Earlier this week, Cobra Kai star and original The Karate Kid star Ralph Macchio offered us insight into the one significant question that hasn’t been answered yet. While I hope that the show will eventually reconcile that issue with time, people can catch up on the first two seasons when the show arrives on Netflix (August 28) with a Season 3 to come. One of the show’s creators, Josh Heald, recently spoke up about production not being delayed at all due to Covid-19, so hopefully, we’ll see a release date from Netflix soon.
In the meantime, Heald has spoken with Comic Book Resource about how Season 3 (which has a lot to clean up) will work to be “bigger and exciting and take it to the next level” for Johnny Lawrence’s students and Daniel LaRusso’s budding Miyagi-do 2.0. Heald reveals that the series wants to show more complex fight choreography as the students improve, but he also feels that it’s necessary to keep things consistent with the show’s existing emotional tone. It’s easy to see why he’s looking at The Matrix (that the trilogy used kung fu and not karate is beside the point) as an example of why dropping character and plot focus (in favor of building the craziest action scenes possible) is something that Cobra Kai doesn’t want to do:
“[We] always want to stay true to why we love this story in the first place, which is the characters. So sometimes, we don’t want to go too far where it becomes The Matrix and feels like a different thing but it is the balance between really focusing on the story while thinking about those ways to make it bigger.”
It’s a wise approach, given that all the fights in Cobra Kai (and The Karate Kid) are emotionally grounded. The stakes are about the people involved and their rivalries and the settling of old beefs, not necessarily the fight moves themselves. Well, other than that crane kick, but we could debate that all day. What matters is that Heald is stressing that the “heightened stakes” of The Karate Kid II are what have most recently inspired Cobra Kai production, and he is promising “fireworks” to come, “but it’s not something that feels different, necessarily.”
Further, Macchio revealed to us that the show will lean even more heavily into the teen rivalry of Miguel and Robby as their senseis continue to guide them and (possibly) make amends for the past. Season 3 certainly won’t be a dull affair, that’s for sure.
(Via CBR)