Cobra Kai season 4 was released this week and I'm interested in what anyone who watched it might have thought. For those who don't know, Cobra Kai is a continuation of the original 4 Karate Kid movies. The first 3 Karate Kid movies in the 80s were based on Daniel, a teenage boy learning karate and twice winning the All Valley Karate championship. All the women in these movies serve as love interests or mothers. The 4th movie from the 90s has Hilary Swank play Julie, the next Karate Kid, and the first time a female character takes on a main role.
Cobra Kai, is a modern day continuation, focussed initially on the hero, Daniel, and antagonist, Johnny, of the first movies. The series is much more nuanced than the movies and looks at the first movie from the perspective of each main character. Casting some of Daniel's actions from the first movie in a less flattering light. Johnny, is shown with more sympathy from his perspective, but without excusing his worst actions from the movie. Johnny is also shown as having totally stagnated (in some ways unbelievably so) since the mid-80s. So a lot of the humour of the series comes from Johnny struggling with modern norms. The series, also features slew of 'next karate kids' with the children of the Johnny and Daniel, among others, learning karate and being influenced by the old rivalries.
Which brings me to why I'm posting about it here. In series 1, the girls and boys fought against each other at the All Valley Tournament. Secondary character Aisha, advances to the quarter finals where she is beaten by the previous champion. I felt quite uncomfortable watching it as teen boys and girls shouldn't have been fighting each other and it was unrealistic for Aisha to have advanced as far as she did. The following two series spanned part of the following year, where more girl fighters feature, and series 4 brings the characters to the next All Valley Championship. Halfway through the series, we get a scene of the board members watching a video of Aisha being beaten. One of the members states how unfair it is for girls to have to fight boys and that parents can't possibly be ok with watching their daughters get kicked and punched by boys. The board then votes to hold separate competitions for male and female fighters.
Obviously the writers benefit from this decision in terms of the additional drama they can include in the story. But at the same time, I really did wonder if they had decided to make a point. They showed footage of Aisha's season 1 fight that much more dramatically shows the reality of a boy fighting a girl. And at this moment in time, when people are starting to wake up to what is happening to women's sports. I wondered if the writers were making a point that males and females are physically different. And having male fighters go up against female fighters really isn't fair. While the more female fighters the show has, means that we do at times see some unrealistic fight situations between male and female fighters. I think the writers may also have felt that they couldn't push ahead and have the main girl characters advance far into the competition against even mediocre boys. So they had to divide the competition but also used something they had to do for dramatic purposes to make the point that male and female athletes can not compete against each other and that we shouldn't stand for it.