SPOILER Magazine NYE 2020

OUR TEAM Editor-in-Chief Galaxy Print Editor Art Director Sara Hope Kent Klarks Design and illustration Supervisor Ronald Garcia Design Manager Zerologhy Copy Editor Ethan Brehm Charles Willington

Staff Writers The Greatest Writing Team in Our Universe Matthew Mclachlan Vanessa Bellew Robert Napolitano David Grand Phuong Pham Natalie Reade Michael Bernardi Ethan Brehm Moses Gamer Social Media Manager Thor the all mighty Advertising Ads@SpoilerMagazine.com Sponsorship sponsorship@SpoilerMagazine.com Press Please send all press releases to: press@SpoilerMagazine.com Please send all review material to: review@SpoilerMagazine.com Subscriptions For all subscription enquiries please contact: sub@SpoilerMagazine.com Check out our website for details on how to get our DIGITAL EDITION Circulation Do you want this magazine at your local book store, comic book hangout, toy shop, or anywhere else for that matter? Let us know, we can make it happen. circulation@SpoilerMagazine.com SPOILER Magazine is published by Spoiler Magazine Publishing. Nothing in this magazine can be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. Whilst every effort is made to ensure all information in the magazine is correct, details maybe subject to change. All photographic material is copyright to the relevant owner and appears with their kind permission. Visuals are used in a review context and no copyright infringement is intended. All rights reserved.

SPOILER Magazine is printed in the USA SPOILER Magazine

INSIDE OUR y UNIVERSE x a l a

by G Welcome to SPOILER,

We did it! We got to the end of 2020. If we learned anything from this year it’s that we missed hugs and handshakes way more than we thought we did.

Trust me, 2021 is going to be a much better year. And hopefully with this vaccine coming out, we’ll be able to return back to normalcy soon and all be able to see each other again at a convention near you. So make sure you stop by our booth when you’re there.

According to our predictions, 2021 is also going to be an amazing year for movies and TV. Think of all the highly-anticipated projects that were already going to be released this upcoming year, PLUS all of the ones from this past year that got delayed.

It’s going to end up being so much greatness that we won’t know what to do with ourselves.

This issue is our New Year’s Special so it’s a tad bit shorter. However, we’ve still got some nice surprises for you inside. We’re so excited to have Martin Kove on our cover. He’s a living legend, especially for us kids of the ‘80s, and it was so refreshing to be able to talk to him and get inspired and pumped up.

Again, I can’t say enough about our team. They’ve worked on a much shorter schedule this time around and amidst all the hustle and bustle that comes with this time of year, no less.

Get ready for what’s to come from SPO!LER in 2021. We plan to begin actual print distribution in the next couple of months (!), so you’ll be able to get the magazine shipped directly to your house, or be able to visit comic shops and bookstores and actually see the magazine on the shelf, finally able to collect what we view as our mini works of art. Heck, grab two of them while you’re at it: one to display and one to read.

Also, the launching of our brand new website is achingly close, so subscribe on our current landing page and you’ll be the first to know when it goes up!

Thank you, as always, for all of your incredible love and support. We truly wouldn’t be here without each and every one of you.

Happy New Year to you all! Here’s to a (much) better 2021!

I Love You All...

Galaxy

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@ComicConRadio NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

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table of contents

FEATURES

44 martin kove

SPOILER MAGAZINE TABLE OF CONTENTS

the watch

58 eleanor matsuura

34 the Karate kid and cobra kai universe

12 The Holiday Movies That Made Us

the base

18 at the movies

70 an ode to 2021

74 comic book review www.spoilermagazine.com | Follow us on Instagram: @SpoilerMedia

March 2020 |

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roger ebert once said, “i know that to get a movie made is a small miracle.”

However, most of us don’t even stop to think about what goes into making the movies that have impacted our lives the most. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know. Filmmaker Brian Volk-Weiss has done just that with his newest Netflix series The Movies That Made Us, which itself is a spinoff of his highly successful The Toys That Made Us. For the first run of the series, Volk-Weiss picked four popular movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s and made little 45-minute documentaries for each one, interviewing cast and crew to find out the backstories of these classics, from conception to release, and beyond.

Back by popular demand, Volk-Weiss has taken his show about movies and put a theme on it this time around.

Titled The Holiday Movies That Made Us, this “second season” focuses on a pair of yuletide classics. While the first series featured four episodes, covering the likes of Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, and Die Hard, the follow-up features only two films, but they’re heavy hitters.

Christmas time stirs up feelings of nostalgia like few things can, so when we’re talking about a pair of holiday

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The Holiday Movies That Made Us/Netflix/Brian Volk-Weiss/Elf/New Line Cinema/The Nightmare Before Christmas/Tim Burton/Disney

BY robert napolitano and Ethan Brehm

classics like Elf and The Nightmare Before Christmas, it’s sure to bring up some (hopefully) good memories.

Over the years both of these movies have become such staples in pop culture that even people who don’t celebrate Christmas tend to enjoy them.

In fact, 2003’s Elf was written by David Berenbaum, who is of Jewish upbringing. Inspired by the loss of his dad at such a young age, along with his love for Christmas movies, Elf was a personal film for him. Perfectly bridging the gap between laugh-outloud comedy and heartfelt Christmas glee, the movie became a timeless classic, but this was by design.

Informed by the stop-motion aesthetic of the Rankin/Bass films from the ‘60s, Berenbaum, director Jon Favreau, and the rest of the team behind Elf studied Christmas movies and what made them so special. Whether you’re in the snow or in the heat, alone or with family, you can find a piece of Christmas spirit that may be absent elsewhere, as watching these films allows you to live vicariously through the characters on your movie screen. It can be Christmastime anywhere in the world, if only in your own

living room.

And this mindset proved to be a success. The unassuming Christmas comedy topped the box office in only its second week, eventually earning over $200 million.

On the flip side of things is 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

While both movies are Christmas classics in their own way, the two productions couldn’t have been more different. As the production of Elf seemed to consist of a team of individuals who all magically possessed the same exact vision, the people behind the scenes on Nightmare didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

In fact, there was so much animosity about a variety of things that the tensions almost overshadowed the

film itself. You might be able to attribute this to the grueling and remote nature of assembling an animated movie, however, it seems like those involved still have a lot of opinions about the production all these years later.

The two films serve as a constant counterpoint to one another (although both include stop-motion, strangely enough). One is a fun-loving paradigm of a Christmas tale that became massively popular upon its release, and the other a Halloween/ Christmas fusion musical that spoke to outcasts, is still one of the most unique films of all time, barely broke even at the box office, yet found an outrageous cult following throughout the years to where Jack and Sally are two of the most tattooed fictional characters that ever existed.

We learn that success can be found in a multitude of ways, from watching your vision come to life on screen to simply being allowed to do what you love for a living. But for

both movies, it’s clear that bringing a project to fruition and obtaining this kind of enduring legacy has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. It’s so interesting to hear about iconic movies that almost never happened, if it weren’t for people who believed in these projects and a great deal of serendipity—a Christmas miracle perhaps.

Highly informative if you’re into any aspect of the filmmaking business, The Holiday Movies That Made Us goes into great detail on the things that went into making these classics from the side of the camera we don’t see on the big screen with fantastic insight from the unsung heroes behind the scenes. These may not be the famous faces synonymous with these films, but every single person interviewed is an integral part of what’s made these movies so beloved all these years later.

The Netflix series is also filled with fun facts for people with even the least amount of interest in what goes on behind the scenes. For instance, studios turned down Elf left and right because they didn’t think Will Ferrell, who at the time was basically only known for SNL and some bit parts, could be the face of a movie.

The iconic actor eventually became the most bankable comedian on the face of the earth, but without the risks taken by the producers on Elf, it would have been a different story.

We also learn that, unlike most other musicals, the early issues NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

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The Holiday Movies That Made Us/Netflix/Brian Volk-Weiss/Elf/New Line Cinema/The Nightmare Before Christmas/Tim Burton/Disney

with the script on The Nightmare Before Christmas urged producer Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman to go ahead and come up with the songs first. The script, eventually written by Elfman’s thengirlfriend Caroline Thompson, was then built around these preexisting lyrics, which turned out to be semiautobiographical for Elfman.

While the Netflix show is totally focused on these two movies, Volk-Weiss is a master at creating narratives all of his own within each episode. With callbacks and subtle symbolism dropped here and there, the writer/director/producer has his hands all over these episodes, exhuming the essence of the backstories and finding the poeticism of each of these films, able to showcase them in all their glory. You truly wouldn’t want these stories in the hands of anybody else.

The Holiday Movies That Made Us contains the same cheeky, off-kilter humor, and the same sly and clever editing that made Volk-Weiss’ first two series so successful. And with his third hit, the creator has not only proven to be a master storyteller, but able to provide consistency and even improve his game with each new outing.

Not often do we get to watch documentaries on our favorite mov-

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ies—that is unless they’ve built up a legacy over decades—with the type of perspective that Volk-Weiss maintains (especially with something as recent as Elf). But the showrunner continues to validate our love for these films and what they’ve meant to us all these years later. Just because they’re not older than us and haven’t won a plethora of awards doesn’t mean they don’t speak to us just the same.

The two-part series hit Netflix on December 1st with great reviews.

And now having built up quite the resume, it’ll be exciting to see what the “That Made Us” series brings next. As long as Volk-Weiss and his team are leading the way, we know it’ll be great.

Watch The Holiday Movies That Made Us on Netflix!

SPOILER MAGAZINE

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(VOD)

Based on a 2013 novel by Larry Watson, Let Him Go stars Diane Lane as Margaret Blackledge, a hopelessly loving, yet flawed grandmother who will stop at nothing to rescue her 3-year-old grandson and widowed daughter-in-law, Lorna (Kayli Carter), from the clutches of the young woman’s new husband and his psychotic family. Costner plays the strong, silent type—an enigmatic, yet very supportive husband who doesn’t say much unless he absolutely needs to.

Costner and Lane have a natural chemistry and actually feel like an old married couple. They bicker about small things, but maintain a level of understanding and tolerance for the more paramount.

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Directed by: Thomas Bezucha Cast: Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Lesley Manville

Let Him Go/Focus Features

Let Him Go

Where other films of this grim nature relish in the traces of hope found throughout their story, Let Him Go has a relentlessly pessimistic outlook to a fault, from lines about how life is just a stack of disappointments and loss to the characters’ belief that there is no hereafter.

Even Straw Dogs has faith-filled undercurrents. But no, at its absolute silver-lining-est, Thomas Bezucha’s neo-Western reminds us how fatalistic it really feels.

Besides the fact that the novel takes place during the mid-century, there’s no real reason to set the film in the 1960s other than to make it easier to write without worrying about plot

holes arising from more modern solutions. It would undoubtedly be too sleek with cell phones and computerized background checks. Here we can rely on Guy Godfree’s stunning cinematography to appeal to our aesthetic preferences.

Much like Terrence Malick in his 1973 debut, Badlands, or even Alexander Payne with

his maudlin 2011 feature, The Descendants, Bezucha makes the most of his picturesque setting and uses it to contrast the depressing and heart-wrenching events depicted. Taking place in Montana and North Dakota (but filmed in Calgary), the film all but exploits its beautiful mountainous scenery to create emotion and mood to where the vacant panoramas and windy roads almost act as characters themselves.

Let Him Go is about the sacrifices we make for those we love and the responsibilities and duties we take on because of that love—whether we like it or not.

The most powerful part of this story isn’t the sacrifice these grandparents make to retrieve their grandson, but the obligation they have to rescue their

daughter-in-law simply because their late son chose her as his life partner. And that kind of love isn’t always easy. It’s loyalty driving love rather than love driving loyalty. Margaret and Lorna don’t always see eye to eye, yet she ultimately offers her refuge and a roof over her head indefinitely.

Bezucha, who also pens the script, provides us with engaging storyboarding under concise vision, but the dialogue is hit or miss. The banter is either perfectly succinct or incisively wordy. There’s no in between.

At 114 minutes, he could have trimmed some of the fat.

Let Him Go never feels mechanical, instead there’s a cleanliness to the minimalist plot.

