Strike hard, strike fast: Season 5 of ‘Cobra Kai’ has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes

Cheesy one-liners, nostalgic ’80s rock and high schoolers busting out advanced karate moves are just a few reasons for viewers to love Season 5 of Cobra Kai. The new season started off Friday and as of now has a 100 percent rating on Bad Tomatoes from pundits and crowds.

A dark cloud loomed over the city of Los Angeles at the end of Cobra Kai’s fourth season. Snake in the grass Terry Silver swept the leg on his Vietnam War buddy and Cobra Kai Karate co-founder John Kreese, landing him in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.In the mean time, Mr. Miyagi’s valued student Daniel LA Russo and Cobra Kai’s unique awful kid Johnny Lawrence are compelled to close the ways to their dojos subsequent to losing the All Valley Under 18 Karate Competition.

All 10 episodes of Season 5 were released Friday on Netflix, and have already raked in top-shelf reviews from critics and viewers alike on Rotten Tomatoes. The new season picks up with Lawrence going after his student, Miguel Diaz, who went to Mexico in search of his real father. Back in the Valley, LA Russo confronts another foe from his past. And all the while, emotionally charged high schoolers continue beating each other up every 10 to 20 minutes.

Chicago Tribune pundit Nina Metz said watchers need to “embrace the cheddar”, and John Nguyen with Geek Reactor depicted Season 5 as “insane, greater and wild.” One crowd commentator said the show took him back to his young life, giving watchers a getaway from the choppiness of today.

The show got its start on YouTube, which produced three seasons before it stopped making original scripted programming, and was then picked up by Netflix in 2020. The show kicked its way to the top when Season 4 dropped on Dec. 31, 2021, with over 120,000,000 million hours viewed in its first week, according to Netflix.

The Karate Youngster side project relaxed in about a month of magnificence on Netflix’s Worldwide Top 10 for television toward the start of 2022, including fourteen days as the web-based feature’s main show on the planet.

Each season brings back new heroes and villains from the Karate Kid trilogy, which first hit theatres in 1984. The original, which has an 82% audience score and 89% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, was lauded by critics, including Robert Ebert, who had lackluster expectations for the film.

“I was completely wrong,” Ebert wrote in 1984. “The Karate Kid was one of the nice surprises of 1984 — an exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long time.”

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, with the frequently down-on-his-luck Johnny (William Zika) trying to navigate his romance with Carmen (Vanessa Rubio), and the rift between his son (Tanner Buchanan) and hers (Solo Marihuana).

The kids, in fact, have as many shifting allegiances as the elder generation, whose AARP-eligible karate masters continue to prove remarkably spry. The producers have also remained quite resourceful not only in weaving old clips into the show where appropriate but sprinkling in familiar faces — which, again, shouldn’t be spoiled and earnestly treat the original “Karate Kid” trilogy as if it were some mythic franchise, an earthbound cross between “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.”

Like any show with this many high-school-age characters in the mix, “Cobra Kai” appears to be running out of real estate, at least in terms of how much more plausible mileage can be milked from the younger crowd. The seasons have also begun to exhibit a familiar pattern, starting and finishing strong while dragging a bit in the middle.

Even so, the show’s remarkable resilience thus far — having started out on YouTube before migrating to Netflix, where it blossomed into an Emmy-nominated success — suggests it would be premature to count it out.

Besides, “i” Cobra Kahas again demonstrated that all you really need is one good leg on which to keep fighting. Five seasons in, the show has already surpassed any reasonable expectations, developing a life of its own that proves it wasn’t just “Karate Kid”-ink around.

The inevitable battle of dueling dojos in Season 4, which saw seemingly every kid in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley taking up karate, has left the region under the thumb of the oily Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), who, like Martin Cove’s Kreese, has found a dazzling encore in getting to reprise this villainous role.

In any case, to fight the trouble maker from “Karate Youngster III,” Daniel (Ralph Macchio) has enrolled the weighty from “II,” Chosen (Yuji Okimono), in an improbable yet absolutely crazy union. (Somewhat fluffy in his English, when Daniel proposes they need to remove the top of the snake, the exact disapproval of Chozen takes out a blade and is all set.)