It’s tournament time in this teaser for season 4 of Cobra Kai
The next season of the hit Karate Kid sequel series is coming to Netflix in December
TV News Kai
It’s all been leading up to this! Netflix’s Cobra Kai (formerly YouTube’s Cobra Kai) loves a good dramatic teaser, or at least a tongue-in-cheek dramatic teaser that can have its cake and eat it too, and that’s exactly what’s going on in this preview for the show’s upcoming fourth season. The Karate Kid sequel series is finally heading to the All Valley karate tournament—a.k.a. the big event from the movie where Daniel LaRusso gets his big cathartic victory against the evil Johnny Lawrence. This time around, though, Johnny and Daniel have teamed up to defeat Cobra Kai together, which is once again being led by the evil (but, like, really evil) John Kreese, played by Martin Kove, reprising his role as the old Cobra Kai boss.
Deadline teases that there will also be some new drama between Daniel’s daughter (played by Mary Mouser) and her friend Tory at Cobra Kai (played by Peyton List), with series co-creator Jon Hurwitz suggesting that this new rivalry will be a major factor for the show going forward and that season four will be “a very special season” for those two characters in particular. Here’s what we’d like to know: With the All Valley tournament coming back, is somebody going to sweep a damn leg or get somebody a bodybag? If we ran the tournament, we would probably institute a ban on leg sweeps and bodybags, not because it’s dangerous but because it would be annoying to have every climactic bout end with two teenagers trying to land crane kicks every year. Surely Johnny and Daniel have earned a chance to bring it back, though. We’ll see one way or another when season four of Cobra Kai premieres on Netflix at some point in December. (A specific premiere date has not been announced and will presumably accompany a longer trailer.)
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One thing that annoys me about the show is that the amount of contrivances required to keep Johnny and Daniel from resolving their issues until the end of Season 3. Also kudos for the show getting rid of Sting Ray last season, who was by far the worst character in the show. I don’t see how the producers thought an overweight 30-something adult creepily hanging out with teenagers would be funny.
Apparently he was going to be in it, but the actor was already under contract for Cruella.
Yup. The wheel-spinning was dire at a certain point.
…there will also be some new drama between Daniel’s daughter […] and her friend Tory at Cobra Kai…They… uh… were never friends. They pretty much hated each other from the jump. Looking forward to another season of this delightfully ludicrous show, though.
“…there will also be some new drama between Daniel’s daughter (played by Mary Mouser) and her friend Tory at Cobra Kai (played by Peyton List)…”Demonstrate you haven’t seen Cobra Kai without actually saying you haven’t seen Cobra Kai.
Are you trying to insinuate that Sam Barsanti is half-assing his job?
I don’t particularly blame Barsanti—summarizing other outlets’ reports while adopting a tone of snarky pop cultural omniscience is just the AV Club’s house style these days. Describing two people who have always despised each other and literally attempted to kill each other on multiple occasions as “friends” is pretty funny, though.
To be fair, the most memorable sentence in the whole article.
I assume he’s getting her mixed up with Aisha, who I’m really hoping comes back this season so we don’t have that uncomfortable “We couldn’t figure out anything for the not conventionally attractive girl to do” vibe.
Yeah, that was fucking terrible. And, in her place, we got more of Tory, who is one of the worst characters on any TV show of the past five years. Fucking awful.
This show is fun. The storylines and rivalries are right up there with wrestling. It has its moments where suspension of disbelief can be a little too much, but overall fun. I still laugh though on just how soap opera serious the characters take karate. Just wondering on how all these karate students in their little gangs could handle real life situation when someone’s carrying? Whether it’s at a shopping mall, school, or house party.
The show makes it seem like karate in the Valley is as important as high school football in Texas. I love it.
One of the things I like about this show is when they demonstrate how low-stakes the whole competitive karate scene is in their town. Like, the karate board has all the energy of a municipal meeting on where to install a stop sign. When the rival dojos do their carnival demos, the audience seems just slightly bemused. When the fights break out at the mall and school, parents and teachers are just super confused about karate being the weapon of choice.This, to me, makes it all the more hilarious when grown-ass people get worked up about what is, essentially, an after-school program for ADHD kids.
Yeah, the subtle joke is that karate is simultaneously a huge deal in “the Valley” while simultaneously no one really cares about it because, well, it’s just teens doing karate.
Yeah, the subtle joke is that karate is simultaneously a huge deal in “the Valley” while simultaneously no one really cares about it because, well, it’s just teens doing karate. I feel like season 1 was by far the best at keeping those two elements in balance. You had a small number of vulnerable teens and living-in-the-past grown-ups who were taking karate way too seriously, and every else was mostly amused by their dorky, idiosyncratic obsession.
But as the seasons have gone on and the scope of the show has expanded to embroil more and more people in more and more karate showdowns for the future of the Valley, the melodrama has started to outweigh the tongue-in-cheek humor, to the show’s detriment.I mean, I thought the first season compared favorably to Freaks and Geeks in the way it underplayed the trials and triumphs of adolescence, offering both comfort and caution in the notion that the lows of life are often not that low and the highs are not that high. But more and more the show reminds me of early-season Smallville: so desperately earnest it’s sometimes kind of embarrassing, but with a wholesomeness and an affection for its characters that carries it through the dodgier moments.
They actually lampshaded this in the second season during the dinner scene with Ali and Daniel’s wife, when they’re both basically making fun of Daniel and Johnny for how seriously they take their silly karate dojos and rivalry.That’s the great thing about the show – it’s fully aware of how cheesy and ridiculous all of this drama and operatics are and they just fully lean into it.
I love how people still recognize Daniel from winning the All-Valley tournament in 1984. It’s so absurd that people would remember someone who won a kids’ karate tournament almost 40 years ago.
“The Karate Kid sequel series is finally heading to the All Valley karate tournament”They already featured the All Valley Karate Tournament in the finale of the first season.
But, you know, finally…again.
I was so utterly bored with the teen drama last season that, after the Okinawa episode (Chozen rules!), I just skipped right to the Elisabeth Shue scenes and watched only those.