Is there anything worse than a sleazy used car salesman with a bad gimmick? Based on this piece of viral marketing from the upcoming YouTube Red series Cobra Kai–which follows the events of Karate Kid–the answer is a clear no.
Instead of a trailer, viewers are treated to a 30-second commercial for Daniel LaRusso’s (Ralph Macchio) car dealership. In the short clip, he literally karate chops prices and promises a free bonsai tree to every customer that buys a car.
That’s sort of ridiculous on a couple of levels. Firstly, if you’re going to reward your customers for spending $20,000, maybe have something a little more substantial than a tree you can buy for as little as 10 bucks. The alternative is to not give them a gift, which would be fine. More importantly, though, is that Daniel has taken everything he learned from Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), including the care and treatment of bonsai trees, and turned it into a marketing tactic. This isn’t why Miyagi took him on as a student in Karate Kid.
It’s understandable that Daniel would take the things in his life to craft a persona around when running his business, but this just feels kind of dirty. Couple that with how mean he is to Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) in an earlier trailer for Cobra Kai, and it certainly seems like Daniel is the villain of this story.
Then again, this is Johnny and the returning Cobra Kai dojo we’re talking about. Perhaps neither of them is the hero or villain, but instead, they have to save each other. Whatever the case, if Cobra Kai was trying to put Daniel in a bad light ahead of the series premiere, they’re doing a fantastic job. And, honestly, that makes the prospect of this series all the more exciting.
Cobra Kai premieres May 2 on YouTube Red. If you can’t wait that long, the first two episodes will be screened on April 25 along with the original Karate Kid movie as part of a Fathom Event.