The reboot is the latest example of Hollywood’s desperate hunger to mine “intellectual property.” It’s so difficult and expensive to make potential audiences aware of something entirely new that anything with cultural provenance is immediately thought to have a leg up. And what has easier cultural provenance than something that was universally known not so long ago?
There are reboots, remakes, and revivals, not to mention sequels and prequels, and the boundaries between them can get fuzzy. Take the newly announced fall series from CBS called Magnum P.I. It stars an actor named Jay Hernandez, and so it is a remake or a reboot; it would only be a revival if Tom Selleck returned as Magnum and brought with him as many members of the original cast as could be found. But people tend to use the words interchangeably, so it’s best not to get hung up on the terminology.
Although there are a few examples of reboots going back decades in movie and TV history, the current rebooting craze began with Netflix’s Fuller House in 2016 and solidified with Amazon’s Gilmore Girls, Showtime’s Twin Peaks, and NBC’s Will and Grace before becoming a national news story when Roseanne Barr’s show returned as a combatant in the Trump culture wars earlier this year to unprecedented ratings success. It will continue with a Murphy Brown reboot in the fall, and more such exhumations will be announced over the coming months once the package deals are made.
It’s not clear these reboots will be able to sustain interest beyond the first season because the very thing they are designed for—to let us to pay a visit to old friends—itself gets old after a while. There’s only so much reminiscing you can do.
Which is why the best, most inventive, and most creative of all the reboots is one that stands squarely on the shoulders of its progenitor before taking its story in delightfully different directions. Cobra Kai doesn’t even reboot a TV show. Its source is The Karate Kid, the fun and cheesy 1984 Rocky-in-high-school retread about lonely Daniel LaRusso, who finds himself the target of San Fernando Valley bullies and is taught martial arts by his building’s eccentric Japanese super.
At the end of the movie, Daniel (Ralph Macchio) defeats head bully Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). Cobra Kai begins with Johnny 34 years later, working as a day laborer in the Valley. It seems like Daniel’s ultimate wish fulfillment. Johnny was a bad rich kid and he’s ended up a dead-end poor guy grabbing dinner from a strip-mall convenience store before going home to a beer-can-strewn apartment. Meanwhile, Daniel is the most successful car dealer in the Valley, and Johnny must pass by his smug face peering down from a Ventura Boulevard billboard every day of his life.
Cobra Kai, for which Macchio and Zabka reprise their roles, flips the script. It’s Johnny’s story, really, not Daniel’s. Johnny becomes the unlikely karate mentor of a kid who lives next door to him and then to the kid’s friends. He’s crude and mean and narrow-minded and insulting. But he’s without airs and he brings real discipline to kids who really need some. Zabka, who hasn’t done much acting in the past 25 years, is just spectacular in the part. Johnny is never not a jerk, but there’s something unexpectedly substantial to him, and you can’t help rooting for him to pull himself out of the crater he’s dug himself into.
Turns out Johnny has what the kids today call a “narrative” of his own in which Daniel is the villain—for stealing his girlfriend and the sense of self karate gave him all those years ago. Meanwhile, Daniel is in something of a spiritual crater of his own—living a nominally self-satisfied life with a comparably self-satisfied wife, a daughter who ditches her fat friend for the popular clique, and a son who never looks up from his video game.
Though he’s nominally a good guy, Daniel seems determined to make himself feel better by belittling Johnny and interfering with his efforts to make something of himself when their lives start colliding again. By the end of the tenth and final episode of its first season, both men have done really good things and really bad things—and so have the two new karate kids under their tutelage.
Cobra Kai, one of the first offerings from YouTube’s Red service, is terrific entertainment. You need not know The Karate Kid to enjoy it, but come on. Of course you know it. How could you not? Have you been living under a rock since it was Morning in America 34 years ago?
