Commentary: ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ And ‘Cobra Kai’ Tackle Legacies Differently
by Frank Martin
With nostalgia fueling scores of reboots and long-awaited sequels, questions of how much connection these stories should have to the originals arise. It’s a delicate balance between creating new material and revisiting the old. Two great examples of how to handle this subject differently are Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Netflix series Cobra Kai. Although, on the surface, both of these franchises are wildly different and executed their revivals in different matters, at their core, they are both about revisiting older story lines with older characters and giving them fresh life. They also utilize flashbacks in completely different ways.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is the third installment of Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe starring Tom Holland. But any casual Spider-Man fan is familiar with the installments that came before it from stars Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. Their characters make new appearances in No Way Home, where events from their films are referenced in great detail. However, footage from those movies is never shown, forcing the audience to rely on their own memory to bring them up to speed. This is in contrast to Cobra Kai, which continues the same storyline from the original Karate Kid films, released in the 1980s and ’90s. Older characters — such as The Karate Kid Part III‘s Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) and Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan) — make return appearances, and unlike No Way Home, the show uses archival footage from those films extensively to remind audiences what happened between these characters years earlier.
Even though both No Way Home and Cobra Kai took different approaches to their legacy characters, it’s interesting to see how each of them made the right decision for different factors. First off, the earlier Spider-Man films are nowhere near as old as the Karate Kid movies. Their existence is still fresh in the public consciousness, so the reminder of what happens isn’t as pertinent. But also, tone has to be taken into consideration. No Way Home is darker and more grounded than Cobra Kai, which has a very ’80s feel to it. This allows the show to be a lot more loose with its stylistic choices. So inserting quick flashbacks when appropriate works much better than it would in a Spider-Man film.
Cobra Kai is now streaming on Netflix.
