We love an underdog, Cobra Kai proved it to me. Last night (Saturday), we finally sat down and watched the first season of Cobra Kai, which picks up on the life of Johnny Lawrence, the blonde haired bully from the Karate Kid movies. He is not living his best life, as the new generation would say, he is some sort of handyman doing the absolute minimum to get through a life he was not ready to live, given what seemed like the high life in the movie series. Within minutes, we keep hoping something good happens to him as he walks from one shitty situation to another. How much torment can one human endure, and I know I am basically still looking at first world problems, but he lives alone, seems to have a bit of an alcohol problem, has a dead end job, still drives the (still cool to me) Firebird he had back in the day, and has a kid with a whore and the kid is around sixteen and they do not have a good relationship.
We see he never recovered from the loss in the Karate Tournament, not because he got beat, but as he says, his Sensei Kreese cast him out and labeled him a loser. He admits in this series that he was like a father to him, that is why he was so devoted to the Cobra Kai philosophy. Through the fog that is his current life and want to remain in anonymity, a young kid just happens to come into his life needing the same father figure he lacked. Of course, he just wants to be left alone, he doesn't want to disappoint anyone else, I figure.
To make matters worse, he still seems to live in the glow of Daniel, who beat him in the Karate tournament, took his girl in high school, then went on to live a successful life as the biggest car dealer in the valley, where they both still live. It seems that every day Daniel is either interfering in his day by reminding him he exists in big billboards along his drive, in commercials while watching old 80's classics on an old tube TV, and then when a group of dizzy girls do a hit and run on his beloved Firebird, he is towed to Daniel's dealership for the repairs.
One night he sees the young kid get bullied outside a store by a new crop of bullies which is where our confusion starts. Johnny is now protecting the new kid with no skills, he beats up the bullies who seem too stupid to run off and continue coming at him even as he does a third round of kicking each of those kids evenly. His step dad pops into the picture, we see their strained relationship and start to see that ole Johnny didn't have it all that great growing up either. He lived in a big house, but his step dad never thought of him more than a nuisance and only kept him around because he liked his hot mom.
I guess this will have to go on into part 2.....
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