However, sometimes there’s almost a frustrating urge to expand this story to be bigger than it is. There are no real secrets lying underneath; no twists or turns; no “more than meets the eye” developments. Fortunately the mostly linear narrative is still able to build this world and give us background in an engaging way through fairly conventional flashbacks. Despite its lazy pace, this slow-burn Western strings you along with the promise of a compelling mystery. And while it doesn’t quite give us a worthy reveal, it delivers in a different sort of way.

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(netflix)

Directed by: Steven Brill Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Julie Bowen

It may be easy to write off Adam Sandler’s newest endeavor as more of the same usual schtick, because Hubie Halloween isn’t unlike the Adam Sandler we’ve been watching for the past three decades. However, the Netflix comedy also hearkens back to the Sandler of old, recalling the most congruous visions of the actor’s early resume, and even surpassing a few of those in certain ways. The comedian could have easily rested on his project’s autumnal atmosphere and festive set design, but happened to piece together one heck of a story that actually lives up to the fun setting.

Sandler plays Hubie Dubois, a bike-riding neighborhood watchman living in Salem, Massachusetts who’s obsessed with Halloween. The entire community knows Hubie and he’s the butt of everyone’s jokes.

Each year during the holiday, he rides around and voluntarily patrols the town while people

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bully him and perennially throw objects at his head, which he’s become artfully good at avoiding…with the help of his Swiss Army Thermos.

A thorn in the side of local law enforcement, Hubie has become the town weirdo who cried wolf, running to the police whenever he finds a diaper in the lake or simply if the local librarian is not acting like herself. Needless to say, they’ve all stopped taking him seriously.

Although this year, for once, there are several threats on Halloween night. People are

Hubie Halloween/Netflix/Happy Madison/Adam Sandler

hubie halloween

going missing and Hubie has several potential culprits in mind. For one, he suspects Steve Buscemi of being a werewolf. And then there’s the resident of the local insane asylum who has recently escaped. However, there may be someone or something else lurking in the shadows.

Sandler and his co-writer Tim Herlihy, along with director Steven Brill, craftily build up this world within this small town. We meet individuals who play small roles in a story that all takes place over the course of one night. We learn about the dynamics between Hubie and his old classmates from school, and get introduced to plenty of town locals. Sandler is infamous for recruiting his friends to accompany him in goofing off on screen, but this time, the intent behind the project feels more earnest, as he not only assembles his best assortment of actors and talents in a long time, but utilizes them all extremely well, including, to name a few, Kenan Thompson, Ben Stiller, and

George Wallace, all with small, but significant roles.

Hubie lives with his elderly mother (June Squibb), who wears shirts with inappropriate phrases that she finds at thrift stores, but doesn’t know what they mean. She’s the only person who treats Hubie with love and respect. That is, until he meets Violet Valentine (Julie Bowen), his old classmate who he’s been in love with for years.

Violet, once the most popular girl in school, admires Hubie for his genuine kindness and unselfish attitude, and for the fact that he never lets all the relentless bullying get to him or

harden his heart. Admittedly, it is pretty admirable.

There’s a clarity that Sandler is operating with when composing his script, along with Herlihy, who actually co-wrote Sandler’s most popular ‘90s films, and his story doesn’t rely solely on his typical in-joke approach.

For the first time in a while, his gags actually serve as garnish to a smart plot, allowing the audience to better appreciate them, rather than being used to overcompensate for a lack of a

concise vision. The story is much more than just a clever hook. It’s a fully developed premise.

The film definitely plays around with some serious horror elements, and never lets the comedy at the forefront undermine the sensations it’s trying to evoke.

There are some spine-tingling moments, yet somehow they’re balanced really well amongst the humorous deluge. Like most of the comedian’s fare, the jokes are definitely hit or miss, with no predictable pattern whatsoever, but this time around, there are a lot more successes than failures.

I found myself laughing much more than I typically do with his recent outings. That, or it was just easier to relax without becoming distracted by poorly thought-out story elements. Despite the intricate plot revolving around a giant, twisted mystery, Sandler makes sure the storytelling doesn’t get muddled.

Not often—if ever—are Sandler’s productions tinged with nostalgia, or simply an appreciation of film as a whole, but Hubie Halloween is imbued, if not grounded, with a sense of reminiscence; a longing for a more classic

and celebrated era of movie-making, with a stronghold on its influences—undoubtedly films Sandler, himself, grew up on. Nods range anywhere from John Carpenter’s Halloween to George Lucas’ American Graffiti, with an especially memorable parallel to the latter’s radio station sequence featuring a cameo from Woflman Jack. Here, Wolfman Jack is replaced with Shaquille O’Neal, but the seven-footer still gives our hero the kind of counsel he needs at a pivotal point in the movie.

Perhaps it’s that very love and admiration that’s helped catalyze Sandler’s story this time around. Details seem fleshed out and the plot seems to have been tailored with much love and care. The film is the furthest thing from autobiographical, yet it possesses such a personal touch that should resonate with any viewer who has even tangentially followed Sandler’s career up to this point.

There are plenty of doses of weirdness, but Sandler and company’s absurdities blend well with the darker atmosphere to give Hubie Halloween a sort of fairytale quality with a uniquely surreal tone that differs greatly from anything else the actor has ever put out, equipped with a poignant and heartfelt fable at the center of it all.

Hubie Halloween is Sandler’s cleanest and most inspired comedy film in nearly two decades. And if nothing else, it’s a ton of fun. Fans of the comedian’s antics will undoubtedly find it sneaking towards the top of their list of favorites from recent years, but even more impressively, this one will actually be accessible to and resonate with those outside the fringes.

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Fatman

(VOD)

Traditionally, Christmas movies that feature Santa Claus are aimed directly at children and frequently revolve around the actual belief in Santa, himself. Or it’s at least a topic of discussion.

But Eshom and Ian Nelms’ R-rated action/comedy Fatman actually directs itself ONLY at adults— who, in every Christmas movie ever, have already stopped believing in Kris Kringle years ago—and leaves behind the usual believability in question. It’s essentially a movie for adults but with similar attitudes about Santa as a kids movie would have. Because of this, Fatman takes on a comic book movie quality, where a story that’s usually directed towards younger audiences is now given a maturity and a certain level of

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verisimilitude, but not enough that you don’t still ask questions.

And instead of Santa Claus being like…well, Santa Claus…he’s treated more like Batman. Everyone knows he exists, but some people choose not to accept his importance in society.

At its best, Fatman feels like something totally different than anything else you’ve ever seen before, not only utilizing an insanely bonkers and innately self-serious premise, but underscoring it with a tongue-in-cheek humor that alternates between perfectly fitting and completely out of place, yet always welcomed.

Chris Cringle (Mel Gibson) is seeing a decline in business. He and his wife, Ruth (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), run their Christmas toy factory operation in a classified location. Typically, the US government gives them a subsidization to make and deliver presents each year in order to keep the Christmas spirit alive

Fatman/Saban Films

Directed by: Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms Cast: Mel Gibson, Walton Goggins, Marianne Jean-Baptiste

in the country. The economy significantly benefits from Christmas, so no Santa could very well mean a downward trend for the population’s spending each season.

However, this year Santa may be forced to take on a new assignment in order to make ends meet. The number of good kids each year is going down, which means he’s making less presents and thus losing money. And he’s not compromising his morals to give gifts to rotten children. Instead, he’s offered a deal by the government for him and his elves to begin producing new components for the military instead. After some deliberation, he decides to accept.

Christmas drives the economy of our country more than anything else, yet Santa has become a mockery and a perversion throughout the years. The holiday has just turned into an excuse to sell stuff (no doubt because of the entitlement cultivated from the idea of Santa itself, although that was never his intent). If Christmas is the biggest money-driver in the world, then why is the number of bad kids rising higher and higher each year?

There’s one bad kid in particular, Billy Wenan (Chance Hurstfield), a spoiled rich brat who thinks the world owes him everything. He writes a letter to Santa but only receives a lump of coal in his stocking. Enraged, Billy hires a hitman, Jonathan Miller (Walton Goggins), to find Santa and kill him. A large chunk of the film is spent on Jonathan following clues and tracking down Santa, which is probably the best part of the story and should be a movie entirely of its own.

Jonathan has his own bone to pick with Santa. As a kid, Santa

didn’t give him what he wanted either, so now he spends his life collecting toys made in the “North Pole,” paying other people for their own childhood mementos. Why? We literally never find out, nor do we explore this concept as much as we would like to.

The Nelms brothers love to reveal things to us slowly, but there’s not always a rhyme or reason to the strategy. Sometimes they work, but others feel gratuitous. We can’t tell if the directors are simply getting carried away with withholding information, or they’re withholding information because they don’t have that much to tell us. We don’t see the elves right away. We don’t find out what’s driving the hit man’s anger until late in the film. We’re not even told that the woman talking to Santa is actually his wife until 30 minutes in.

But why? There seems to be so much missing from this story that perhaps they felt the audience needed some-

workshop much too easily. There is no surveillance system set up and apparently these soldiers aren’t wearing bulletproof vests. Also how is this the first year Billy has received coal in his stocking? He’s literally the worst child in existence, so why doesn’t he see this coming?

When something is grounded in realism, we start needing answers.

In something like Star Wars, for instance, we don’t need answers— we just accept certain realities. But here, the basis for all the magic and

thing to hang on to; some questions to ask themselves. But at times it becomes frustrating.

And by the end, there are a lot of loose ends. At one point two US liaison agents approach Santa and threaten to withhold his payment if he doesn’t extend his deal, but we never see any conclusion with this. What’s the future of Santa’s operation? Does Billy get any sort of real world punishment for his heinous crimes? And what did he originally ask for in his letter?

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extraneous details doesn’t get covered in the same way.

Interestingly enough, Fatman isn’t just a high concept novelty movie, but serves as a think piece as well. Santa has become disenchanted by the holiday and is currently trying to rekindle his own Christmas spirit. He’s beginning to see how Christmas spirit has increasingly been exploited, ultimately turning into a mask for corporatism and commercialization. It’s a shame these ideas aren’t developed more. Unfortunately, the film gets a little carried away by its own absurdity, quickly realizing it’s not really as interested

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in the poignancy as it thought it was. The filmmakers deviate from these early themes, becoming more fixated on the idea of this “violent and crazy” Santa movie instead. The commentary is left at that.

This movie has to have the highest body count of any movie where you don’t actually see anything vio-

B-

Fatman/Saban Films/Run/Hulu/Lionsgate/Mank/Netflix/Freaky/Blumhouse/Universal/Blow Out/Orion Pictures/Brian De Palma

lent happen on screen. For some reason Fatman tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but with a premise this ludicrous, you just wish that it would have gotten even more extreme. There are lots of cutaways prior to the acts of violence and a lot less Christmas puns and Easter eggs than there probably should be.

Fatman takes a stubbornly realistic approach as a Christmas film that never shows us any of the usual Santa magic. All the elements are there—the reindeer, the sled, the elves—but we never see any of them in action. We don’t see reindeer flying or the elves actually making toys. And that’s okay, but as an audience, we crave more odd instances like this, which we never get.

While the mishmash tone is oddly pleasing, there’s a lot left to explore in Fatman, a high concept film that relishes in simplicity yet doesn’t really have a position to do so. A realistic R-rated movie about Santa Claus comes around once in a lifetime, so audiences don’t want to feel like the concept is wasted.

Fatman is a lot of fun, but much of that has to do with the promise of something great. The promise that was only partially fulfilled.

s movie e h t t a

Other Notable Releases run (VOD)

Blow Out (1981)

A Mank (netflix)

A Blow Out/Orion Pictures/Brian De Palma/Freaked/20th Century Studios

Freaky (VOD)

B

Directed by: Brian De Palma Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller Blow Out is beloved by cineastes and cinephiles alike, celebrating the filmmaking process while also satirizing certain elements of it, especially early on. It speaks to the arguably misguided seriousness that goes into schlocky B-movies, but Blow Out is anything but a B-movie.

This one is near-perfect.

John Travolta plays Jack, a sound technician for low-budget horror movies, who’s out recording some natural sound effects for a production he’s working on when he hears a gunshot followed by a tire blow out.

