Cobra Kai What William Zabka Originally Imagined Johnny Lawrences Career Would Be

Cobra Kai: What William Zabka Originally Imagined Johnny Lawrence’s Career Would Be

Part of Cobra Kai’s magic is Johnny is a loveable loser trying to better himself but William Zabka originally had a different idea for his character.

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Cobra Kai What William Zabka Originally Imagined Johnny Lawrences Career Would Be

In Cobra Kai, Johnny Lawrence became the new sensei of the titular karate dojo, but recapturing his high school glory years wasn’t the career William Zabka once envisioned for his character. A continuation of The Karate Kid set 34+ years after the original film, Cobra Kai was originally a YouTube Red original series, but it became a global blockbuster when Netflix acquired it in 2020. Not only is Cobra Kai season 3 set to drop in January 2021, but Netflix has also ordered Cobra Kai season 4.

Cobra Kai catches fans up with Johnny and his eternal rival Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). This time, they are the co-leads of the series, which skirts the line showing their virtues and their flaws as they each set up dojos and train a new generation of karate kids. Johnny and Daniel’s animosity spreads to their students, which erupted into a full-blown karate war between the rival dojos by the end of Cobra Kai season 2. However, Johnny made the crucial error of letting his sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) back into his life; Kreese undermined Johnny’s evolving philosophy for Cobra Kai and stole the dojo from underneath him, casting Lawrence out and returning Cobra Kai to his original, cruel “no mercy” modus operandi.

Yet, back in 2014, William Zabka was celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Karate Kid and the actor shared his very different vision for where Johnny Lawrence was in his life three decades later. In an interview with For The Win, Zabka was asked what he thought Johnny became as an adult and he replied: “I think he’s a real estate agent. He’s flipping houses somewhere.”

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Cobra Kai What William Zabka Originally Imagined Johnny Lawrences Career Would Be

That’s certainly a different outcome for Johnny than how fans canonically found him at the start of Cobra Kai season 1: Johnny was a handyman barely eking out a living in the San Fernando Valley. He was an alcoholic and he was perpetually lost in the 1980s of his high school heyday. While Zabka’s original idea for Lawrence is somewhat in the same field — flipping houses does involve the handyman skills of being a contractor, plumber, and electrician — Cobra Kai’s Johnny fell far short of being the success that Zabka hoped his character would be — and that turned out for the best.

In Cobra Kai, it’s Daniel who is successful in business and in life: he’s got his own chain of car dealerships and he’s happily married with two children, although LaRusso begins to jeopardize it all to pursue his old grudge with Johnny. But part of the fun of Cobra Kai is seeing Lawrence scratch and claw his way out of his predicament and trying to make his dojo a success. In addition, being around his students, especially Miguel Diaz (Xolo Mariduena), had a positive influence on Johnny. In Cobra Kai season 2, Lawrence had accepted responsibility for his students’ attitudes and he was trying to create a new Cobra Kai that was still “badass” while trying not to turn his kids into “a**holes” the way Kreese did his generation back in 1984.

In the years after The Karate Kid came out, Zabka took on different acting roles and stepped behind the camera as a director to distance himself from Johnny. But in the 2010s, Zabka began to reembrace Johnny Lawrence and The Karate Kid legacy; he directed a video called “Sweep the Leg” for No More Kings that featured a caricature of himself as Johnny and Zabka guest-starred in How I Met Your Mother as himself in a Karate Kid themed episode. Zabka also enjoyed the popular fan theory that Daniel LaRusso was the real villain of The Karate Kid. All of this pop-culture cache helped mold Johnny’s current resurgence as the star of Cobra Kai. But part of the magic of Cobra Kai is seeing “loveable loser” Johnny Lawrence trying to better himself. Perhaps the series wouldn’t have worked as well, and Johnny may not have been quite as endearing, if he started off Cobra Kai as a successful real estate agent.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/cobra-kai-william-zabka-career-prediction-explained/

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