It does feel that the creators of Cobra Kai are trying to do as much as they can to flesh out The Karate Kid universe, but it also feels that by trying to bring up five different spinoff shows that they’re letting ambition drive them, not necessarily the love of the story. A lot of authors want to see the universe they create expand in a dozen different directions or more since the idea that one story can be told from many different perspectives is entirely real, but one has to wonder just how valuable every single perspective is going to be and which are going to be more dominant than others. A Kreese spinoff feels as though it might be good for a season or two in order to show just how he came to be the miserable, bitter person he’s been for so long, and to show how he and Terry Silver started Cobra Kai, but beyond that, it doesn’t sound like it could possibly last and still be interested since despite seeing his backstory, or at least part of it in season 3 of Cobra Kai, it does feel as though we were given enough to realize just why he’s so hardnosed when it comes to striking first and striking hard. He was put into a hellish situation where it was kill or be killed, and despite the fact that he and his squad had been saved, he took that lesson to heart and made a choice to rid himself of the last vestige of weakness that he had.
The trouble with Kreese though is that his story would be easy enough to write up with an entire history that came before his inclusion into The Karate Kid, but it also feels that it might continue to make us feel sorry for the guy when in truth he’s turned out to be the mega-villain that the story needed since turning Johnny or Daniel into the main villain never felt like a great option. The two former students, now turned sensei to their own dojo’s, are the protagonists of Cobra Kai at this point, which leaves Kreese as the unrepentant villain, and someone that will start calling in the troops to lend him the aid that he needs. It’s still believed that we’re going to see Terry Silver and hopefully Mike Barnes in the next season, but while Cobra Kai has an eventual endpoint, one that a lot of people can easily guess ends with Cobra Kai either going through a great deal of reform or being dismantled entirely, the spinoff series are already being planned with a great deal of excitement.
Another problem with a Kreese spinoff is that like many shows such as this, it’s easy enough to come up with a plot that would cover the entire thing, that being the fact that Kreese came back from Vietnam a very changed man, and became hardened, calculating, and fully ready to take on the world if it felt like trying to knock him down. That in turn could make relationships very hard for him to work with, apart from the one he shares with Terry Silver, which might be a bit one-sided and might even turn Terry into the psychopath he would become with just a few heavy nudges. But it would also attract those that feel weak, disenfranchised, and in need of some sort of control in their lives, which would be the perfect way to found Cobra Kai, and would eventually attract a young Johnny Lawrence. But the overall gist is that the man that returns from the military would be hard, cold, and ultimately self-serving since it’s been made obvious in the movies and in Cobra Kai that he doesn’t care about his students as much as he cares about his dojo and his methods. The students are tools, the dojo a place where his word is the law, and that’s all there is to it. Creating a series that is bent on showing him as a caring and ultimately vulnerable human being would be a little awkward after what’s been seen in Cobra Kai and The Karate Kid since it would indicate that at one time he might have actually tried to go back to being a decent person and that something had tipped him over the edge once again and allowed him to continue being the villain he became.
Kreese is actually better off as the bad guy in this scenario if only because he’s been so seriously hated since the original movie that people have identified him as one of the only villains that have never really repented. That’s why a Kreese series might be kind of counterproductive. But there’s obviously already an idea that’s being written out as of now, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
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