A nearby car careens into the lake and starts to sink. Jack dives into the water to save the passengers. He sees a woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), who’s still alive, and the governor, who’s already dead.

Jack begins to analyze the sound recording he picked up.

Some government officials secretly tell him not to tell anybody about the woman in the car, since it wasn’t the governor’s wife. Meanwhile, the police don’t believe there was any sort of foul play—just a typical tire blow out—and won’t listen to anything Jack has to say about the gunshot.

Things get complicated when a man named Karp (Dennis Franz) sells a video tape of the accident to local media outlets, claiming there wasn’t anybody else in the car. Since Jack knows otherwise, he tries to track down Karp and find out why he’s hiding the truth, while also learning some startling secrets about Sally.

The film is heavily inspired

by Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic 1966 film Blow-Up, which follows a photographer as he tries to solve a murder by obsessively looking at the same photograph over and over (and over) again. Photographs never change, but they can tell a bigger story, even if that’s not always the photographer’s intention.

In Blow Out, the still photography medium is changed to motion pictures to double down on the idea of perception versus reality. Just because we don’t see an occurrence doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur. This concept is furthered by relating it to conspiracies and how people can’t possibly believe the possiNYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

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bility of improbable events, and how improbabilities can often fly under the radar for that very reason. Much like a movie, where the audience is so reliant only on what they can see in the frame, society has a difficult time doing the same. If things don’t make sense or can’t be seen, they can’t happen.

At times, Blow Out almost makes TOO much sense. Objectively more accessible than its progenitor—especially by today’s standards—and far less unconventional in its structure, the movie still remains experimental in its composition and technique. De Palma’s style is perfect for this project. His famous long pans and oneshots turn the camera into another character itself, keeping an awareness of the fact that events happen whether or not the protagonists are privy to them. The first time we deviate from Jack’s perspective, we are caught off guard, but then realize this movie is aiming for a different goal entirely.

Blow Out remains grounded in humanity and doesn’t succumb to the events depicted, which are outrageous, as many conspiracies are by nature. More than any movie I’ve seen in a long time, I found myself rooting for the main character, not because I was manipulated to do so by the usual tactics, but because

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Jack is such a likable person. We’re instantly drawn into this guy’s integrity. He’s earnest and makes the right choices. He’s about as perfect of a character as you can be without becoming saintly. Credit goes to the sharp writing by De Palma in making him so admirable—we know who he is right away—but also to Travolta for really grabbing hold of his character and drawing out every last ounce of empathy from the audience. This is truly one of his best performances ever.

There’s a perfect touch of a love story between Jack and Sally. Sally, who works out of desperation and winds up getting involved in this seedy business, grows on us over the course of the movie, credit to Allen who delivers an eloquently nuanced performance. De Palma really draws the line in the sand between her character and a guy like our actual antagonist, Burke (John Lithgow), or even Karp.

Blow Out is a unique movie with an equally brilliant script that lacks very many flaws at all, and ones that are inconsequential to say the least.

The twists don’t necessarily shock as much now as they probably did back then, but the way everything is compiled together garners intrigue more than anything else; a poignant look at how a conspiracy, while starting out small, gets brushed off until it snowballs to where the details are so ridiculous that nobody can possibly believe it’s true at all.

Ultimately, this is a film about the filmmaking process. It speaks to the importance of film—no, the responsibility of film—to inform, and the power it has with its unique scope and deliberate perspective, and what it chooses to do with those things.

a

Freaked (1993)

Freaked/20th Century Studios

Directed by: Tom Stern, Alex Winter Cast: Brooke Shields, William Sadler, Eduardo Ricard There are some movies so weird that it’s a wonder how they got mainstream distribution, but every once in a while one slips through the cracks for whatever reason. 1993’s bizarro black comedy Freaked benefitted from being a carryover of a show on MTV, The Idiot Box (which, itself, lasted only 6 episodes as the creators ceased production to make this movie).

Joe Roth, the head of the studio at 20th Century Fox at the time, loved the idea for the film: three friends stumble across a freak show in the middle of nowhere where a mad scientist is using a banned fertilizer to make his own mutant freaks. Fox even released merchandise to back the project, which included action figures, a comic book series, and a novelization.

Roth, perhaps naive to the actual tone of the film he was green-lighting, was eventually fired and replaced by Peter Chernin, who detested the whole idea. He quickly cut costs to the already $12 million allocation. He also only allowed the film to play in two theaters across the country. For some reason, he didn’t want to even try to make any of the money back.

Freaked is written and directed by both Alex Winter and Tom Stern,

and features some of the best makeup effects of any movie in the ‘90s. Winter also stars as Ricky Coogin, a former child actor who is now a spokesperson for a harmful fertilizer sold by the conglomerate EES. He’s sent down to South America to promote the product when he, his friend Ernie (Michael Stoyanov), and a protester Julie (Megan Ward) stumble across a carnival with a freak show. They’re soon kidnapped by the evil Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid) and turned into freaks themselves, with the help of the EES fertilizer.

Now caged in a giant outhouse, Ricky, Ernie, and Julie meet the other freaks: a dog man, a bearded lady, a guy with a sock puppet for a head, and several others. Like it or

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ovies

Freaked/20th Century Studios

m at the

not, you quickly realize the vision behind this project is very intentional and impressively thought-out.

While amazing as one half of the titular Valley boys in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Winter can’t quite handle the douchey role of Ricky convincingly, often delivering his lines in a way that’s cringe-inducing.

But the man writes the heck out of this script, for better or worse.

Freaked may turn off viewers with its non sequiturs, gross out gags, and flippant disregard for taste, but that’s kind of the point. This is an underground movie made for a niche audience (but with a $13 million budget). The off-the-wall situations are farcical, which prevent any real character development from happening, but the absurdist co-

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medy is nearly a breed of its own.

Blending their influences, which seem to range from something as highbrow as Annie Hall to as uncultured as The Naked Gun, Winter and Stern concoct an irreverent string of jokes that never seems to quit, but also refrain from relishing in one gag for too long. Some go unnoticed the first time around.

The film is excellent as a surrealist comedy, but has a slapdash plot, including zero motivation for our villain. Skuggs tells Ricky he wants to turn him into an unstoppable mutant to kill all the other freaks, but we never figure out why, nor would it make any sense for 18 of 27 him to want that.

Freaked is a glorified B-movie; an alt-punk fever dream where everything just feels off, but in a good way. With gaudy special effects and a killer soundtrack that features several songs by the likes of Butthole Surfers and Blind Idiot God, the film represents a very specific window in the ‘90s where something like this could actually exist and feel both fresh and apropos. It’s like Ren & Stimpy, Monty Python, and Nightbreed all wrapped up into one, sick, twisted, stone

cold production that pays absolutely no mind to any genre or filmmaking conventions. There’s a lack of interference by the studio at the ground level, with this project eventually left all on its own with a relatively generous budget. The “damage” was already done by the time the big heads intervened, and all they could do at that point was suffocate the release. Fortunately, this didn’t affect the final product too much, leaving the audience stupefied by what they just experienced only to wonder if all of that really just happened, but probably being better off because of it.

c+

Based on the writings of

Bruce Lee

JONATHAN TROPPER BANSHEE FROM J U S T I N L I N DIRECTOR OF F A S T & F U R I O U S FROM

CO-CREATOR OF

FRIDAYS AT 10pM ©2020 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. Cinemax® and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

®

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K

Concept by Galaxy Written by Ethan Brehm

a small news article about a young boy who earned a black belt in karate in order to deal with neighborhood bullies. Weintraub knew instantly he had a marketable story on his hands.

After signing on director John G. Avildsen, who helmed 1976’s Rocky, the task was fairly simple: make a movie like Rocky. And that’s exactly what they did.

Sylvester Stallone even jokes with screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen that he ripped off his story. However, there’s more to it than that.

Informed by his own upbringing and martial arts background, Kamen wrote what he knew. Much like the kid in the news story, Kamen learned karate after getting beat up by a group of bullies at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. He had a militant instructor like The Karate Kid’s antagonist, John Kreese, and a spiritual sensei like Kreese’s counterpoint, Mr. Miyagi. The film was semi-autobiographical for Kamen.

While not as culture-altering as its progenitor, The Karate Kid was Rocky for an entire generation of kids who grew up in the ‘80s, if not bigger. Number five on the list of top-grossing films of 1984, a year that some people argue is one of the best in cinema history (just go look at the four films above it), The Karate Kid eventually spawned three sequels, a remake, and a TV series.

Netflix’s Cobra Kai catches up with protagonist Daniel LaRusso, his rival Johnny Lawrence, and the rest of the characters 34 years after the events of the original film. Becoming a huge hit, the series has struck a definite chord with fans of the franchise who found solace in the morals and lessons of the iconic movie.

Originally on YouTube Red, the series was acquired

by Netflix following its second season, with the numbers skyrocketing and Cobra Kai becoming one of the streaming platform’s biggest shows ever.

With a format like television, capable of evolving narratives and longer character arcs, these stories have found a natural fit for this medium. The characters have aged and dynamics have evolved, but the themes are still just as relatable, molded to fit within today’s sprawling sensibilities with nuanced characters and complex storylines. There’s no telling what’s in store next for Daniel, Johnny, and company, but you can bet this series will be around for a long time.

Season 3 is set for release this January and we can’t wait!

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Daniel LaRusso

(portrayed by Ralph Macchio) Moving to California from the east coast, Daniel is bullied by aggressive karate star Johnny Lawrence after befriending his girlfriend, Ali Mills. With his father dying when Daniel was a young boy, the teenager finds guidance at the hands of Mr. Miyagi and the art of karate.

Facing off against Johnny in rival dojo Cobra Kai, Daniel defeats the two-time reigning champion, earning his respect. A few months later, Daniel accompanies Miyagi, who’s visiting Japan to say goodbye to his dying father.

There, our protagonist faces off against Chozen Toguchi, the nephew of Miyagi’s former best friend, Sato Toguchi, whose family terrorizes locals in town. With Sato and Miyagi making amends, Chozen challenges Daniel to a fight, which Daniel wins.

When Daniel and Miyagi return to America, they face a new challenge. Terry Silver, friend of Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese, helps Kreese get his revenge on Daniel by trying to corrupt and weaken him. But our protagonist eventually beats Silver’s star student, Mike Barnes, who had been previously undefeated.

Mr. Miyagi

(portrayed by Pat Morita) Born in Okinawa, Japan, Mr. Miyagi chose to emigrate to the United States so he wouldn’t have to face his best friend in a fight to the death. Some time later, his wife and newborn son died in a concentration camp, leaving a void in his life for decades. Upon saving Daniel from a group of bullies, he reluctantly takes him in as his student, teaching him the art of karate using his unconventional methods.

The Karate Kid/Sony/Columbia Pictures/Lorenzo Aurelio (Previous Spread)/The Karate Kid/Sony/Columbia Pictures

In the early’80s, producer jerry weintraub optioned

Karate Kid

John Kreese Johnny Lawrence (portrayed by William Zabka)

Former two-time champion of the All Valley Under-18 Karate Championship for the Cobra Kai dojo under sensei John Kreese, Johnny has a bone to pick with the new kid, Daniel, after he becomes romantically involved with his ex-girlfriend. Johnny eventually loses to him in the tournament, gaining respect for his former rival. Breaking ties with Kreese after his teacher publicly berates him for losing, Johnny resigns from Cobra Kai.

(portrayed by Martin Kove) Sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo, the Vietnam War veteran instructs his students to have no mercy towards their opponents. Teaching dirty fighting tricks and dishonorable methods, Kreese eventually reveals his true colors to his star student, Johnny Lawrence, who eventually abandons Cobra Kai. Getting beaten in a fight by a passive Mr. Miyagi, Kreese becomes destitute, losing his dojo after all of his students leave.

He attempts revenge on Daniel and Miyagi with the help of friend Terry Silver, but eventually he, along with Cobra Kai, gets banned from the sport.

