Cobra Kai, YouTube’s continuation of The Karate Kid franchise, is a bona fide hit.
The show has already been renewed for a second season after both critics and audiences lapped up the first ten episodes.
Cobra Kai also reportedly trounced its streaming competition during its debut week with demand topping the likes of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and Arrested Development as well as the second season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Karate Kid was an instant commercial success on its release in 1984. Made for $8 million, it took $90.82 million at the domestic box office – adjusted for inflation that increases to $248.12 million.
To celebrate Cobra Kai’s success, I caught up with Martin Kove, aka Sensei John Kreese, to talk about the original’s legacy and how close he was to securing his own spin-off.
Simon Thompson: Is it true you weren’t that impressed with The Karate Kid when you were first approached with it?
Martin Kove: I was doing Cagney and Lacey at the time, a very popular show, and they wanted me to play this heavy, Martin Kreese. I’ll be honest, I didn’t like the title ‘The Karate Kid,’ it sounded like a Bruce Lee movie, and the whole thing seemed just ‘okay’ to me. Pat Johnson, the stunt coordinator and the guy who played the referee in the movie, worked separately with me and the Cobra Kai boys which created a mystique between us. Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita kept their distance and so, thanks to the director, it authentically evolved into something that we couldn’t have predicted.
ST: And you certainly had no idea it was still going to be so popular three decades later, right?
MK: No, no idea at all. We do a lot of panels and autograph shows and the same three factors as to why people feel such an affinity with the movie always come up. The first is that they were being bullied in 1984 and they identify with the resolution of that, the second is they were a fish out of water and were moving around a lot, and the third one is that they had a romance that didn’t work out. For most people, at least one of those elements rings true. I have to say that for me, the real star of the movie is the writer Robert Mark Kamen. He wrote the lines and the phrases such as ‘no mercy’, ‘sweep the leg’ and ‘wax on, wax off’ that became so iconic. We, as the cast, all receive an enormous amount of credit from fans of the movie for those but they were all his work.
ST: You say you didn’t hang out with the rest of the cast during the making of The Karate Kid but as time has passed, and with Cobra Kai, that changed. How did that affect the dynamic?
MK: Well, Ralph Macchio, Billy Zabka and I have now been friends for 30 years. They came to me last September, we had dinner at Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles, they told me that they wanted me to come in on the 10th episode of the series, that I would be a surprise and that I’d become a regular in seasons two and three. When Kreese turns up, the audience has no idea what he’s been up to. They basically think he’s dead. I’d been sworn to secrecy about this whole show. These writers on Cobra Kai are intelligent. These three men know more about our characters than we ever did and they convinced me to it. As much as I did not want to just drop in on episode 10, they made it make sense to me. It’s such a great show and I would be amazed if we don’t get picked up for a third season.
ST: Collectively, you guys have been presented with a number of ideas over the years for sequels and reboots around The Karate Kid. Has anybody ever pitched a John Kreese spin-off to you?
MK: It’s very intuitive of you to ask that because about six or eight months ago someone came to me with a script that was really good. It was set 30 years later, John Kreese was training horses for a living in Will Rogers State Park, he had mellowed out and his life had totally changed. It was fascinating. It didn’t utilize our other major characters in the series but it was still a great draft, it was just bad timing. It came to me from these people in Pittsburgh but we couldn’t use it because they couldn’t get the rights because the series had just been sold. People come to me all the time with ideas and reboots but that was the first time that I was interested. I made the mistake of doing too many action movies in the late 80s and early 90s that I probably shouldn’t have done because the scripts weren’t great and I guess I was arrogant enough to think I could fix them with a good performance. The thing is, you never can.
ST: One of the movies you are talking about is one that I actually have a soft spot for, despite it being quite cheesy, and that’s Steele Justice. Is that one of those movies that you look back on favorably?
MK: Oh yeah, absolutely. It was in 1986, it was my first major picture where I was the star and it had a good cast but I do think we could have done better with the writing. We’d watch Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen at my house as well as other movies like The Wild Bunch and we’d try and capture some of that spirit but that didn’t quite happen. Like you say, the end result was cheesy. Because of movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II and The Karate Kid, I was the guy to go to for the action but the parts of these movies I enjoyed the most were the gentler, more personal scenes about revenge and love. Back in the day you wanted to be an action movie star, you’d get caught up in that world but those tender elements were always the things that moved me and they still move me now. Action movies are fun, popcorn movies but today I’d much rather make a Casablanca or a western. I’d love to bring westerns back.
ST: Are there any roles you turned down over the years and you’re still kicking yourself that you passed on the opportunity?
MK: There is one that still plagues me, big time. It was back in 1976 or 1977, I was visiting my parents in New York and all of suddenly I got a call that an offer had come in for me to play ‘Gentleman’ Jim Corbett in Tom Horn opposite Steve McQueen. He was my idol. When I worked on The Karate Kid, his son Chad McQueen played Dutch and I was constantly asking about his father. I remember being on the phone and I had just walked through the door from the airport. They were offering to pay me $650 for the week and I was insulted. I didn’t have any right to be insulted because $650 a week for an actor who had only come to Hollywood two years earlier was terrific. The most important thing was that I was going to work with Steve McQueen and do a couple of fight scenes. I was offended because of the money and the fact that I was going to have to leave my parents’ house the next day. I was the only child and I was very close to my parents, they were really wonderful middle-class Jewish people that just loved when I came to visit them and I didn’t have the heart to just turn around and leave. To this day I have a big poster of Tom Horn in my house. I think about this quite frequently because Steve died two years later and I passed up my one chance to work with him.
ST: Cagney and Lacey is being rebooted. Have you been approached about returning in some capacity as Isbeki?
MK: I would, absolutely. My manager actually pitched me for the role of the Captain but I’d do a cameo, for sure. I’ve got the script and I would love to be part of that. Cagney and Lacey was, and is, a great part of my life. We love each other. I go to the theater and see Tyne Daly quite often, I actually saw her at the Geffen Playhouse a few months ago. Sharon Gless lives in Florida but I talk to her on a regular basis.Cagney and Lacey was a lot of fun, there were no egos on that show.
Cobra Kai is available to stream on YouTube Red now. Season two will debut in 2019.
You can read my interview with Ralph Macchio and William Zabka here.
