New "Cobra Kai" trailer: the Karate Kid is a car salesman and Johnny is still a prick

Honestly. In the annals of TV-dom. The idea of bringing back Daniel and Johnny is one of the least offensive things out there. IMHO anyway.

It certainly has to be less egregious than Logan Paul or Dantdm or any other YouTube stream garbage. Maybe I’m old and just not hip to things.

I haven’t delved deeply into it, but from a few comments I saw (elsewhere) I got the impression this might be motivated by the same sort of sentiment that lead to that offensive Heathers reboot. Everyone likes a good a-hole character in a show now and then… but with things the way they are these days, especially in U.S. culture at large, I worry we’re seeing a new crop of media aimed at subtly promoting bullying behaviors, hypermasculinity, and white supremacy in general. Or at the very least, marketing itself toward those who hold those ideals.

Hopefully I’m reading too much into this, though.

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Can someone explain why Johnny is an a-hole now?

I mean even back then…he’s a bit dickish yes, but not any more than the average well-to-do privileged teenager.

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Perhaps a little inspiration from this as well?:

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Part of the joke seems to be that he’s not an anormous asshole, just a bit of a prick.The whiff of permanent adolescence under a performance of adulthood. Beating up teenage vandals, MRA-ish pep talk for kids, humiliating an old foe in public – the trailer doesn’t quite give you enough context to know if they’re really being jerks, and the trailer knows it. It’s a good trailer!

A lot of this show’s appeal will depend on whether they get the level of asshole right. If Johnny is genuinely bigoted or abusive, or Daniel genuinely hypocritical or gross, it will be a bad show because only bad people will truly sympathize with them. If they stay behind the lines or even carefully manage character arcs that dip across them, maybe it’ll be a good one.

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the smile bunch…HAHAHHAHAH

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More context…new trailer back up:

And yes Daniel is a jackass in this. He is the rich one percenter who refuses to allow Johnny to open up the Cobra Kai dojo again. Johnny is clearly trying to just make a living and not be the failure he feels like and his students are the weak/geek/nerd targets for the bullies. He is teaching them how to fight back.

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To each his own.

That’s my take on it as well.

There seems to be a lot of interest lately in taking popular fictional characters and subverting them into the antithesis of what they were originally.

Vicious cycles are a real thing, but arbitrarily turning pop heroes into the “real bullies!” can easily play into psychological manipulation and projectionism.

Then there’s this; personally, I’m not even remotely interested in what happened to ‘Danny Russo’ and his high school nemesis, ‘Johnny,’ 30 years after the fact. There comes a point when it’s time to grow up and move on.

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Now that show, I’d actually watch.

And holy fucksocks; Ralph Maccio is 56!

How in the hell is he aging so slowly???

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