Ali Mills

(portrayed by Elisabeth Shue) The former love interest of Johnny, Ali’s relationship with Daniel is the catalyst for Johnny’s animosity towards his rival. Daniel and Ali break up soon after he defeats Johnny, but Johnny never gets over his former girlfriend.

Down-to-earth, intelligent, and tough, Ali eventually becomes a pediatric surgeon years later and is accidentally contacted by Johnny after a night of drinking.

Lucille LaRusso (portrayed by Randee Heller)

Strong and independent, Lucille is the single mother of Daniel who worries about her son’s personal struggles and supports his passion for karate, as well as his relationship with Mr. Miyagi.

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Kara

Tommy

(portrayed by Rob Garrison) A friend of Johnny and the jocular, sarcastic member of Cobra Kai, Tommy is defeated by Daniel in the All Valley Under-18 tournament. Along with Johnny, he also leaves the dojo after getting hit by John Kreese.

Dutch Bobby Brown

(portrayed by Ron Thomas) The second-strongest Cobra Kai fighter, Bobby is in Johnny’s crew, but usually knows when to draw the line. Despite being one of the more compassionate members of the group, Bobby acquiescently injures Danny’s knee during the tournament, per Kreese’s command, which gets him disqualified.

Instantly remorseful, Bobby quits Cobra Kai immediately afterwards.

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(portrayed by Chad McQueen) Dutch is Johnny’s right-hand man and the most aggressive and brutal of the Cobra Kai gang, finding pleasure in being ruthless. He is eventually defeated by Daniel in the All Valley tournament.

Chozen Toguchi (portrayed by Yuji Okumoto)

Once in Japan, Daniel must face his new competitor, Chozen, who’s more skilled and more vicious than even Johnny Lawrence in karate.

The nephew of Miyagi’s ex-best friend, Chozen runs a corrupt grocery store, which Daniel exposes, thus furthering his hatred for our protagonist. When they have their fight, Chozen has Daniel close to death. However, Daniel finds his strength and ultimately defeats him.

ate

Kid

Terry Silver

(portrayed by Thomas Ian Griffith)

Sato Toguchi

The Karate Kid/Sony/Columbia Pictures/Luke Preece/Paul Shipper

(portrayed by Danny Kamekona) A highly respected karate master living in Japan, Mr. Miyagi’s former best friend, Sato once challenged him to a fight, from which Miyagi fled to America. Sato was arranged to be married to a girl named Yukie, but she and Miyagi had fallen in love instead. Years later, upon Miyagi’s return to Okinawa, Sato still wants his revenge.

However, he ends up owing Miyagi his life after being saved from a typhoon. With their friendship restored, Sato cuts ties with Chozen, realizing that he does not want to be consumed by anger anymore.

Kumiko

(portrayed by Tamlyn Tomita) Daniel’s love interest in Okinawa, Kumiko is the niece of Miyagi’s former lover.

Chozen, who also takes a liking to her, takes Kumiko hostage in order to force Daniel to fight him. After Daniel wins, she decides to remain in Japan when he returns to America.

Co-founder of Cobra Kai along with Kreese, Silver made his riches by illegally dumping toxic waste into the environment. He helps his friend and former comrade get his revenge on Daniel and Miyagi by infiltrating their lives and convincing them that Kreese is dead.

After Miyagi refuses to train Daniel to fight the undefeated Mike Barnes, Silver takes him in as a student, but fills his head with Kreese’s “no mercy” philosophy. Eventually Silver, along with Kreese and Cobra Kai, are banned from the sport.

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Johnny Lawrence (portrayed by Williams Zabka)

(portrayed by Ralph Macchio) 34 years later, Daniel now lives the high life, running his own chain of successful car dealerships. Miyagi’s death deeply affects Daniel’s life and his relationship with his family. After hearing that his rival dojo Cobra Kai is returning, he decides to return to karate to carry on the legacy of Miyagi’s philosophies, eventually taking in the son of his former nemesis, Johnny Lawrence, as his senior student.

John Kreese

Years later, Kreese returns to Cobra Kai and tries to make amends with his former student. All seems to be well and good until both Johnny and Daniel uncover some secrets that Kreese has been hiding, with the sensei eventually seizing the dojo from Johnny.

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(portrayed by Randee Heller)

Having a troubled relationship with Daniel’s wife early on, Lucille eventually reconciles with her. Always able to give her son perspective, Lucille helps guide him through his rivalry with Cobra Kai and his marriage troubles.

(portrayed by Martin Kove)

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Lucille LaRusso

Amanda LaRusso (portrayed by

Courtney Henggeler) Daniel’s wife and co-owner of the auto dealership, Amanda is a motivator for a lot of Daniel’s reconciliations in his adult life, encouraging him to drop his animosity towards Johnny, and take back his protege, Robby.

While supportive of Daniel’s return to karate early on, she eventually puts her foot down once things get out of hand, making her husband give up all activities related to karate and taking down Cobra Kai.

Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Sony/Columbia Pictures

Danny LaRusso

After his mother’s death, Johnny becomes estranged from his son, Robby. The down-on-his-luck former fighter gets fired from his job as a handyman and decides to reopen the Cobra Kai dojo in an attempt to infuse it with more honor than his old sensei John Kreese had in the past.

Samantha LaRusso (portrayed by Mary Mouser)

The rich and popular 16-yearold has an up and down relationship with her father, Daniel. Caught in a love triangle with Miguel and Robby, Samantha is the spark of a lot of conflict between the two fighters. Her rivalry with Tory is furthered when Miguel and Tory start dating.

Robby Keene

(portrayed by Tanner Buchanan) Robby, Johnny’s estranged son, drops out of high school after getting in trouble for drugs, which leads him down a path of other various crimes. He comes to work for Daniel at the car dealership, eventually falling under his tutelage where he flourishes as a fighter. Furious when he finds out who his father is, Daniel banishes Robby at first, but then takes him back in and invites him to move into his home, where the teenager forms a relationship with Daniel’s daughter, the former girlfriend of Robby’s rival, Miguel Diaz.

Miguel Diaz

Demetri

(portrayed by Xolo Maridueña) Johnny’s first student at the new Cobra Kai dojo, Miguel is a misguided and bullied teenager with low self-esteem who eventually finds solace in karate. A violent altercation with Robby and Samantha sends him down a path of ruthless and dishonorable values, earning the disapproval of his teacher and eventually landing him with life-threatening injuries after Robby kicks him off of the second story during a brawl at school.

(portrayed by Gianni Decenzo)

Eli “Hawk” Moskowitz

(portrayed by Jacob Bertrand) Eli is a bullied teenager who gains confidence through Cobra Kai’s philosophies, flipping the script on his life, but takes the “no mercy” mindset to an extreme level at times. Disqualified from a tournament for dishonorable fighting, which only makes him even more aggressive, Hawk is reprimanded by Johnny, but forms an admiration for John Kreese, forming his own antagonistic gang set on destroying Daniel’s dojo.

Once best friends, Demetri and Hawk’s relationship crumbles after the former joins Daniel’s rival dojo.

Struggling with confidence, Demetri continues to be torn between reconciling with his best friend and finding guidance in a way that best suits him.

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Kyler

(portrayed by Joe Seo) Kyler used to date Samatha.

One night, while having dinner at her house, the wealthy teenager is questioned by Daniel about bruises on his body. After hearingthat Kyler was attacked by Johnny Lawrence, who was trying to protect Miguel from the bully, Daniel figures out that Cobra Kai has reopened. After Samantha realizes Kyler’s predatory nature, she dumps him.

Tory Nichols (portrayed by Peyton List)

Aisha Robinson (portrayed by Nichole Brown)

Originally rejected from joining Cobra Kai because she’s a female, Aisha eventually becomes the first woman fighter for the dojo. The bullied teenager is best friends with Samantha, a relationship that becomes strained once the rivalry between the two dojos comes into full force and Aisha becomes closer with Sam’s rival, Tory.

Possibly disapproving with John Kreese’s actions, Aisha doesn’t show up to Cobra Kai on the day of his takeover.

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Growing up in a povertous household, Tory learned the “no mercy” philosophy herself at a young age after finding out that the world, as well, shows those same attitudes. Becoming Miguel’s love interest after he breaks up with Samantha, the teen engages in a tumultuous rivalry with her boyfriend’s former lover. Things get more complicated when Tory and Aisha become friends after she joins Cobra Kai. Ultimately the young fighter sides with John Kreese during his takeover.

Raymond (aka “STINGRAY”) (portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser)

The overweight former hardware store employee joins Cobra Kai as the oldest student, flipping the script and rebranding himself as “Stingray.” Adopting John Kreese’s teachings, he applies for a job as a security guard at West Valley High School, eventually using a brawl breakup as an excuse to restrain several members of Miyagi-Do from fighting.

Turning against Johnny during the coup by Kreese, Stingray proves to be an unpredictable asset for the sensei.

Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Sony/Columbia Pictures

Anthony LaRusso

(portrayed by Griffin Santopietro) Daniel’s 11-year-old son, overtaken by entitlement and laziness, refuses to learn karate, instead spending all day, every day playing video games.

Carmen Diaz

(portrayed by Vanessa Rubio)

Moon

(portrayed by Hannah Kepple)

Miguel’s mother fled to America from Ecuador when she was pregnant with him.

Hesitant to let her son fight due to her opposition of violence, Carmen still attends the All Valley tournament.

She and Johnny develop a romantic relationship, but she breaks up with him after Miguel gets put on life support following his fight with Robby.

This neo-hippie and former girlfriend of Hawk constantly tries to unite the two rival dojos, but breaks up with her boyfriend after his attack on Demetri.

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SPOILER MAGAZINE

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from his role as Sensei John Kreese, but the New York native has had a long, illustrious career that’s spanned nearly five decades. With an early role in The Last House On the Left, and later on in the popular procedural drama Cagney and Lacey, Martin eventually became a household name and icon for anyone who grew up in the ‘80s, starring in the aforementioned Karate Kid in 1984 and then Rambo: First Blood Part II the following year.

Born in Brooklyn, Martin dons a filmography that consists of over 200 credits in both TV and film.

His prominent features and intimidating glare earned him some early antagonistic roles in action flicks. With his first bit of notoriety in 1975’s Death Race 2000 and later that same year from White Line Fever, Kove got a big break and made a turn as the honest detective Victor Isbecki in Cagney and Lacey, showing us all that he can easily play both sides.

The actor’s ability to play both good guy and bad guy throughout his career has not only been so profitable to Kove himself, but has infused his performance of Sensei Kreese, making him the quintessential ‘80s antagonist. Nowadays when villains are written to have much more depth,

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GabboT/Albert L. Ortega/WireImage/Bryan David Hall/Alamy/ Rambo/First Blood/StudioCanal/Manfred Baumann

O Fans of The Karate Kid undoubtedly know Martin Kove

Kreese translates perfectly, as he was constructed ahead of his time. And the nuance of the Karate Kid reunion series, Cobra Kai, has been justified by the quality of the films it’s based on.

Martin has had such a resurgence in recent years with his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and his return as Kreese on Netflix’s Cobra Kai—first with a surprise appearance in the finale of season 1, which turned out to be just the beginning. Kove not only became a regular in season 2, but a significant pillar of the series as a whole. His presence takes the show to another level. After all, he basically is Cobra Kai. Now with its third season coming out on in January, Martin analyzes the unbelievable popularity of the show and why the property still resonates with people all these years later. Cobra Kai didn’t invent the

Martin Kove(Previous Spread)/Martin Kove/Karate Kid/Columbia Pictures/ Sony/Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Getty/IMDb/AlamyViral Panda

Interview by Galaxy Intro by Ethan Brehm

‘80s/’90s reunion series, but definitely set a trend for HOW to bring back a franchise.

The actor also reflects on his own career and how much he’s grown as an actor and as a person. He admits that he didn’t always have the discipline for the job, but has learned an immense amount of tenacity and integrity over the years with his craft. In his personal life, he explains how he’s learned a lot from his character John Kreese, for better or worse. Once willing to channel all of his traits at full force, he’s now become master over his alter ego and found a way to mine only for the good parts off screen.

