Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy.

That’s the boldface motto of Cobra Kai karate, painted on a wall in Johnny Lawrence’s Los Angeles dojo. But the sentiment also applies to Netflix’s strategy for rolling out the third season of the hit “Karate Kid” revival series.

The streamer recently announced that new episodes of “Cobra Kai,” originally slated for Jan. 8, would be bumped up to Jan. 1, 2021. Now fans can ring in the New Year with Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and their students, who are locked in what Daniel’s wife Amanda sagely calls a “mortal enemy karate dojo battle for the soul of the Valley.”

More karate drama and ’80s flashbacks to start 2021 off right? Don’t mind if we do. Beats going outside this time of year (unless you’re attempting Daniel’s crane kick, in which case you probably should). Besides, there are only so many Christmas movies you can watch before it’s Valentine’s Day. As Mr. Miyagi said, “Balance is key.”

“Cobra Kai” started out in 2018 as a sleeper hit on YouTube Premium (then YouTube Red) before making the jump to Netflix in August, where it became one of the most popular picks on the streaming service during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ‘80s revival sated the appetites of people who had already digested a perhaps alarming percentage of their content menus.

The significance of that fact is not lost on the creators of the show, three friends who grew up in New Jersey — like the Karate Kid himself.

“It’s been amazing,” says writer and executive producer Jon Hurwitz. “When we created this show, our goal was always for it to be on Netflix,” he tells NJ Advance Media in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles with fellow “Cobra Kai” creators Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald.

Students become the masters

Hurwitz and Schlossberg, known for writing the stoner comedy and New Jersey road movie “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” (2004), met as students at Randolph High School. Hurwitz met Heald, a Red Bank native, when they lived down the hall from one another at the University of Pennsylvania.

“‘Karate Kid’ was one of the first things that we bonded over,” says Hurwitz, 43. “Hayden (who attended the University of Chicago) used to come and visit us at Penn.”

When Heald (”Hot Tub Time Machine”) moved to Los Angeles a year after Hurwitz and Schlossberg, he lived down the block from the writing team.

As reboot culture flourished in film, TV and streaming entertainment, the writers returned to one of their early influences. What would it be like to revisit Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, the high school kids whose epic rivalry had become an emblem of the 1980s?

Ralph Macchio and William Zabka, now 59 and 55, are executive producers of “Cobra Kai” (along with Will Smith). They answered the call, taking up the respective mantles of Miyagi-Do Karate and Cobra Kai for a new generation. In the show, each sensei reports back to the same All Valley Karate Tournament where they had their final showdown in 1984.

Only this time, the script is somewhat flipped as Daniel, the respected owner of a car dealership, appears every bit the villain to down-and-out Johnny, who lives in the shadow of Daniel’s billboards and his own defeat at the foot of the Karate Kid.

Johnny has reached underdog status after failing at fatherhood, his job and the one relationship that mattered to him, back in high school (when Daniel “stole” his girlfriend, Ali, played by Elisabeth Shue). Having formerly resided in a wealthy area, he now lives in Reseda, home to Daniel and his mother in the movie.

The show is delivered in tightly written, highly binge-able 30-minute episodes that have just the right dash of after-school special. They take themselves seriously until they don’t.

As much as the show is about the clashes between Johnny and Daniel — characters created by “Karate Kid” writer Robert Mark Kamen — it’s also about Daniel’s daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser), Johnny’s son Robby (Tanner Buchanan) and the kids of West Valley High. Everyone is seemingly aligned with Johnny and Daniel’s karate dojos. Alliances are shifting in the wake of a huge rumble at the school that left Johnny’s student Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) in the hospital, unconscious. When he wakes up, doctors are unsure if the karate champion will regain the ability to walk.

From Jersey to California, ‘Karate Kid’-style

When Heald, Hurwitz and Schlossberg were pitching “Cobra Kai” in 2017, they had hopes for Netflix, but YouTube made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. It allowed them to film an entire season of the show without having the powers that be scrutinize a script. The first season premiered in 2018 and a second followed in in 2019.

