pat Morita was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Mr. Miyagi, and Cobra Kai is one of the most watched shows in America. 43 million Americans have already seen its third season!

For me, that magic was bringing me back to 1984. That magic was tearing up when Daniel knelt in front of Mr. Miyagi’s headstone admitting he doesn’t know what to do. That magic was feeling gutted as Johnny’s son won’t forgive him and eventually turns on him to join Kreese.

As an adult, there are many times when I don’t know what to do.

As an adult, it feels impossible overcoming losing what you love most.

And as an adult, I often think back to 1984.

Sorry, Mrs. Lo. I didn't mean to crane kick you in the face. I honestly thought you were Tim.