Cobra Kai - No mercy

The ‘80s revival is flourishing with a new product: Cobra Kai or how we take the villain of the first movie and we add some well deserved and much needed layers.

Here’s where the Youtube Red series strikes gold: it digs into Johnny Lawrence anti-hero potential and it hits home. The twist is: adding some bully layers to all time, favorite hero, Daniel LaRusso. About time, if you ask me.

The beauty of this Youtube show is mixing nostalgia with the modern days. We have bullying served in all its forms: fat-shaming, slut-shaming, ethnicity-shaming, poor-shaming, shaming for the love of shaming. There’s a lot of shaming because as we’ve learned by now, we live in a fucked up world and even the good ones hit an all time low. But since I don’t give a damn about the good ones, I’ll dive in and add some more paragraphs about the characters I like: the Cobra Kai team.

William Zabka is amazing as Johnny Lawrence. We rekindle with the blonde with the red leather jacket in the worst place and mood we could find him and we realize that what happened back in 1984 broke the once confident young man, one young man who was shaped and molded by the Darth Vader of Senseis. 

This series does a great job in explaining without a ton of exposition what happened to Johnny and here’s the beauty of everything, it delivers and rebirth of a broken man through the dojo which corrupted him. He finds strength and rebuilds himself by re-opening the Cobra Kai dojo and wait…there’s more! He finds a group of misfits youths and in the era of politically correct everything, Johnny teaches them to stand up and not be bullied.

Yes, I know, the show ends on delivering the dark side that lures in the spotlight of victory but it’s done intelligently not for the boring sake of showing how the good vanquishes the bad.

It’s a show about coming to terms with who you were and seeing what you can be and it’s done so much better from Johnny and the Cobra Kai’s point of view than from Daniel’s. Because, I don’t give a damn about Daniel. That’s a fact, I won’t hide it.

Johnny Lawrence has flaws and those flaws don’t vanish over night. His demons haunt him without mercy and he keeps on walking and rediscovers himself through the sport and art which broke him. It’s beautiful, it’s tragic, it hits all the Shakespeare notes I could hope for and a few more.

Yes, you have some teen angst but I watched his series for the sake of finding out if they’d do some justice with Johnny. And it did and left space and plots for a second season which I can’t wait to see (come on with the announcement of a second season).

So here is it for the misfits! They’re not perfect but they’re more authentic than many small screen characters.