My guess would be that YouTube Red (and Google) parent Alphabet coughed up a bunch of money to get this made. One thing I wondered about was why IP rights holder and Columbia Pictures owner Sony Pictures Entertainment didn’t try to put “Cobra Kai” on its Crackle streaming service. YouTube Red, which wants to enter the rarified realm of streaming TV leaders Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, footed the bill to produce 10 under-30 minute episodes of “Cobra Kai,” which explores the relationship between the protagonist and antagonist from 1984’s “The Karate Kid,” by far the first (and best) of a Columbia Pictures movie franchise that begat more three more installments, a TV cartoon version and one reboot in 2010 starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith) that was co-produced by Overbrook Entertainment, Jaden’s dad’s company. I intend to cancel it since I don’t need another streaming subscription.) (FYI, I signed up for the 30-day free trial to watch this. You might think it’d be really bad - but “Star Trek Continues” proved to be surprisingly good - maybe because I wasn’t expecting too much.Īlso on YouTube - or to be more precise, YouTube Red (the $10/month subscription version) - is a show that could also be considered a resurrection: “Cobra Kai,” which debuted for streaming and binge-watching on May 2. (Rights holder Paramount Pictures wisely gave the team behind “Star Trek Continues” permission to produce it as long as they didn’t make a profit.) Not only that, this dedicated group re-created not just the sets and costumes, but more importantly the spirit of the original’s exploration of larger social themes and issues via the medium of science fiction. Scott (played by James Doohan’s son) and Ensign Chekhov. The best examples might be Paramount’s recent “Star Trek” movies and the fan-created “Star Trek Continues.” I’m lukewarm on the big-screen versions but in the latter, fan actors of the original 1960s series took over the roles of Capt. There’s another subcategory in which a defunct legacy TV show gets remade with different actors slipping into the shoes of the property’s characters. In the reboot subcategory, there’s CBS’ upcoming “Magnum P.I.,” the first “reimagined” episode of which is directed by the ever-slick Justin Lin, with Jay Hernandez playing private investigator Thomas Magnum, a role originally played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck, who, bringing it back to Harrison Ford, had been considered to play Indiana Jones in the 1982 movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark” but couldn’t due to his TV obligations. On TV, there are revivals of long-defunct shows, examples of which include ABC’s “Roseanne,” NBC’s “Will & Grace” and Fox’s “The X-Files.” Those shows include original cast members (no doubt happy for a steady paycheck) and have met with varying levels of success. Hitting movie theaters now, for example, is Disney’s “Solo,” which revisits the “Star Wars” character Han Solo in the (light) years before meeting Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and so on, with a younger actor taking over that role from Harrison Ford. You may have noticed, what was old is new - and I’m not just referring to, say, hipsters who insist on feeding their musical appetites via vinyl LPs on turntables (What do those words mean, grandpa?) vs.
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