The new season “Cobra Kai” has finally been available on Netflix since yesterday September 9, 2022 – and since the episodes are compared to other series hits like “Game Of Thrones” or “Stranger Things’ turned out to be relatively short, many fans of the ‘Karate Kid’ series should have seen some of the new episodes by now. But already in the first episodes, a name keeps popping up that is ascribed great importance for the current events: Kim Sun-Yung. But who is that anyway?
Anyone who knows the “Karate Kid” films may have heard the name before, but may have forgotten it by now. Because with Kim Sun-Yung, a well-known character returns, so to speak, who was only known from stories. Nonetheless, his influence on the lives of Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), Terry Silver (Ian Thomas Griffith) and co. cannot be denied.
Both in the cinema films from the 80s and 90s as well as in the currently successful series offshoot on Netflix, we get to know various antagonists – including Terry Silver, John Kreese (Martin Kove) and their cronies. However, we never saw Kim Sun-Yung. And yet he is partly responsible for the decade-long karate war between Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai.
Then Kim Sun-Yung was a martial arts master who trained a certain George Turner in Tang Soo Do during the Korean War. And it was that George Turner years later who passed his knowledge on to Kreese and Silver – and she taught to fight without honor and without mercy. After all, the Cobra Kai motto is not for nothing: Strike hard. Strike first. No Mercy.
Sensei, known as Master Kim, learned the Korean equivalent of karate at a young age and eventually met with a lot of backlash from martial artists when he developed “The Way of the Fist” – a particularly brutal and unfair way to fight.
But it’s not just Sun-Yung’s spiritual heritage that lives on in “Cobra Kai”. Kim Da-Eun, played by Alicia Hannah-Kim, is a blood relative of his in the service of Cobra Kai: In season 5 of “Cobra Kai” we see his granddaughter as an instructor in Terry Silver’s dojo.