After YouTube shifted its original programming roster to focus on user-generated and unscripted content, Hurwitz, Heald and Schlossberg knew that giving the series a new home on Netflix would pay off. The show had a dedicated audience, but they believed it could grow, especially considering how many people have seen “The Karate Kid.”

“The move to Netflix has been a dream come true in every way,” Hurwitz says. “It was surreal for us to see these two seasons that have been out there and available to the public for over a year or two suddenly coming out there as a new show to tens or hundreds of millions of people all over the world ... It’s felt nice to see the joy that it’s brought people, especially during these difficult times.”

Though they moved to Los Angeles a long time ago, the creators of “Cobra Kai” were proud to sprinkle a few references to the Garden State in the series. They do so through Daniel, whose journey from bullied Newark transplant to California karate champion is the backbone of the 1984 John Avildsen film that inspired the show.

“New Jersey’s baked into the story of the Karate Kid,” says Schlossberg, 42. “It was one of the things about the movie that was so fascinating to us as kids.

“Here you had Ralph Macchio — who reminded us of ourselves at the time — this underdog kid from New Jersey, going out to California. For us, we didn’t know what California was. We really learned California through ‘The Karate Kid.’ It was this place of sun and everybody seemed blond and everybody knew karate, and if you didn’t, you’d get your ass kicked. We have fun with that on the show. And who knows? Maybe someday Daniel’s character may revisit New Jersey.”

Daniel often brings up Newark on the show, and his slightly terrible cousin, Louie LaRusso Jr. (played by Bret Ernst, a Princeton native who grew up in Passaic), is given to saying things like “not for nothing,” “mozzarell stick” and “Jersey justice.”

Even Cobra Kai devotee Johnny Lawrence’s eating habits indirectly channel New Jersey. In his sad bachelor apartment, he is often seen frying up something that wants to be Taylor ham but isn’t.

“He doesn’t know what Taylor ham is,” Schlossberg says. “To him it’s just bologna. I think it’s probably not even Oscar Mayer, probably some generic store brand. But I love Taylor ham. Every time I go to New Jersey I’ll have a Taylor ham, egg and cheese sandwich and that’s something that you can’t get in LA. It’s one of my favorite things about New Jersey.”

Schlossberg and Hurwitz, who are also known for writing the 2012 “American Reunion” movie from the “American Pie” franchise, plumbed their high school memories to create Harold Lee and Kumar Patel, the stoner duo in the Harold and Kumar films.

Did they have any school beefs, karate or otherwise, that they could channel in the troubled hallways of West Valley High?

“Back in Randolph High School, Hayden and I were really cool kids in school,” Hurwitz says with a smile. “We met on the debate team. We did have a Jersey rivalry with the baddies from Ocean Township.”

“You’d be like, ‘Resolutions or no resolutions, you’re dead meat at the debate meet!’” Schlossberg muses. “We would talk about Billy Zapka (who plays Johnny Lawrence) all the time. Jon (Hurwitz) had this fingerless glove that he would occasionally wear, pretending to be that kind of ‘80s teen bully. So we were sort of joking about it back then.”

Tapping into 30 years of tension

For a show about a 37-year-old karate rivalry, the moments that Daniel and Johnny actually come to blows are few and far between.

“It’s the will they-won’t they of our show,” says Heald, 43. Like Hurwitz and Schlossberg, he put on his director hat for a bunch of episodes.

“‘Cheers’ had Sam and Diane and every show has its ‘Are these two characters going to hook up?’ On our show, it’s ‘Are these guys gonna have a rematch? Are they going to actually fight each other?’ There’s the Justice for Johnny crew out there that feels like the crane kick (Daniel’s decisive blow at the All Valley Tournament in ‘84) was actually an illegal move. That also fuels the people who say it was legal and he (Daniel) could kick your ass again.”

