Conversation

Okay this show is very unusually written. It lurches from 80s homage, to serious characterization where everybody is sympathetic, to reversion to caricature, to irony. You’d think it’s just confused about what kind of show it wants to be but it somehow works.
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Damn that was a good cliffhanger for season 2. This is like how the American version if the office went longer and really worked out the premises of the UK original much more deeply. Impressive achievement, topping an 80s classic. Can’t wait for S3.
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Staying true to the cartoonish kid movie original while making it an interesting adult drama is tough, but they pulled it off. You know because there’s failed attempts all around, like Riverdale and even Sabrina, which was a brave attempt.
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At the same time, they stayed true to the genre tropes as well as the gestures at the philosophy of pedagogy stuff like how students reproduce teachers’ demons. The only character they didn’t mess with is Miyagi. He’s remained a cartoon. Even the Kreese character got complex.
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Agree about the “better than it has any right to be” part. Like seriously this has no right to be this good. Mainly the acting by the 2 leads, especially William Zabka (the Johnny antagonist in the original; he’s basically the protagonist here)
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Replying to @vgr
I like Cobra Kai because it is better than it has any right to be but the end of S2 was not well plotted
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Daniel is kinda in arrested development mode, and is kinda stuck where Miyagi left him, a kinda ironic fortune cookie wax on wax off guy. But Johnny, who was basically a prop in the original, has a much more interesting growth arc going on.
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I’m not sure it’s possible for new viewers to enjoy this in the same way. You can’t watch the originals now except as camp, but in context in the 80s it played different and thus show feeds of that in-context vibe.
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It’s not reboot or nostalgia or revival. It’s like a single canon with parts separated by a few decades. Like that Linklater movie or Updike’s Rabbit. It’s the same characters, but living out the adult 3d consequences of teenage 1d/2d events. Still cartoony but in a different way
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The weakest part of the show is probably the karate element itself. That would probably need an element of BJJ and MMA to meaningfully extrapolate from 80s to now. Strip mall karate simply doesn’t signify the same things now. It’s an elder statesman art in a grittier world.
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I actually took a year or so of karate back in like 1987 or 88. Casual curiosity, possibly inspired in part by the movie. Didn’t really get into it. But this made me google my teacher who appears to have died a couple of years ago. Must have been in his late 50s.
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