While martial arts movies fell out of vogue after their peak in the ‘70s and ‘80s, one hit Netflix show managed to bring them back thanks to its six-season success. Martial arts movies have a long, complicated history. The peak of the genre’s mainstream US popularity came, surprisingly enough, shortly after the death of its biggest star, Bruce Lee. While Lee’s own movies were hugely successful, the Shaw Brothers managed to leverage his legend to make later martial arts movies a mainstream commodity throughout the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s.

While the bone-snapping action and jaw-dropping stunts of these movies made them popular during this era, it was 1984’s inspirational sports movie The Karate Kid that led to the genre’s mainstream boom in popularity. The Karate Kid made martial arts movies accessible for young suburban viewers, turning actors like Jean-Claude Van-Damme, Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal into mainstream stars in the years that followed. However, as quickly as the martial arts movie flourished, the genre died out in the ‘90s, until the arrival of Netflix’s Cobra Kai.

Cobra Kai Reinvented ’70s & ’80s Martial Arts Stories For The Modern Era

An ingenious reversal of the original movie’s straightforward underdog story, Cobra Kai was co-created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg. The show followed William Zabka’s Johnny Lawrence, the original movie’s one-note villain. Portrayed as a thoughtless, mean-spirited jock in 1984’s The Karate Kid, Johnny became a fully rounded, tragically complex character in Cobra Kai. His decision to open a dojo reignited his decades-old feud with Ralph Macchio’s original series hero Daniel LaRusso, subverting the setup of classic ‘80s martial arts stories.

Like a typical martial arts movie hero, Johnny was initially slow to return to fighting, and only taught local kids self-defense when he saw them being beaten up by bullies. However, unlike the virtuous heroes of most martial arts movies, Johnny was a former bully himself, and viewers knew him best as the tormentor of a smaller, weaker kid in the original movie. As such, Cobra Kai’s story is inherently more morally complex than the plot of its predecessor, and that was before the show introduced the students of each master.

Cobra Kai Is A Rare Example Of A Revival Topping The Original

Image courtesy of Everett Collection

Where The Karate Kid was a simplistic sports movie with a flat character arc for its villain, Cobra Kai delights in constantly subverting the expectations of its audience. The show’s villains are almost never stock characters, but rather poignant figures who could be sympathetic if they didn’t repeatedly choose to feed their worst impulses. Johnny’s journey to self-improvement isn’t a straightforward redemption arc, but rather a rocky road filled with setbacks.

Throughout the unpredictable plot of Cobra Kai, the show’s creators display a genuine affinity for the earlier movies in the franchise, but also highlight their shortcomings. By showing viewers Daniel’s dark side, Johnny’s potential to be better, and the complicated lives of their students, the spinoff manages the rare feat of outdoing its original predecessor. Now, it is tough for viewers to re-watch the original movie without being struck by its disappointing lack of nuance.

As Daniel and Johnny’s shared story unfolds over six seasons of the Netflix hit, viewers get to see how the outlooks of both characters impact their students and how the self-images that have shaped their lives aren’t as honest as Johnny and Daniel might assume. Both characters become more complex than viewers might have ever expected from the Karate Kid franchise, and the show turns into a fascinating character study as a result. This allowed Cobra Kai to reignite interest in the martial arts movie format more broadly, although, ironically, this came at the expense of tidily trouncing the original movies.

Release Date

2018 – 2025-00-00

Network

Netflix, YouTube Premium

Showrunner

Jon Hurwitz

Directors

Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz, Joel Novoa, Jennifer Celotta, Steven K. Tsuchida, Sherwin Shilati, Marielle Woods, Steve Pink, Lin Oeding, Michael Grossman

Writers

Josh Heald, Ashley Darnall, Chris Rafferty, Bill Posley