Martin is still inspiring us, even during these times of isolation. Early in quarantine, Kove issued what he refers to as the Cobra Kai Challenge, which is quite simple, but so important. He urges us to be as creative and as productive as possible while we’re alone and utilize this time the best we can, so that when this is all over, we can all go out and apply our growth and just take life by the horns. And the world will be even better for it.

As he says, “Fans love to hate John Kreese and hate to love John Kreese,” but Martin Kove is a different story.

The incredibly charming and humble man who plays the nuanced antagonist just might be what we need during these times. Evoking nostalgia for the past and providing a silver lining for the present, the world could always use some more Martin Kove in their life.

SPOILER

John, there are debates out there, so let’s hear it from you. Was The Karate Kid one of your biggest movies at the time? Or was it Rambo II?

MARTIN KOVE

Well, I did them back to back. And I was doing a TV show called Cagney and Lacey. That was really a big, classy show. I was doing that for about six years. And then I was able to go off and do different projects.

One of the interesting projects I did was an action picture called Steele Justice that I starred in. That was fun because it was my first romantic lead.

Yet, it was an action picture. It was very enjoyable to do. But I would say Karate Kid made so much noise. We never knew it would be as successful as it was. And Rambo, I remember reading Rambo in my dressing room on the set of Cagney and Lacey,

and it was 85 pages of nothing but mayhem [laughs]. And I realized this movie would make equal to Karate Kid, which at that time had grossed around 100 million. This was 1984, and I said, “Wow, this is really interesting. What a follow up. I better do it.”

And it holds up today. I think they’re both memorable for different reasons to society, to kids, to people of that age, to adults today. They have different meanings but they both hold up and it’s really my pleasure to be a part of them.

SPOILER

After The Karate Kid, did everyone look at you like you were this martial arts master?

MARTIN KOVE

My introduction to karate was, we were going to do a movie called Lion of Ireland, which was a book written by Morgan Llywelyn about the Vikings, about Brian Boru, who unified all the tribes in Ireland to fight the Vikings in about 1080. It was a fascinating book and we were all

C training and I was to be the Viking adversary. We were working out with Shihan Tak Kubota and his dojo.

Shihan Tak Kubota trained the police academy. He’s been in a multitude of movies from The Killer Elite to The Mechanic to anything. He’s a brilliant shihan. He’s a wonderful sensei. I was working with him and we were using plywood axes because my character was an axeman. The style was right out of Conan. It was the first time that people would start doing movies, instead of wielding an axe or a sword like in the old Viking picture from 1958 with Kirk Douglas, we were going to do a style of Taekwondo.

It was all going to be Kendo moves and it was very rich and very much involved with learning the foundation of karate. So I had to work out every other day. And then unfortunately the tax laws changed in England and they lost the movie. They couldn’t make the movie. A month later I had the audition for this film called The Karate Kid. I didn’t know what to expect.

To me it was just another heavy. That character was so well structured by Robert Mark Kamen, the writer. I think the star of that movie was the writer.

I really do. I believe we all would not be in the position we’re in—Ralph [Macchio] or Billy [Zabka] or myself— if it had not been so articulately and meticulously written. Like Cobra Kai, our show is so terrific because the writing is so good. Our show is about us 30 years later, but if the writing wasn’t on the money, it wouldn’t work and people wouldn’t love Cobra Kai. NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

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Since the last time we spoke, your Instagram page has exploded beyond belief.

MARTIN KOVE

You know, there’s a lot to write about, and my son assists me with that. During COVID-19, it was a little depressing because I had a Western and two other movies postponed and it’s been tough. But yet, the silver lining of all this is you get to spend more time with family. We waited with bated breath to see how Netflix would handle it. We knew they would do a good job because they promote

very well. And I think Netflix is just terrific. Not only is the show such a big hit, but the way they handle us and the promotion and the publicity, and giving the care to the actors, and making sure that when you want to run with the ball you can do it—they give you freedom. It’s just been a very pleasant experience. Just terrific. I’ve been very happy. It works for us that everybody’s home now so they can watch the show, but I think it would do very well even if people were going to their jobs and coming home and watching Netflix.

SPOILER

Cobra Kai is a massive hit. I was on board with it instantly back when it first released on YouTube Red. And now it’s on Netflix and has become one of their biggest shows ever. People absolutely love it. What do you think attributes to that success?

MARTIN KOVE

Nostalgia works now for a couple of reasons. One, times are hard and people want to feel good, so it’s hard to feel good about a vampire show.

But you watch Cobra Kai and you remember exactly what you were feeling like in the ‘80s, but as an adult.

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And then as an adolescent, there are so many references to the problems that our younger stars are having on the show, and they’re all identifiable.

And it’s all gray. Nothing is white hat/ black hat. So the writers are writing that way and it’s quite identifiable for people nowadays. Everybody’s tastes are far more sophisticated than they were when I grew up. It was different.

I’m a big Westerns buff, and if you make a Western now you gotta have it really gray and interesting because people’s tastes have changed. The same thing goes for shows that were hugely popular back in the ‘80s. You do them now, you gotta approach it differently. And I think the writers on Cobra Kai have approached it masterfully.

Martin Kove/Karate Kid/Columbia Pictures/Sony/Cobra Kai/Netflix

SPOILER

YouTube/Getty/IMDb/Alamy/Manfred Baumann/Rambo/First Blood/StudioCanal

M So to answer your question, I became the sensei and the person to look up to and all, but not until later on did I really start studying and going to the dojo and working out. You get to do a lot of black belt moves in movies, even though you haven’t studied as much as you should have as a black belt. And I have honorary black belts and regular black belts from different styles. But the honor of it all is the discipline, and the people you meet and the devotion they have to karate, and the devotion they have to Taekwondo and Shotokan. And I’m a black belt in Okinawa-te. And it’s just fascinating to be considered that.

But God knows, there are so many people out there who are further down the line who could make Sensei Kreese just crawl [laughs]. But it’s great. The respect I get is enormous and I don’t take it for granted at all.

I’m quite humbled about it. People out there just love to hate John Kreese and hate to love John Kreese.

don’t think that an action-karate movie, 35 years later, we’re still saying [these things]. But it meant so much to so many people over these 35 years and still holds up!

SPOILER

E

SPOILER

Your career spans decades, and you have so many amazing projects under your belt, but The Karate Kid just had this explosive popularity. I know you said last time that you took the project on a whim and you weren’t sure it was going to be any good.

And now here you are decades later still involved in these stories. Isn’t that mind-boggling?

MARTIN KOVE

Let me tell you, it’s amazing that any movie ever gets released in the theaters. It’s just amazing that a film gets made from the inception of the writer. I had an exact example of that.

It was a movie called VFW that I did last year in Dallas. And the cast was brilliant. It was Stephen Lang, William Sadler, guys who have done so many things. And then you have Fred Williamson and David Patrick Kelly.

And it was all about this bar, this VFW, where all these characters are alcoholics, and were great comrades during Vietnam, but now they’re in the twilight of their lives. But it was very violent. It made The Wild Bunch look like Disney. And I just said, “Do I really wanna do this?” And my son

said, “Dad, you gotta do it.” My son Jesse is a wonderful actor and is like my mini manager. He said, “The casting’s great. It’ll be a good movie.”

And everybody loved this picture and it did so well, because of the cast; because of the camaraderie that happened with all of us. The camaraderie that was generated by veterans as actors—all of us. It was the director’s third movie, and between the four leads, we had 500 films between us. And we knew what we were doing. We did lots of improvisation.

And Dallas [Sonnier], who is a terrific producer who did Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete—and I’m trying to do a Western with him.

And to answer your question, there’s a lot of things you don’t think will work out. We thought Karate Kid was just another Bruce Lee-type movie, in a sense, from the title. And I couldn’t have told you that 35 years later we’d be saying, “No mercy,” “Sweep the leg,” “Wax on, wax off.” You say, “The force be with you.” You say, “Play it again, Sam.” You say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But you

I recently saw this picture on your IG, you have a pose with your hand up, like you’re playing air guitar or something.

MARTIN KOVE

Originally, we sat down and worked with a photographer just to do some fun stuff for some t-shirts—some silly stuff. If it was up to me, I would do photo sessions on a horseback with six shooters and a Winchester, but it doesn’t work with Cobra Kai. It works with Yellowstone—I wish I was on Yellowstone. But we were just playing and we did it all at the house. All of it is just what John Kreese would do in the enjoyment of life when he wasn’t in the dojo trying to make everything perfect. It was stuff that would go on the t-shirts. I’m thinking of doing my own line of clothing, but I want a new slant. That commercial I did for QuickBooks, which was really interesting, where I play John Kreese—they handled it so well. They gave him enough of an edge there where it didn’t seem like you were doing something silly because you were getting a paycheck. There’s just a lot of people interested in these characters, and they’re fun. You just kinda go with it.

And sometimes people still wear the same old t-shirts from back in the day. When I was with The Last House On the Left cast and we were doing Chiller Theatre—an autograph show

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SPOILER

You have this incredible stare, when you’re looking at the camera. What’s going on in your mind at that moment?

MARTIN KOVE

SPOILER

So many people want a Sensei Kreese shirt. Have you ever thought of making a Sensei Kreese apparel line?

MARTIN KOVE

We’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but just haven’t done too much about it [laughs]. You gotta pick artwork, and it’s hard for me to make a decision about this stuff because I wanna do it tastefully. And yet my true love is going out there and, “Make it a Western!” So doing a t-shirt, you gotta lay it on someone who knows what they’re doing. And it’s gotta be lucrative. I’ve had several offers, but I’ve never found one that’s

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It’s all real. In other words, it’s never just blank. It all has to do with the moment, I think, as an actor. There’s so many movies I did because I liked the character, and I probably should not have done the movie because the movie was, say, a fair script.

But you’re arrogant enough to think that you can improve the movie by your performance. I don’t think that anymore. The most fun for anything now—and I wish I’d paid attention to this more when I was starting out—is you have to do your backstory. You have to pay more attention to where this character came from. What was it like for him as a kid? What was his relationship for him with his parents?

And can jot these ideas down, and then you don’t refer to them a lot.

You just kind of read them every once in a while. I do. When you see these moments when I’m holding my lapel—I took all those moves from my instructor Pat Johnson, who was great. He taught all of us. He taught Pat Morita, he taught Ralph, myself,

SPOILER

Everyone’s probably bugging you about season 3. Are you getting tons of messages about it?

MARTIN KOVE

I don’t mind it. I went out the other day. There was a movie shooting right outside of my house. I went outside and went up to this prop

Martin Kove/Karate Kid/Columbia Pictures/Sony/Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Getty/ IMDb/Alamy/Steve Dietl/Mirit/Once Upon a Time In Hollywood/Quentin Tarantino

N blown me away where the artwork is great. That’s what those silly little guitar pictures came from.

in New York—I had never gone to an autograph show before. This was about 10 years after Karate Kid was released. There, again, all these people showed up on my end of the table with “No Mercy” shirts, spewing the lines from the movie, and I just couldn’t believe the popularity of it.

It was the first time I saw the popularity of it. I sold all of these pictures, but I was still just a new guy on the block. But I realized the potential of this movie, and it was brilliant. What people adhere to when it’s meaningful emotionally is quite surprising.

all separately. And you just encompass the character. You just go into that character when you do that homework and you do the backstories. So even the simple stance in the front of the class, telling them to forward punch, you really have a reason why you’re there and what you’re trying to communicate with them. Because these writers write me pontifications—these giant speeches all the time—and I’m standing in front of the class and I’m delivering them, but I’d love to be doing something vulnerable. They love writing for me on the dark side. So you have to have an inner life going. It’s never just holding the lapel. But these writers—Hayden Schlossberg would not let me hold the lapel in any other scene other than the end of season 2, episode 10—that’s the only place in all the episodes. Every time I wanted to do it in the dojo he said, “No, we’re saving that.” Because he loved that body language. So you make every moment as real as you can for you.

Sony/Manfred Baumann/Rick Krusky/Rambo/First Blood/StudioCanal

K

truck and said, “Do you have a rake?” [laughs] and he said, “Yeah, I got a rake.” I said, “Can I borrow it for a minute? I have a grandson and I bought a little pool and I want to level the ground.” And just somehow I never bought a rake. I brought the rake back about 15 minutes later and the guy said, “Will you sign my broom?”

