The origin story of Cobra Kai—you might know it as the biggest show in the world right now—begins, more or less, about five years ago in an undisclosed Mexican restaurant. The table: Longtime best friends Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz, and Josh Heald, pitching their childhood hero, William Zabka, on a Karate Kid spinoff. The pitch: A TV series flipping the perspective of the beloved trilogy from the ’80s. Turns out? Danny LaRusso was the bully this whole time, stealing Johnny Lawrence’s girlfriend and emasculating him to the point where he would never be able to get on with his life. “His mind was so blown and he needed to hear our pitch probably two or three times before he sunk in what we were saying to him,” Heald says. “He kept sending away the waiter, so we just ate three or four baskets of chips in the course of an hour and a half before we finally ordered our lunch.” Lo and behold, Cobra Kai landed on YouTube Red in 2018 to glowing reviews. The trio of Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald somehow managed to roast the ’80s and its lovable, Johnny Lawrence-esque meatheads, while introducing a brand-new cast of crane-kicking heroes and villains. In the summer of 2020—AKA, when we were all sitting around our TVs—Cobra Kai found a new home at Netflix, with its nearly 200 million subscribers. It promptly blew the hell up. Suddenly? Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald, who grew up Karate Kid buffs and had been thinking… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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