KICKING & STREAMING

Thirty-five years after Daniel LaRusso crane kicked his way to victory at the All Valley Karate Championship, streaming series Cobra Kai has given the Karate Kid franchise a rousing new lease of life. Ahead of Season 3’s debut on Netflix, Total Film hits the dojo with Ralph Macchio, William Zabka and the show’s creators to discuss the unlikely resurgence of an ’80s icon, and Cobra Kai’s hardest hitting season yet.

- JORDAN FARLEY

When Cobra Kai launched on YouTube’s premium streaming service in 2018, it was, appropriately enough, the underdog. A sequel series to a beloved, three-decades-old film franchise that had fizzled out in the mid’90s, long before a financially successful remake consigned the original continuity to history, Cobra Kai entered the fiercely competitive streaming arena as barely more than a white belt.

Certainly, the world had moved on. Karate had long fallen out of favour on screen – replaced by high-impact martial arts in everything from The Matrix to The Karate Kid’s own remake, which might more accurately have been titled The Kung Fu Kid. Over the years original stars Ralph Macchio (Daniel LaRusso) and William Zabka (highschool bully Johnny Lawrence) flirted with a revival, sending up their iconic roles for cameos in sitcom How I Met Your Mother, No More Kings music video ‘Sweep The Leg’ (which Zabka directed) and Funny Or Die short ‘Wax On, F*** Off’. But despite hearing pitches from numerous writers, nothing felt like a worthy follow-up to the box-officeconquering original.

“It always was easier and less risky to not try to go back to that well again, because we didn’t want to taint the legacy,” Macchio tells TF from his New York home in late November. Zabka, likewise, “never really saw [himself] playing Johnny Lawrence again”, despite a growing ‘justice for Johnny’ movement quite rightly pointing out that Daniel LaRusso won the All Valley Karate Championship with an illegal kick to the face (“Every time I watch it, I still feel the pain of the kick, man. For real!” Zabka chuckles). But when Hot Tub Time Machine and