I said, “Sign your broom?” He says, “Yeah, I got a broom and I really want you to sign it.” So I signed his broom and he said, “Will you write, ‘No Mercy’ on it?” I said [laughs], “Okay.” I had never signed a broom before. He watched the show on YouTube and he said, “I love the show and you are the iconic character.” And it was just charming. You get all these kinds of feelings now, especially since people have great feelings about the show because it’s nostalgic. We all need to feel good now in this COVID situation. We all need to latch on to great memories and feelings we had. And we remember what we feel like when we see some of the outtakes, some of the flashbacks from the movie.

It’s good memories and good timing.

And people ask about season 3 constantly. You know, we finished season 3. It’s been in the can for a long time.

It’ll air after the first of the year, and it’s such a rich season. There are so many surprises. It makes season 2 look like Bambi. It’s very exciting that people appreciate it and look forward to it. And it’s not that far. It’ll be sometime early 2021. And then people will go, “When’s season 4??” Because season 3 encompasses a lot of wonderful elements in all the characters.

SPOILER

Do you think if Cobra Kai had been released on Netflix first it would have been as big?

MARTIN KOVE

Netflix is just set up so well for a show like this. The publicity department is just so rich. Not only do they watch you and make sure the show gets represented so well, but they really play an important part in what you’re doing individually as an actor.

I’ve done four or five TV series and the network always only paid attention to the show. They never really did anything to the actor. Even if the actor stood out, it was all about the show. With Netflix, it’s about everything. It’s about getting it out there, keeping it secret, representing

the actors well, making sure you run all of your PR through them and letting them look at it—but not in a way where they need to control it in a negative way—it’s just that they have an ultimate plan. And the plan for season 3 is enormous—bigger than 1 and 2. And the pictures they use, the artwork, it’s so superior to anything we’ve had before. That picture of Billy and me in front, where I’m looking at him and he’s in profile, it’s on that opening page of Netflix. I watched it just to look at all the promos, just to see the presentation. And it was done very well. It’s set up well. If it

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They study us and make sure that what goes on works. It’s all gray. You can’t write white hats and black hats anymore. To answer your question, you have to play it by how the chess game falls. There’s no winner, there’s no loser. It’s just a matter of being patient. And it’s hard, especially in COVID-19, to be patient and wait for the success, because we’re not all out there functioning. And the silver lining is we are learning to be patient; we’re learning to be a family more; we’re learning to cultivate our scripts because we have time to sit on our ass. I think we all have to make the best of what’s going on, and Cobra Kai has been a great recipient of that time, where people can watch the show—several times—and learn all about it. And then, BOOM! When season 3 comes out, they’ll appreciate everything a lot more.

SPOILER

Do you think if Pat Morita was still with us Cobra Kai would’ve been even greater?

MARTIN KOVE

That’s a very difficult question. I think Ralph has somewhere to go with the absence of Miyagi. And the entangle-

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ment between Cobra Kai and Miyagi, initially being represented by Billy against Ralph—that competition, that rivalry—I think is clear without Pat Morita. The rivalry I would have had would present itself differently. I think the adjustment was masterful.

I think [Pat] would have loved the show if he was around. I’m sure he is watching from up there. He would’ve loved the show because all the values of Miyagi-Do are out there, especially in season 3. They’re really out there.

And they’ve never violated what Pat Morita would’ve done if he was alive.

Ralph carries it on religiously. Johnny is a misfit and gets caught between John Kreese and trying to make sure that his students have a fair shake and are not dominated by what the “no mercy” concept is from his point

Martin Kove/Karate Kid/Columbia Pictures/Sony/Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Getty/IMDb/ Alamy/Manfred Baumann/Jarod Harris/Rick Krusky/Rambo/First Blood/StudioCanal

had not gone to Netflix… Netflix had 193 million viewers. YouTube had 20 [million]. YouTube left the writers alone to write their little masterpieces, so that was really appreciative.

But maybe things would have been different if we had started out on Netflix. Who knows? The essence of the show might have changed. I’ve been part of those kinds of shows too. I couldn’t do Karate Kid III so they had to rewrite the part, putting in a character called Terry Silver, because I got a TV series called Hard Time On Planet Earth. And they had to revamp everything and ultimately the movie didn’t do as well as it should have. You can’t disenfranchise the villain. You can’t disenfranchise Darth Vader from Star Wars. And here, they disenfranchised me only because of the rewrites. There’s a structure that’s in every screenplay and creates the characters so richly so that the audience loves them, and the star of all three of our movies is Robert Kamen. He wrote all of that. The star of our TV series is not Billy or Ralph or the kids or me, it’s the three writers: Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz and Josh Heald. They’re the guys.

of view. I loved Johnny Lawrence as my own son. He’s like my stepson; my godson. But I love Cobra Kai more—the integrity of Cobra Kai—so Johnny violated that, and he just got lost for a little while. But I’ll bring him back. He’ll thank me for taking over the dojo. And with Pat Morita there, it might have been a different dynamic.

It would’ve been, you know, siding going a little more towards Pat’s side, and Pat and Ralph together. There would’ve been an imbalance I think.

I don’t know if it would’ve been any better, because they just wrote such good stuff as it is.

SPOILER

T

Johnny Lawrence is kinda the good guy now. Everyone, including myself, is rooting for him to succeed. Do you feel like that’s the popular consensus?

MARTIN KOVE

You have to understand that people somehow always root for the underdog. Johnny’s a misfit. He changes all the time. He doesn’t know which end is up. He’s kind of a lost soul

because he comes from an environment where I was the father figure and then I violated that by breaking the trophy and disappearing for 30 years. And then I came back and tried to be the father figure again and that didn’t work out because I was trying to keep the integrity of Cobra Kai, certainly in his absence. We always root for the underdog. You know the romance we all had with American gangsters? I did enough research and played enough gangsters. They

were the vermin of society. These people, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, they had no sense of humanity when it came to killing someone.

Like the Vikings—I used to love the Vikings—and they just pillaged and raped and did all this. But we really thought they were cool because they were great warriors and all that. But it isn’t cool. The public does like the darker characters, and they do it here with the villainy if the villainy is done with taste. Some of the greatest characters—Klaus Maria Brandauer in the Bond movie—I loved him—and Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds—wonderful. The smoother the bad guy, the more interesting.

And Billy and I, we really cook on film. Two people with such a history.

People love to watch the history. And Ralph does a terrific job. When I’ve had scenes with Ralph, it was just rich because we don’t get a chance to act much with one another. So Ralph’s gotta pick his ass up and get in there with us. And he does.

But there’s such a history from the movies that you do root for Billy because he’s caught in the confusion of the John Kreese world and the Miyagi-Do world, which is a kind and decent world. It’s the offensive sport

that John Kreese represents, and Miyagi represented the defensive art.

And Johnny’s caught up in that. So it is normal to appreciate Johnny the most and, I think, the relationship between Johnny and my character is rich.

SPOILER

When everyone saw you in the series for the first time, they went nuts! I think they love you because you have this particular old school personality.

Do you think so?

MARTIN KOVE

Well I think I said it in that diner scene. It’s interesting because I have this conflict within my personal life, we have to stop giving trophies to people who participate. We’ve got to only give trophies to people who win—1st or 2nd place. And I think of that a lot. Because kids who don’t have the prowess to come in 1st and 2nd, whether it’s karate or little league, they really try hard. I personally, as Martin Kove, have a conflict there.

But John Kreese has no conflict. He states it very well in that diner that society is soft and we don’t need to give trophies to kids just because they participate and their head’s not into it. “If their head’s into it, they’re champions. There’s no pain in this dojo. There’s no defeat in this dojo.”

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SPOILER

Isn’t it exciting to know that your grandkids will one day watch you as Sensei Kreese in The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai?

MARTIN KOVE

My son, he lives up in Monterey and is an educator, he has a 5-year-old, so she’s learning about Cobra Kai now.

My grandson with my daughter, he’s three—he’s very precious, he reminds me of what Paul Newman would’ve looked like at three—so he doesn’t really know. My son, who’s 30, really knows the value of it. He’s done several movies, we’ve done movies together. Did a wonderful picture called D-Day with Weston Cage, his good friend from high school—Nic’s kid. And it’s all about D-Day, 1944, right before D-Day happened, the real

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life event that happened in Pointe du Hoc. But he understands the value of it, and he understands the value of the business.

I always feel like people say, “What’s your break?” But I don’t feel like I had the break. I haven’t done a Raiders of the Lost Ark yet. I haven’t done The Searchers. I haven’t done my vehicle yet. And one day, maybe I will. But it’s all a school of hard knocks. If you don’t spend the time to work it out and do the work in class... These kids say, “Should I go do theater? What should I do?” And I always say, “Go do theater. Do as much theater as you can, because when you get called to do a movie or a TV show, it’s what you learned in theater that’s gonna make the difference.” I don’t get the chance to do a play as often as I like, but it’s hard work. They have me a year older than I am on IMDb, but you look at this stuff and you function a little slower because you savor the integrity and the grace that God has allowed you to be this lucky—even down the line at my age. I’ve seen all this game in the ‘80s. I was in Rambo, Karate Kid,

Cagney and Lacey, Wyatt Earp, Steele Justice—all this stuff. And it goes as fast as it comes. So you have to really enjoy it for what it is, because it’s a tough game out there. Cobra Kai—I hope it runs forever, but you have to be realistic about it. It’s in the writing, and then everything else comes. You have good writers, boom, you have a good show. It’s just the way it is.

SPOILER

Can you share one amazing experience from The Karate Kid or Cobra Kai?

MARTIN KOVE

The beginning of Karate Kid II was written as the ending of the first Karate Kid. We were waiting to do my big fight scene with Miyagi at that van. And we waited outside for three hours. And finally [producer] Jerry Weintraub and [director] John Avildsen decided that they would cut the scene in the tournament. And I said, “Great!” Three years later, in the same parking lot, we were starting that scene—and I practiced a lot with [stunt coordinator] Pat Johnson, who was incredible—he ran with Chuck Norris and was his partner in the ‘60s and ‘70s. So we do the scene and it’s a lunge punch over Miyagi’s right shoulder through the van, break the window… But the window never breaks. I hit the window in all the rehearsals. It’s supposed to shatter.

Never shattered. The charge in the

Martin Kove/Karate Kid/Columbia Pictures/Sony/Cobra Kai/Netflix/YouTube/Getty/IMDb/ Alamy/Manfred Baumann/Photostream/Zimbio/Rambo/First Blood/StudioCanal

reliant on cell phones and computers. Interpersonal activities are at a minimum, and that’s got to change in society, I believe, or else we’re gonna get lost. Personal attention is just imperative, whether you’re an actor or whatever. You need to have attention and instruction from someone on a personal level, and then you can maintain “Mercy is for the weak.” The weak don’t get it. If you don’t seek it out then you don’t get it. If you’re not tenacious in whatever your plan is for life, no one’s gonna give it to you anymore. Competition is too hip. There’s too many really hip people who are knowledgeable about so much for you to just luck into something. That might’ve happened in the ‘50s, but that’s not gonna happen now. You have to do the work. You don’t do the work, you’re not gonna get what you really want.

R

veins, but you get into the adrenaline of a movie and you just do what you gotta do.

SPOILER

Were you a little upset when the glass didn’t break?

MARTIN KOVE

window didn’t go off. It wasn’t done properly. So finally I say to myself, “Oh boy, this is gonna be a problem.”

And of course the show must go on, so you can’t cut the scene. It was a very important scene. So I did not lunge, I just snapped the punch. The special effects fella swore it was gonna work this time, and I believed him.

And then, boom, I snap the punch, it doesn’t work. I go right through the window—shards of glass sticking in my hand. I break the window—not the gunpowder charge. And I have to pull out, and we bandage me up and put new skin on and we did the scene again. And still, he swore it would break, but it didn’t break. I met the window with my fist and it didn’t break it this time because I held back a bit. I turn to John Avildsen and I said, “John, this isn’t the hand of the Terminator. This isn’t Arnold’s hand.

