Johnny Lawrence Is Right: Let’s Live Like It’s the ‘80s

5 We Either Were Healthier or Just Thought We Were, Which Is Just as Good

When Johnny (William Zabka) opens his Cobra Kai dojo for a new generation, back in Season One, he only has one student: his neighbor Miguel (Xolo Maridueña). Miguel learns his first lesson — “Strike first” — the hard way when Johnny abruptly flips him onto the mat. Trying to recover, Miguel pulls an inhaler out of his pocket, saying he has asthma. “Not anymore,” Johnny snaps, chucking the inhaler across the dojo. “We do not allow weakness in this dojo, so you can leave your asthma and your peanut allergies and all that other made-up bullshit outside.” 

In case my sister or her afflicted child is reading this: I know peanut allergies are real. I took the epinephrine injector training; I understand that it’s serious. I’m just saying I made it through more than a decade of public school without ever knowing one kid with a peanut allergy. In fact, I can’t remember kids who had any food allergies, and this was in the ‘80s so we would have for sure ranked on them for it. 

Leaving children out of it: When you have a friend who suddenly turns up to brunch announcing that they’re gluten-intolerant but somehow didn’t know for the first 30 years of their life at least a teeny-tiny part of you thinks they’re faking it for attention. You can’t just announce to that friend that their new dietary restrictions are made-up bullshit, but if Johnny can set that rule in his own fiefdom, I say more power to him.

4 Miguel’s Generation Could Probably Benefit from Learning Some Physical Skills

Before long, some of Miguel’s classmates start noticing his karate skills and follow him to the dojo. Johnny is, at a surface level, ill-suited to teach a class full of underdogs. As we know from his origin story (The Karate Kid), Johnny is more of a bully than a victim. But, on the other hand, who better to teach bully-fighting techniques than a quasi-double agent who knows all their tricks and tactics? 

Johnny is especially disgusted that most of the psychological abuse his new students are experiencing isn’t even taking place in person: “What a bunch of pussies! Back in my day, if you wanted to tease someone, you did it to their face!” 

More on this below, but Johnny has a point. Any coward can be a keyboard warrior; to deliver a life-altering kick to a target that deserves it, you actually need training.

3 Muscle Cars Rule

One of the events of the series premiere that brings Johnny back into contact with his old nemesis Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is an automotive collision. Johnny has parked his beloved Firebird so that he can revisit old haunts and feel sorry for himself when a careless teenager named Yasmine (Annalisa Cochrane) accidentally runs into it; Daniel’s daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser) happens to be in Yasmine’s back seat. The car gets towed to Daniel’s car lot, where Johnny learns that fixing the damage will cost more than the car is worth, and Daniel’s magnanimous offer to fix it for free only makes Johnny feel worse. 

This is, unfortunately, not the worst that happens to the Firebird. Daniel’s idiot cousin Louie (Bret Ernst) brings a couple of biker friends by Johnny’s several episodes later, vandalizing and ultimately burning the car in vengeance for some slight or other in Daniel and Johnny’s ongoing battle. (Incidentally, Louie’s fracas interrupts Johnny as he’s trying to write a letter to his estranged son, Tanner Buchanan’s Robby. Why a letter, when they live in the same municipality? To quote Johnny: “I know you refuse to answer my calls, and I refuse to text or email.”) 

Johnny goes to Daniel’s to get his own revenge, and it falls to Daniel’s wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) — who’s not from Karate Town and finds all the karate feuds tiresome — to tell Daniel he needs to make it right by giving Johnny a car from the lot. This is how Johnny becomes the proud owner of an almost-contemporary muscle car, and even though a 2009 Dodge Challenger is definitely from this century, the Cobra Kai-branded upgrades Johnny gives it are pure ‘80s.

I assume there’s a deleted scene that showed us where Johnny managed to source his cassette deck.

2 Kickass Rock Music Does Kick Ass

I can’t disagree with Variety’s Lily Moayeri and Shirley Halperin that the needle drops on Cobra Kai are very expected. But if we’re supposed to be in Johnny’s POV, isn’t that expected? This character isn’t someone who strikes me as a deep-cut album guy; he likes the singles that got heavy play on Top 40 radio stations when he was driving around in the early ‘80s, multiple All-Valley victories under his (black) belt and the world on a string. 

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” isn’t an obscure favorite; it’s exactly the kind of pump-up track a guy like Johnny would reach for when he needs to motivate his students. And you know what? Still works!

1 The Internet Isn’t So Great

Midway through the first season, we watch a younger Johnny (Owen D. Stone) on a carefree day in Encino Hills, a much nicer part of the Valley than Reseda, where Daniel lives. By chance, Johnny follows a cool-looking guy to his karate training at Cobra Kai. That night at dinner, he’s thrilled to tell his mother Laura (Candace Moon) all about what he saw and how cool it would be to learn to kick above his head like the guys in the class. 

Laura, though, might have never registered Johnny in a class at Cobra Kai if she could have gone online and seen dozens of negative reviews on Yelp. Would Johnny have been better off? Psychologically, maybe. But he also fundamentally wouldn’t be the guy we now love (and sometimes love to hate) without that experience.

We watch through the first season as Johnny takes a few tentative steps into current technology. It clearly would never occur to him to create a website promoting the Cobra Kai dojo if Miguel hadn’t taken the initiative to do it himself. He doesn’t know how to tell prospective customers the URL. He knows enough to tell Lyle (Matt Borlenghi), the clerk at his local pawn shop, that the old video game system he’s trying to get rid of is “a Nintendo,” but not enough to realize Lyle will be able to tell at a glance it’s an Atari. 

It’s not until Season Two that Johnny decides he needs to get a computer (defensively telling Lyle when he incredulously asks whether it’s his first by spitting, “I’m not a NERD”). Once he admits to Lyle that he doesn’t know what Wi-Fi is, a montage of Johnny discovering everything that’s now at his fingertips — “Hot Babes,” “Wet T-Shirt Contest” and clips of his favorite movies (Iron Eagle and Bloodsport, of course) — things get even less wholesome than softcore porn when he lands on a website called “The Actual Truth” and finds “PROOF THAT DINOSAURS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS.” “I knew it,” Johnny mutters.

Leaving aside the corruption of Johnny’s sweet, soft brain by opportunistic loons, all the workarounds Johnny’s found for his internet-free life have their appeal. He’s right to try to reach Robby in a letter rather than an email: Robby might actually perceive the struggle he went through to write it if he can see the scratched-out pen marks. He’s right that cyberbullies are weaklings: physical confrontation takes a lot more conviction than most people can muster. He’s right to wait as long as a living human in America possibly could have to find out what “a face book” is, even if it also means he’s the last living human in America to learn that Facebook sucks.

The world was better when boys had to write thoughts like this out by hand — maybe with a typewriter loud enough to make them self-conscious about what they were doing. Johnny should boycott texting forever.