Cobra Kai Forgets Karate Kid’s Most Crucial Line (But Season 5 Can Fix It)

Cobra Kai has been quite successful in continuing the Karate Kid legacy, but there’s an important line from the first film that the show has been forgetting to pay off. Through four seasons, Cobra Kai has masterfully combined the elements that made Karate Kid into a classic with a more contemporary type of storytelling. At a time when many franchises struggle to pick up where the original movie or show left off, Cobra Kai is an example of how to play nostalgia while also crafting new ideas.

Although it has now grown to have a large cast of original characters as well as returning actors from the three Karate Kid films, Cobra Kai started with the simple premise of taking a look at how Johnny Lawrence was doing 34 years after his fight against Daniel LaRusso. In an interesting twist, the point of view of the story was no longer Daniel’s, but his rival’s. Cobra Kai took the classic fan question “was Daniel the bad guy?” into the next level and created layered characters out of previous two-dimensional ones.

Even though Cobra Kai has been so successful in reimagining the Karate Kid universe into a different story, there is one point in the original film that the series has failed to live up to. At the end of the fight between Daniel and Johnny in Karate Kid, a defeated Johnny hands the trophy to Daniel and says, “You’re alright, Larusso”. The line was supposed to prove that the former never hated the latter, or had at least grown some respect for him. In Cobra Kai, however, all flashbacks and mentions of the iconic fight have never referred to it. Viewers of the original movie have even asked Jon Hurwitz on Twitter if the line is canon to the world of Cobra Kai, to which the showrunner said that “yes”, but after 35 years Johnny’s feelings “have changed”.

It is interesting how Cobra Kai approached the way Johnny remembers that fight. Rather than visualizing himself handing the trophy to LaRusso out of respect, Johnny’s memories of that night always end with him lying on the floor in defeat. Through a revisionist memory, Johnny blames his struggles on the All Valey loss and creates in Daniel a villain to his story. It’s also important to notice that, had the “You’re alright, LaRusso” line been brought up earlier in the show, igniting Daniel and Johnny’s conflict once again could have been more difficult to the writers.

The constant beef between Johnny and Daniel worked through the first three seasons of Cobra Kai, but season 4 has proved that it won’t work forever. As fun as it is to see the rivals always in conflict, never finishing to develop the relationship between the two characters could prevent the show itself from evolving. After the disaster that was the collaboration between Johnny and Daniel in season 4, it is time for the show to finally resolve the conflict between the two characters.

The “You’re alright, LaRusso” moment needs to be remembered in Cobra Kai not just as a flashback or throwaway line, but rather as an important element in Johnny’s character development. Now having to find Miguel and fix things with Robby, Johnny no longer has the time to blame things on Daniel. As Cobra Kai keeps raising the stakes, the original Karate Kid movie will always be a source of wisdom and lessons that every character on the show could learn from.

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Marcelo Leite
(184 Articles Published)

Marcelo Leite is a senior writer for Screen Rant with years of experience in creative and academic writing. Although his chosen field was structure engineering, there is nothing he likes better than writing about the things he loves.

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