This is the real hand of Martin Kove.”

So he looked around at everybody and said, “Alright, we’ll use the one we just got. That’s a wrap.” So whenever you watch that movie, going in is real big-time smashing glass. And the next day we shot the other part, pulling out and the remainder of the scene. But it was real, and I always try to look at that and see, “Can you tell?” There’s blood all over, but it’s fake blood because it was the next day. That was dangerous because I could have really severed

I was a little upset. But he tried everything. He was feeling so bad himself, because this was a special effects man who was experienced.

Over the course of the movie they bought me hanging bags to work out and sent them to my house. They were very generous, it was a good department. I couldn’t get angry at them. I was just somewhat disgusted. The director, this guy was really just ashamed. He was suffering enough. He didn’t have to catch the wrath of John Kreese.

SPOILER

Are people intimidated when they first meet you because of the sensei persona?

MARTIN KOVE

I have really changed a lot because that character comes up; that arrogance comes up when someone says “no” to me. In the past, I’ve had six breakups with my lady, and I’ve only recently put it together. And the only reason we have ever broken up in the past is because that character comes up when someone says, “Sorry, can’t do it,” or they violate you or people come up short. And it isn’t Martin Kove, but all of a sudden John Kreese comes up. I don’t get physical with anybody, but the intensity of the look… You know when you really

want ice cream—you have a passion for ice cream—and you go to the little ice cream shop and you knock on the window and they say they’re closed?

This whole thing comes over me and I wanna do a spinning crescent kick right through the glass. Because John Kreese, that sense of, “You can’t violate me”—and it’s John Kreese, it isn’t Martin Kove—it comes up because the character’s celebrated. The character’s been around a long time, and somewhere in my past I’ve clicked in to some sort of repulsion, some sort of, “Oh God, someone’s saying ‘no’ to me,” and somewhere in the back of my upbringing it’s triggered

by John Kreese. Those emotions get triggered. So to answer your question, yeah he comes up. But doesn’t come up much anymore because I’m really in control of it. There’s not a lot of integrity [behind it] when it comes up. It’s an integrity exercise when the camera’s rolling. Life’s tough enough, you don’t wanna beat up everybody with your eyes and emotionally. You don’t need to do it.

SPOILER

Any final words for the fans out there?

MARTIN KOVE

“You’re all going to be so pleasantly surprised and excited about season three. And the presentation by Netflix is gonna be awesome. And the writing is awesome. If you truly enjoyed one and two, not only should your expectations be escalated by what I have to say, but you will truly feel so much part of Cobra Kai when you see season three. You will have the need to just go to the dojo and work out.”

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Interview by Galaxy Intro by Ethan Brehm

one of the biggest fan favorites from the past couple

seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead is Yumiko, played by Eleanor Matsuura, who joined the series in season 9 and has since become a regular on the show. Eleanor is unbelievably cool, with a wicked wit and wry sense of humor, which inevitably exudes from Yumiko as well. Heck, she even smacked Carol in the face and got away with it!

You can tell Eleanor has such a knowledge and passion for all things Walking Dead, which makes talking to her feel like talking to a fanatic of the show.

Unfortunately, the series is coming to an end after its eleventh season, consisting of 24 episodes which will be aired over the course of two years, but audiences should still see a ton more of Eleanor and Yumiko for a long time to come. Season 10’s interim finale, which got pushed back six months, finally airing this past October, left a lot of fans anxious and curious about what the future holds for the characters. Yumiko and her new crew are left with a huge cliffhanger.

However, with six more season 10 episodes set to air in the upcoming months, fans can rest easy that they will soon get some answers.

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Premiering a decade ago and creating this tremendous change in the entertainment industry and the world in general, The Walking Dead in the live-action medium isn’t going away any time soon. With all the current and upcoming spin-offs, along with some anthology stuff in the works, the franchise has its own universe now. The momentum is still going strong.

It’s always such a pleasure to sit down and chat with Eleanor. You can always count on her for a fun, unpredictable interview, and to go along with Galaxy’s madness. Here, she discusses and analyzes her show, her character, and what she’s been up to during this pandemic.

N SPO!LER

Eleanor, welcome to SPO!LER! The last time we spoke was in March and you were a guest on my show.

ELEANOr matsuura

Oh my gosh, was it March?

SPO!LER

Yes, March 23. The pandemic hit.

You had a glass of wine and you were like, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

And now we’re here almost a year later.

ELEANOr matsuura

Well, you know what, that’s really blowing my mind. Because really nothing has changed. I’m still here with a glass of wine. It’s not the same one. It’s a fresh one. But I feel like

that’s almost the same [laughs] for the past few months. But that’s insane. When we last spoke things were just starting to happen—in the UK anyway, lockdown was just officially starting to happen. I guess I thought that by now things were going to be kinda back to normal again. And here we are.

SPO!LER

I want things to go back to normal. Back to the same old world as before. What do you miss from life pre-COVID?

ELEANOr matsuura

Everyone misses so many things.

For me it’s just sort of a longing for things. The missing of people, the missing of work, missing shooting, and killing zombies, and doing my job. And that didn’t quite kick in until recently. I was kinda like, “Okay, we’re doing lockdown. The year is different but it’s fine.” I took it quite well, even though it was hard. But there’s something about the seasons changing in the UK and it being autumn now, and I dunno, something about it which has just got me all kinds of longing now for all the things I miss. I’m starting to miss hugs, I’m starting to miss real people, I’m starting to miss the buzz of living in a city like London. But it doesn’t feel like London.

It feels like an empty, strange place right now. I miss that. I really do. It really hits me hard.

was all something. Extreme to extreme [laughs].

SPO!LER

A

Why are you such a fan favorite? Why do the fans love you so much?

ELEANOr matsuura

Oh wow, that’s a really nice thing to say!

SPO!LER

Don’t be humble [laughs].

ELEANOr matsuura

SPO!LER

Eleanor Matsuura/Nuit/Andrea Vecchiato (Previous Spread)/Eleanor Matsuura/Gage Skidmore/IMDb/Getty/ The Walking Dead/AMC/James Gourley/BAFTA/Shutterstock/Alberto E. Rodriguez/Alex Lentati/AP

You have become such a fan favorite since the last time we spoke. We know the future is unknown, but one thing that is for sure it’s the final season of The Walking Dead. Which will be spread over two years, so according to my calculations you are not gonna go anywhere for at least three years.

ELEANOr matsuura

You’re right. It’s so funny, we keep joking about that. Like Khary (Payton), who plays King Ezekiel, keeps saying to me, “We’re all so sad, of course, that it’s gonna be the last season, and we’ve been away from each other for this whole year, so everyone’s really missing each other and eager to get back to work. But actually, it’s an extended season. We’re gonna be shooting together for the best part of two years, plus post-production, plus promotions. We’re gonna be so sick of each other at the end.” [laughs] Like, “Okay, we really need to take a break.” It was all nothing and then it

[laughs] It’s crazy to me. First of all, that is really a nice thing to say. And I’m not just saying this to be humble. I’m saying this because of the year that this has been in particular.

Where the season has been with The Walking Dead and where my connection with it has been, because I haven’t felt like I’ve been in my house, at home, begin a mom, not going out, not filming, so it does feel very, very far away. My life in the UK is so disconnected from Yumiko and The Walking Dead. I never have to deal with any kind of intrusion or fans. I never get recognized. It just doesn’t happen. I lead a really, really regular, normal life, thank goodness, so it’s very easy for me to kind of switch off from it. So first of all, it’s really lovely to say the fans are connecting

with my character—I love that because I love Yumiko so much. I love playing her; I love her as a character.

She holds such a special place in my heart, so to know people get that and people are also having a connection with that character somehow makes me so happy. If I can survive punching Carol in the face and not be completely torn apart for it [laughs], that’s a good thing. Yumiko, in that moment, was completely caught up and felt like that was what she needed to do.

I knew there was gonna be some backlash [from fans]. That was a really intense day. Melissa [McBride] was so awesome and so fun to shoot that with. She’s the best. That was one of my favorite days filming—not because of that hit, but just because of who I was filming with and how much everyone was bringing their A game that day. Everyone was so in it. It was really, really extraordinary to do.

It’s great. I’m so thankful that people are connecting with Yumiko and of course connecting with the show, but to be honest, I miss it! I can’t wait to feel some of that connection in person. I haven’t done a lot of conventions and I miss even the idea of it. All these people being together in one place; getting to meet people and talk about the show, and talk about what they love—I miss all of that.

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and where you find us, it is the end of season 10, yes, but shows that there’s a huge door opening into a possibility of the next season. If you follow the comics, you know about those crazy stormtrooper guys—I’ve got to figure out a better name for those...

SPO!LER

If fans ask you to recreate the Carol smack scene, what would you do? “I want your autograph, but I want you to slap me in the face too!”

ELEANOr matsuura

I mean, I can’t sit around smacking people for money.

SPO!LER

Yes you can! If they want it, give it to them! [laughs]

ELEANOr matsuura

[laughs] If they want it… I guess everyone’s gotta make a living right? Fine.

I’ll do it. Who cares? Put it on the record, I’ll do it [laughs]. If both parties are in agreement, that could be quite therapeutic. Maybe this could work for me too. Okay, I’ll definitely give it some thought.

SPO!LER

The last episode, a lot of people were really frustrated because they waited almost a year. Your crew, you went on a journey to find this new town. Then all these people come out and you’re like, “OMG, what’s goin’ on?” A lot of fan theories are floating around. From your mouth, what’s going on? What can you share?

ELEANOr matsuura

Wowww, what can I share?? Ummmmmmm, [laughs] I can’t share anything! Don’t be ridiculous!

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SPO!LER

In the season finale of The Walking Dead you’re running around with your new posse—the King, Eugene, Princess, and you—what a unique crew.

SPO!LER

[laughs] Angela, are you listening?

ELEANOr matsuura

[laughs]Yeah, you gotta be careful because [showrunner] Angela [Kang] will take you down! Okay, here’s the thing, it’s a finale, first of all, so of course there’s gonna be cliffhangers.

I mean, it wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t leaving lots of people with lots of questions. I loved the finale so much. I really thought it was worth the wait. I was starved for so much Walking Dead content for such a long time and then I watched it and was stunned by everyone. I thought everyone was just brilliant in it. I thought it was really funny and really moving.

And Carol’s journey in the end with Lydia, I just thought was so gorgeous.

The cliffhangers have to be there because it’s the finale and you’ve got to give the people what they want. But what this really means for our posse

ELEANOr matsuura

You’re right, it’s a really weird combination of characters. We talked about it a lot on set. To be honest, the four of us are really an unlikely squad, because I’ve never really done much work with—obviously Paola [Lázaro] is new. We sort of meet her along the way, pick her up and carry on the journey with her. Princess has been on the road for a very long time. Josh [McDermitt], as Eugene, I’ve never really worked with him at all. I’ve had maybe a couple of crossover scenes with him in the past few seasons I’ve been on the show. And same with

the king. Our paths have crossed in ways of the community, but not in a personal storyline way. So having us all come together to go on this journey is really bizarre, but also really gorgeous in the sense that everyone is running away from their own separate path. Everyone’s running away from something. I’ve split up with Magna. I’ve kinda got a clean slate in front of me. I don’t feel like I’ve got anything left to be useful for with Hilltop having to burn, and I just feel like I need to go—go searching for something where I can put my efforts and my skills to better use. That’s Yumiko fundamentally. She just really wants to help. She’s naturally a leader and really wants to help other people and help find other communities.

Obviously Eugene had made this connection with Stephanie. He’s left behind Rosita and any sort of possibilities with that relationship and any connection he had with Alexandria.

He’s forging forward with a new potential relationship. The king has got this trouble with the cancer being on

Eleanor Matsuura/IMDb/Getty/The Walking Dead/AMC/Alberto E. Rodriguez/ Tommaso Boddi/Nuit/Andrea Vecchiato/Into the Badlands/AMC/AP

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his throat and his relationship ending with Carol. We’ve all had something happen to us where we’re like, “You know what? We’re good. It’s time to move on. It’s time for a new chapter.

