Cobra Kai as a counterfactual for the sequel trilogy

There is a lot of (mostly justified) complaining about the constant churn of sequels, reboots, remakes, remasters, etc. with virtually everything nowadays. As we all know Star Wars was part of this with the sequel trilogy, and everyone has pecked it to death for all its flaws.

But what are good examples of how to hypothetically do it right?

The two rare examples that I can think of that demonstrate the right way to do this are Top Gun: Maverick and Cobra Kai. Arguably they surpass the original source material. They didn’t try to just revive and remake the former stuff, they actually tried to improve on it.

In these cases the legacy actors were front and center. Their characters had developed and were placed into new contexts that suited their age and experience, but they were still the main characters and the main draw for the audience.

Top Gun brought back Tom Cruise of course, but Cobra Kai did something even more impressive, bringing back every single actor from every main character in all three Karate Kid movies (that have Daniel), with no recasting whatsoever, minus maybe the love interest from 3 I think. Every villain and several minor characters were also brought back. Not only this, but every one of these characters was given something to do. All the villains were given multiple seasons of development, and were better villains, or heroes or antiheroes, in the show than they ever were in the movies.

In addition, effort was taken to make a new generation of characters. I could absolutely see the equivalent of Cobra Kai show up in another 30 years, using the new characters as senseis. But they were integrated very closely with the legacy characters. You saw them bond and take the time to learn from them, sometimes through conflict and disagreement.

For people obsessed with “flawed” characters, the legacy characters are certainly flawed people. Daniel LaRusso is given plenty of time to show imperfection, hypocrisy, aloofness, poor parenting, and an overly rigid philosophy. There’s a subplot in the final season where he loses some faith in Mr. Miyagi because he learns new things about him, and it messes with his head. But he never stops being a good guy, a family man, and a teacher for his students. You want to see him succeed and learn because he’s still the hero and still one of the protagonists. Johnny Lawrence is always a highly flawed alcoholic, abrasive antihero but also an extremely compelling underdog story.

While I don’t think this is the right fit for Star Wars, Cobra Kai also fully develops the idea that there is room for a passionate, aggressive side in life that is just as legitimate as a passive, defensive side, and that both can learn from each other. For anyone who craves some kind of gray Jedi thing or is under the misconception that dark side = emotion, Cobra Kai is a satisfying exploration of that concept in a setting where it makes sense.

Is this to say that maybe the sequels would have been better as a TV show so that you have time for all this development and complexity? Maybe but not necessarily. Luke, Han, Leia, Obi Wan, etc. were likeable from the very first movie. The primary thing you would need, other than charismatic actors, is to have the new characters coexist with the original characters in believable ways so that the torch passing feels right.

Imagine how much more you would like Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo Ren if Luke, Han, and Leia lived through all three movies and constantly interacted with them and each other. Imagine how much more compelling Kylo Ren would be if he were actually mentored directly by Darth Vader somehow. Imagine if they made Boba Fett a main character antihero with a fully fleshed out backstory, and he ends up in a situation where he has to team up with Han or something. (They kind of did this with The Mandalorian and it was insanely popular. I don’t mean the character of Boba Fett in The Mandalorian, I mean The Mandalorian himself as a version of what people wanted from Boba Fett.)

We can talk about the goofiness of various plot stuff with maps, Starkiller Base, Sith wayfinders, hyperspace tracking, etc. or how they messed up by not including Coruscant or explaining the political situation, etc. But I don’t think any of that would matter if they got the characters right.

Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t tell you which country is the “enemy”, it’s a vague amalgamation of Iran/China/Russia/North Korea, and you never see any of their faces or learn anything about their motivations. The setup is very similar to the Death Star trench run. But when you’re watching it you couldn’t care less because you want the characters to win and survive.

Cobra Kai is this ridiculous pastiche world where roughly 40% of the population are bullies ready to throw down at the drop of a hat, and it’s a synthwave version of California where 2010s kids still love going to arcades. Multiple psychos are willing to do anything including murder depending on what version of martial arts is getting taught to 20-30 kids at a strip mall. (It’s a lot like the memes about Yu Gi Oh and “children’s card games.”) But you don’t care because it’s well done and you like the characters. You get invested in it because they are.

What do you guys think?

Even though I do like the sequel trilogy, well 2/3 of it, I completely agree that Cobra Kai does the legacy sequel thing way better because it remembers to ensure that both the old characters and the new characters get somewhat equal focus and allow both to have character arcs and progress. Also, I think the writing is way better in Cobra Kai because I think only 1 of movies in the sequel trilogy, The Last Jedi, was actually well written. Force Awakens was fine but focused too much on setting up mystery boxes that they had no idea what the answers that were within them would be. Much of the film was also was derivative of A New Hope because they were terrified that the Star Wars fanbase would hate it like the prequels and decided not to write something new and original. Rise of Skywalker is a complete trainwreck from a writing level. The Last Jedi is the only one of the sequel trilogy that even attempts to do something similar to what Cobra Kai did, in that every single character in that film goes through a character arc and tries to give everyone some character development, even if a lot of people dislike what they specifically did with those character arcs. Cobra Kai does all of this, and more, successfully enough to where I consider the show better than the originals.

Ironically Top Gun: Maverick was better than the original Top Gun and a better SW movie than most recent efforts.

Thinking about it further after I wrote it, I realized why I originally liked The Force Awakens and looked past all the stuff about it being a remake. It was the interactions of the new characters with Han. Despite everything else, that was a new dynamic. Han was back to being a smuggler again unfortunately, but now he was a believer in the Force and he took something closer to a mentor role. I’m sure Harrison Ford and Lawrence Kasdan and the rest were chomping at the bit to kill him off, but that was a big mistake. Not because you can’t kill characters or I think Han should be invincible, but because it took away one of the main things they had going for them. It’s no coincidence that the one scene everyone likes in Rise of Skywalker is when Kylo has a vision of his dad.