Any scene, fight or no, can prove electric with the two frenemies — and funnier than anyone might have expected. In the second season, Daniel and Johnny find themselves on dates at the same Mexican restaurant. Watching the former opponents try to make nice is just gold.

“You have so much history there in terms of their characters and in terms of these guys who have known each other for almost their entire lives,” Heald says. “What we’ve found is that putting them in a scene together is usually just hilarious because they’re on such opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they look at the world. You have Daniel’s frustration with Johnny being a fossil in so many ways. And you have Johnny’s frustration with the fact that Daniel has allowed himself to grow up and mature and become part of the 2021 world.”

Mix that faded machismo and teenage nostalgia with some new perspectives and you get part of what makes “Cobra Kai” tick.

In one scene, Daniel’s daughter Samantha, who started karate training with her father as a young child, laments how she’s viewed in a fight.

“It’s different when you’re a girl,” she says. “I mean, even if you win, you’re not cool or tough. I think you’re crazy.”

Daniel’s wife Amanda LaRusso, played by Phillipsburg’s Courtney Henggeler, always has a refreshing take on the karate chaos consuming her husband and daughter.

“Have the man-boys filled you in on the whole ‘mortal enemy karate dojo battle for the soul of the Valley’ thing?” she asks a guest star this season (if we reveal their identity, Netflix may send a trained assassin to our dojo).

“For us, we really view this show as a whole world of characters,” Schlossberg says. “It’s the people in Johnny and Daniel’s lives that their rivalry is affecting the most. We have a lot of fun with Amanda’s character, who, at the beginning of the season, had probably a vague understanding of Daniel’s life. Just viewed it like, ‘Oh, he won this karate tournament,’ didn’t know as much detail about all the drama. As she gets sucked into the story, she doesn’t quite understand it, thinks it’s ridiculous. She’s that outsider’s perspective. But then the more she gets sucked into it, it’s almost like she’s trapped in the ‘Twilight Zone.’”

That Twilight Zone is chock-full of ‘80s references. There’s even a guest performance from Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider this season. Coors Banquet-swilling Johnny lives aggressively in the past — he has decades-old magazine centerfolds and his favorite movies are “Iron Eagle” and “Iron Eagle II.” The only parts of his life that seem to keep him in the present are his students, like Miguel, and a budding romance with Miguel’s mother Carmen, played by Vanessa Rubio, an alum of Paramus Catholic High School.

For his part, Daniel gets lost in Miyagi memories after the 2011 death of his treasured mentor, played by Pat Morita, who died in 2005.

While the series is not a retread, nostalgia is the whole point. Like a high school reunion, most of the fun is just seeing the old gang show up. When Daniel travels to Okinawa, site of “The Karate Kid Part II” (1986), he meets up with his love interest from the movie, Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita), as well as Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), the fearsome fighter he once bested in a “fight to the death.”

However, it is John “Sweep the Leg” Kreese (Martin Kove), founder of Cobra Kai and dark lord of the Karate Kid Extended Universe, who goes under the magnifying glass this season. He’s a menace: a threat to Johnny, Daniel and anyone on the receiving end of his dangerous, unforgiving teachings.

“Cobra Kai,” like “The Karate Kid,” is about rising to the occasion and fighting back. But defeating the bully isn’t the end of the story. The show wants us to know that behind every bully — behind every Kreese — is another antagonist, another bully. As Yoda could tell you, fear begets anger. “Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

“No mercy” is Kreese’s constant refrain, both in 1984 and 2021. This season explores why he only believes in weak and strong, not good and bad. Flashbacks to his younger years and time in the Vietnam War explain much. In the present day, the spiky sensei thinks he can “melt this whole snowflake generation.”

Let him try.

“Cobra Kai” season three debuts at 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT Friday, Jan. 1, 2021 on Netflix. The first two seasons are available on Netflix and free on YouTube.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.