Seasons 1&2 available starting 8/28/20, apparently. S3 in 2021
Yeah…around halfway through the video I was thinking “this has to be a free flash advergame thing, right?” But nope, console release apparently.
Hey, could be a fun Double Dragon type of homage thing.
I mean, Beat em ups are having a bit of a moment (River City Girls and Streets of Rage 4 are both great), so its not the genre that’s the issue. But those two are actually good, and have, for example, animation frames.
The models slide around weightlessly, and the hitspark looks like an obvious placeholder. More than those two games, this looks like KoF Allstar (which is mobile F2P garbage), but with less visual pizzazz.
Not my kind of game in the first place, just sayin’ it could be worth a shot if it’s cheap.
Finally watching Cobra Kai and took me a while to recall this scene. Community S 6 E 4
Context: Annie is so happy she gets the “lead” as the Karate Kid
Maximum derek has been bullying Chang the entire episode as he tries to play Pat Norita’s character
Here we find out the director’s only been nice to Annie because her character’s worthless and she’s cute, and he’s hard on Ben because he has potential and Mr Miyagi is the actual lead of the story
Just binged season 1 now that it’s on Netflix - great nostalgia from the original. A bit cheesy at times but some of the callbacks were awesome.
Finally finished S2 tonight (wow, that finale must have taken ages to film). Need S3 as soon as possible.
S2 is nowhere near as good, the villain is annoying. Stuff is more contrived.
Watched it all now it’s on Netflix, what a great show.
I loved it for two reasons:
- Role reversal - The bad guy is now the hero, that’s a fun twist. There’s something very realistic and, well, delightfully transgressive about the idea. Okay, it’s not that clear cut, especially as time goes on, but you get the gist of it. Karate Kid is not exactly 100% the nice guy anymore.
They should do this with more old stuff. Like say, Conan. James Earl Jones is trying to get a nice death cult going and some 'roided up jerk comes in and kills his parishoners. He’s just so misunderstood, y’know?
- There’s two levels to the show: the adults and the teens. Karate Kid was 100% a teen movie: the bullying, the tournament, the girlfriend/boyfriend, it all seems so important to a kid. To an adult, it’s all just dumb, and Cobra Kai is (partly) a series for adults.
In that regard, Karate Kid’s wife gets all the best lines:
“Don’t punch each other, you’ll get blood on the patio. Do you want some breakfast instead?”
“Oh, don’t mind them, they just have warring karate dojos.”
The bored tournament organizers also have some great lines:
“I told you, we are not ready to change the colors of the mats this year!”
Honestly, I don’t think Mr. Miyagi would have actually fitted into this new show. It’s a show about flawed people, and he’s just too perfect, as in a perfect father figure for teens: great role model, virtuous to a fault with a pacifist philosophy, but he’s also unbeatable in a fight, yet lives with overwhelming sorrow that can safely be contained in a single scene, and he’s also an all-American, medal of Honor soldier.
Finished both seasons. Yeah, when the first season was over I was like, “there’s nothing left to do here, what the heck are they going to do in a second season” and sure enough, basically nothing happens. Pretty much all worth it for that last episode, though, that was epic (although boy in some cases those hits are way too obviously fake).
I thought it did a good job keeping the 80s vibe – which sometimes made it dumb, but it was appropriately dumb.
We just finished watching season 2, and I find this show to be unbearable at this point. The key issue I have is that this show is about teenage grudges in an adult world. It’s not a crime show, so there’s no strong motivation beyond old grudges these obsessed men have against each other from their childhood. This simply doesn’t work for me. There is no way in hell these kids or adults should be using any of their karate in the real world when they aren’t attacked in a life-or-death situation. They showed a few of these situations (people getting attacked by real gang members), but everything else is simply absurd. The ending of season 2 was beyond ridiculous. I don’t care about any of these kids and they should all be both arrested and expelled immediately.
I don’t think the show is really meant to be taken seriously. It’s more of a nostalgic fun romp that exists in a world where everyone in the west valley cares about karate and a 50-ish year old man can still somehow live completely in the 80s. The whole lifelong grudge between the two of them is just part of the joke so you either buy in or you don’t I guess.
Season 1 is great, and pretty serious in it’s presentation. Honestly, season 1 is some kind of crazy miracle. It’s so much better than it has any right to be. The premise sounds like a one-joke setup, but everything about it is terrific stuff.
And yeah, I think Zabka gave a wonderful performance and I think being on YT Red or whatever really hurt his chances of breaking out.
Yes, the first season was one of the best series I’ve seen in some time. I was expecting a goofy show that might give me a few laughs but it was so much better than that, both the teen stories and the adult story. Zabka is great.
Haven’t watched season 2 yet. I’ll get to it soon. I don’t like the addition of the old, bad sensei but maybe they will do something good with it.
It is, in all the ways the show is, very much an homage to the 80’s action movie tropes. The dark past/ evil mentor come back to haunt our hero is very much the kind of trope the show revels in.
The show is very much a ‘what if 80’s action movie story/ nostalgia, but with modern TV production’ thing.
So because the show is about fighting against the past, and can he escape becoming what took down his mentor in the first season, it makes sense to take that figurative struggle and make it literal.
Only half way through season 2 myself though.
I’m in the same boat. I loved Season 1. But the criticisms here of Season 2 are making me think that maybe I’m better off just leaving it there?
I feel like the soap opera instincts of the writers took over in Season 2. I found it fairly poor.
You could wait until Season 3 drops and see what reaction here is. I generally enjoyed Season 2 (although it wasn’t as good as Season 1, which was great), but I do think the last episode of Season 2 really went off the rails and put the show in a really weird place — I’m not sure how they fix it for Season 3.
I think the problem is that they didn’t establish a goofy enough world for the show. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but both main characters are mostly reasonable people. They have a temper, but they also have people around them who calm them down. All this reasonableness feels very real. And then things go crazy in season 2, and you’re not prepared for it because the show was pretty realistic up to that point.
(*Except for the fact that the kids became karate masters in a week, and nobody would ever practice karate as unsafely as they do in the show.)