The new dynamic is just Obi-wan again unfortunately; including the death.

Mocata said:

The new dynamic is just Obi-wan again unfortunately; including the death.

Right, that’s his role in the plot, but he has a much different personality and chemistry with the other characters.

I suppose so, in some ways, but they don’t give him that much to work with. He even takes them to a weird cantina! I don’t dislike the dynamic though, Harrison Ford was phoning it in pretty badly in some movies just before this one (Ender’s Game etc). He has some little good moments between Rey, Kylo, and even Finn.

What’s so ironic is that there is a lot of evidence that the primary reason Luke Skywalker had such limited percentage of screen-time in the Sequels, compared to say, the legacy characters in Cobra Kai, is because the screenwriters initially feared that the legacy characters would absolutely overshadow all the new characters (at least in the case of Luke). The screenwriters (presumably including Lawrence Kasdan himself?) seemed to just outright throw up their hands and admit they simply weren’t skilled enough as screen-writers to write a story that included both legacy and new characters side-by-side without the legacy characters completely overshadowing the new ones.

When I first saw TFA in the theater, I enjoyed very much the chemistry between Finn and Poe and also between Finn and Rey. The new characters and actors in the Sequels weren’t bad at all. Finn especially was a novel and interesting character concept. The problem was ENTIRELY 100% in the screen-writing.

Anyway, as another counter-factual to the Sequel Trilogy (but a VERY controversial one), I’d offer Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now hear me out on this for a second. I know the movie mostly sucks. But the way the movie introduced a new character (Indy’s son Mutt) to inherit the legacy of Indiana Jones was arguably handled correctly. They put Indy in an absentee father role - similar to Sean Connery in The Last Crusade - and showed how Indy and Mutt had a lot to learn from each other. The movie did a good job depicting Mutt’s unfolding relationship with Indy, who had just as much screen-time (or more) as Mutt. Of course, the movie turned out to suck anyway, mostly for plot-related reasons, but the handling of a new character introduced to inherit the legacy of a beloved aging character was arguably done correctly and skillfully, or at least was on the right track conceptually.

Crystal Skull could have served as the archetypal example of “new character replacing beloved aging legacy character” done more or less competently - and also serve as a much closer analogy than any Netflix series for an illustrative comparison with the Star Wars Sequels - if only the rest of the movie wasn’t ruined by such a lackluster and poorly conceived plot.

Anyway, say what will you will about George Lucas - and certainly, I doubt his weird “Midichlorian Micro-adventure” Sequel Trilogy would have been particularly good - but I’m convinced that Lucas at the very least would have handled the interplay between legacy characters and new characters a lot better than Disney did. Disney arguably also had ulterior motivation to promote the new characters at the expense of legacy ones, because Disney had already invested billions into theme parks, toys and promotional materials based around Sequel Trilogy locations and characters, gambling that a new Sequel Trilogy fan-base would soon grow to eclipse the aging Gen-X/Millennial fan-base of the Original Trilogy. This business decision still seems clinically insane to me, but then again I’m not a CEO so what do I know? But after paying 4 billion USD for Star Wars, why the hell would you risk alienating the demographic in your fan base with the most disposable income to buy Star Wars shit? I guess they assumed TFA’s “retro” aesthetic would be sufficient to keep the older fans - and it was, for a time. To be fair, George Lucas took a similar risk when marketing the Prequels to a new generation, but his gamble actually paid off financially, and the Prequel characters arguably weren’t really “inheriting” the legacy of any OT characters in the same way. George Lucas also probably has much better business instincts than Bob Iger or Kathleen Kennedy, and probably could have easily explained to them that a character like “Jake Skywalker” is not likely to sell too many action figures, and that Star Wars’ historical profitability had just as much to do with new iconic starship designs and nerdy world-building materials driving merchandise sales for decades after the release of the films as it did with box-office revenue and VHS/DVD purchases.

Yeah you’re right, they were so afraid of that happening, but instead of accepting it and leaning into it they went in the opposite direction. That’s the problem. If you create Star Wars movies with the original cast returning, everyone is going to be there to see the original cast. If you do include them, it’s impossible for it to be any other way. The way you legitimize the new characters is to graft them on to what is already there, not try to have them compete in a zero sum game they’re always going to lose.

2015 was such a different time. People really were open to, at the very least, Finn being the main character and becoming a Jedi. TFA was a “good enough” movie on its own because it felt like it was really going somewhere. I think part of that was seeing the interactions with Han and anticipating the interactions with Luke.

With Indiana Jones I think it’s a special case where you simply can’t have anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role, and that goes for new characters too. As weird as it sounds I think their best chance at actually making a good movie would be to make a spinoff about adult Short Round, instead of trying to make someone who is sort of a new Indiana Jones but not really. If Shia Labeouf were way more charismatic I think it would be better, but that’s really not fair to him because it’s probably impossible to become just as iconic a character as Indy himself.

I think it is fair to say that the prequel characters were inheriting the OT, given that most of them were the same people, just earlier. You’re watching the whole thing to find out how Anakin becomes Vader, who you’re already very familiar with. Obi Wan is there, Yoda is there, the Emperor is there. The primary additions are Qui Gon and Padme. As many have said, this nostalgia bait is actually done way too much, to the point of also shoehorning in Boba/Jango Fett, Jabba, C3PO and R2D2, and Chewbacca where they don’t belong.