We’ve gotta turn the page.” So that’s really the common thread that unites us all in this moment. And so it becomes this sort of unlikely group, but we all have this same unified mission which is to go and find something better, and go and connect, and find something new. That takes us out on this journey and there’s this lovely moment in the finale when Eugene, who’s been waiting there for a while, realizes that Stephanie isn’t going to come, or she might not be there yet, or whatever the reason is, and we all make a decision collectively to go, “Well, we’re not going back. We’ve got nothing to go back for. We’ve gotta go forward.” And what that does for our characters in the Walking Dead universe is open the door to what that could be. The world is big out there. It’s bigger than the universe that we’ve known for the past ten seasons. Anything could happen with these crazy stormtroopers. They are

the gateway into—if you follow the comics—the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, from what we know from the comics, and we don’t know yet how closely the show is going to follow this, but the comics show the Commonwealth, this entirely new community. And it looks, for the moment, like those soldiers are very much from the Commonwealth. So I guess we’ll have to see what unfolds in season 11.

SPO!LER

There are so many spinoffs and different possibilities with the storyline.

Even though The Walking Dead is coming to an end, the TWD universe won’t be coming to an end anytime soon. I think your character is going to get a spinoff. I feel it. Am I right?

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ELEANOr matsuura

[laughs] I don’t know either, man!

OM SPO!LER

Say it! Come on!

ELEANOr matsuura

SPO!LER

You’re gonna eat forever. Ten years from now fans are still gonna be just as excited as they are now.

ELEANOr matsuura

I really hope I do. I think, you’re right, the universe from The Walking Dead clearly isn’t going anywhere. There’s so many spinoffs. I think it really is going to be something that runs and runs. But you’re right to sort of say that this season has to end. I think it’s so natural that it will, but we also have this extended season.

We’re going to be around for awhile.

I know that all of the cast just feels like, with that information and with that knowledge, everyone’s gonna go diving into season 11 wanting it to be the best that it can be. And everyone I think is going to just feel so grateful to be back and working because we’ve missed it so much. I have a really good feeling about the final season. I think it’s gonna be amazing, I really do.

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SPO!LER

I’m sure you already know this, but your hair is much nicer than the comic character.

ELEANOr matsuura

[laughs] She has a severe cut. I get a lot of good love for my hair. It’s kinda nice. I’m like, “Thanks, guys!” That’s props to our amazing—AMAZING— hair crew, and our makeup crew, they’re just extraordinary—Taylor [Knight] and Tiff [Simpson], just a big shout out, because they’re the best.

SPO!LER

Hairstylists are gonna survive, you know why? Because they know how to use scissors. They’re gonna stab the zombies in the neck.

ELEANOr matsuura

Halfway through season 9, I remember Angela saying about me and Magna and Luke and Connie and Kelly, “You’re representing an eclectic, sort of European, group, that needs to feel new and fresh and like you’re from a different place.” So she let us have different haircuts. She let us keep our jewelry in. We didn’t have to abide by previous rules that would be like, “There’d be nothing left. No one would be wearing jewelry. Everyone would be in certain types of clothes.”

They wanted us to look like we came from somewhere different, so we kinda started moving things forward in that way where we could like, keep some bits of our costume and jewelry and hair stuff. Basically just still keeping it fresh even during times of the apocalypse. You just never know who you’re gonna run into [laughs].

Eleanor Matsuura/IMDb/Getty/The Walking Dead/AMC/Into the Badlands/AMC/AP

Honest, honest, honest, hand on heart, at this moment in time, I don’t know. I’ve heard rumors and I have some ideas. But they’re just ideas.

Until I have a script in my hand and I’m acting out that scene on set, then I’m not being held to anything.

I’ve gotten used to doing that with this show. Things change, storylines change, and there’s just no way of being like, “This is definitely going to happen.” In a way, I’m glad I don’t know. I can’t deal with that level of responsibility and secrecy, it’s just too much [laughs].

SPO!LER

A lot has changed since you and your folks walked on last season. I’ve noticed the dynamic of that crew has changed. Do you feel friendships have been lost or is it because you’ve entered into this place that has so many different characters that you have to take your role within them moving forward?

ELEANOr matsuura

I love this question because when I first joined with the crew, it was such a big thing to join as a family.

So many people join in the show in these little pockets of other people.

It’s very rare to have people like Paola who’s been completely on their own as a loner who’s come in. And we made sure, behind the scenes and off camera, that we welcomed her as Paola and made her feel completely comfortable and made sure she had an easy time fitting it. Because it’s

really hard, like joining anything as a solo person. But also as characters, like Yumiko started in the show with this little family. My crew was like my family. We had this motto, “Ride or die.” We were a proper crew; a proper unit. And throughout the last season, whether it was in really overt ways, like me and Magna splitting up, fighting, falling out, clearly going our separate ways, or it was more subtle, like Connie’s kinda doing her own thing with Daryl. She and her sister are still really close, but they’re moving in different directions. Luke’s got this interest going on in Oceanside and doing his own thing. There’s definitely been fractures in the group, that are not bad fractures—I don’t think anyone is hating on each other, apart from me and Magna— but it just sort of naturally started to loosen and expand and infiltrate into other groups and communities.

There’s one episode which I thought really portrayed it well. It was when Luke decided to head off to Oceanside on a mission and I was sort of left back at the community. And they had me stand off at the side in the distance at the back of Hilltop watching while the convoy set off, and everybody was saying goodbye, and they had me separate and apart from the group. It was really strange, because the writers started planting the seeds early on that I was kind of graduating on from this group, and we were all outgrowing each other.

They used really subtle moments like that, like keeping me apart within the scene, to show that maybe I was

M

moving in a different direction. And to film it kinda felt like that. I was like, “Oh man, I really feel far apart from my original crew.” And there’s a sadness to that, which is good because it’s very real, and it’s exactly what Yumiko’s feeling. But I think there has to be a little bit of outgrowing each other and a little bit of saying goodbye and letting go in order for me to go on and have this, hopefully lovely new adventure and a whole new existence and storyline to take me on something completely separate.

That’s what it seems to be setting up for anyway. I mean, who knows what will actually happen, but I think she’s ready for it.

SPO!LER

Outside of The Walking Dead, what’s going on with you?

ELEANOr matsuura

Well, things are starting to roll again.

The industry is definitely picking up.

Things are starting to shoot again in the UK. I can’t really travel. Obviously things are a little bit more precarious with traveling internationally to shoot stuff. I’m shooting stuff here in the UK. There’s a couple of TV shows going on, which are very, very different from The Walking Dead, NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

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SPO!LER

Is this something you can share or we gotta wait for that?

ELEANOr matsuura

I think you’re gonna have to wait for that. It’s honestly baby steps right now. I don’t wanna spoil any baby ideas before they’ve found their little wings yet. Maybe next time, a few drafts in, I’ll be able to share a little bit more of what I’m working on.

SPO!LER

Do you believe in the paranormal?

ELEANOr matsuura

I believe in ghosts, witches, spirit guides, hexes, spells, science and Mother Nature. It’s a real party in my brain

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SPO!LER

Has anything paranormal happened to you during quarantine?

ELEANOr matsuura

Something happened the other day.

It’s not paranormal, but I’m quite superstitious, and I’m very good at noticing coincidences and reading signs, and—this is gonna sound completely insane [laughs]—I’ll often look for signs from the environment on where to go or what to do, or a feeling, you know? For example, we have a lot of cats in our neighborhood. I have two cats and there are a lot in our neighborhood that run on the street.

And there was this one time where I needed to go and have a difficult conversation with a neighbor, and I was like, “Is this a good time? Should I go out?” And when I really wasn’t sure if

I should do it, I remember getting out of my car outside of my house, and suddenly it just started raining. Like REALLY raining. The skies opened and this rain was just pouring down.

I was like, “Mmm, okay, this looks like a sign to go home and just chill.” So as I walked past my neighbors house thinking, “Is this the moment to go have this conversation?” there was this cat—one of the cats from the neighborhood. He’s like the meanest cat, he’s like a real a**hole, and he was sitting in the rain, on the doorstep of this neighbor’s house—and it’s not this neighbor’s cat—just looking at me, really glaring at me, giving me the evil eye. And I looked at that and was like, “Okay, there’s the sign.

I’m not going in. Everything’s telling me that’s a bad idea. Don’t go there.

Go home.” So it’s not paranormal, but I am trying to clue into signs and signals and the environment around me that tells me, “Yeah, do that,” or, “Maybe don’t do that,” or, “Yeah, that’s safe to go there,” or “Actually, maybe don’t walk down there.” I’m very tuned into that kinda stuff. Do I sound mad? I can’t handle really, really scary things, but love hearing about other people’s experiences and I really believe it. Why do we love the paranormal?

Eleanor Matsuura/IMDb/Getty/The Walking Dead/AMC/Into the Badlands/AMC/Invision/AP

so it’s kinda nice. I get to sort of flex a different muscle and be a different character for a little bit, which always feels fun. And I’m writing a lot. I’m really trying to use this time to carry on writing and creating my own stuff, and creating my own show. I’m very much in this sort of embers of that creative process at the moment, so it’s still baby steps. But it’s pretty awesome. It feels nice to be creative again, to be perfectly honest. For such a long time over lockdown I wasn’t. And I couldn’t because I’m a mom and I’m running all around with my toddler a lot of the time [laughs].

But I kinda got my juice back for it, so I’m really enjoying creating my own stuff. Who knows what will happen with that. Maybe it will just be for me, or maybe we’ll get it made and it will be a really cool show. And maybe we’ll be back in SPO!LER Magazine talking about that!

to leave of my own volition then they withhold the right to hire a professional assassin to take me out. So I’m not sure it’s worth the fuss tbh especially as it’s the finale season.

R SPO!LER

Did you plan on being part of The Waking Dead or did it just happen?

ELEANOr matsuura

SPO!LER

Would you ever go into a haunted location?

ELEANOr matsuura

Yes but only with 20 friends. Five to stand in front of me, five behind me and five on either side at all times to provide a sort of buffer between myself and anything creepy that might suddenly jump out.

SPO!LER

Are there any cities in this world that spook you out?

ELEANOr matsuura

Venice. Once you’ve seen Don’t Look Now you can’t visit that city and not s**t your pants.

SPO!LER

It just happened. My agent called me one morning and said he had an audition for me that was so top secret, no one actually knew what I was auditioning for! I had to sign three NDAs and wear a large hat and a mask—which I know is all the rage now but this was pre-COVID times so it was really quite unusual. Turns out it was for TWD of course! I was disappointed not to get to wear the hat and mask as Yumiko in the show.

SPO!LER

Were you a fan of the zombie genre prior to The Walking Dead?

ELEANOr matsuura

I can’t watch horror really. I am rather scared of a lot of things and don’t need to add to the fear.

SPO!LER

What got you started in acting?

ELEANOr matsuura

I’ve always wanted to be so rich and famous that I just completely lose touch with reality. There seemed to be a few paths I could have chosen to achieve this but acting seemed like the easiest.

SPO!LER

Was it hard breaking into the American acting scene?

ELEANOr matsuura Nah. [laughs]

Ok, answer the next questions as quickly and randomly as possible: Would you ever leave The Walking Dead for another series?

SPO!LER

ELEANOr matsuura

ELEANOr matsuura

Oh sure! But sadly they make you sign a contract in blood which clearly states in clause 1984 that if I decide

How hard is it for someone from the UK to become an actor here in Hollywood?

It’s easy. Just act more British than ever. Hollywood loves it! I speak super posh when I’m there. I also tell everyone I ride a pony and that I only drink “cuppas” or “pints.” Oh, and

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ELEANOr matsuura

Wear a mask. Vote. But not for that guy. Be kind to animals.

SPO!LER

I know Andrew Lincoln was a person that everyone on the series looked up to. Since he left who is the one person you look up to is the series?

ELEANOr matsuura

Cailey Flemming. No joke. If we’re lucky she will run the world one day and it’s not worthy of her.

SPO!LER

If you can change anything about The Walking Dead universe what would you change? that I once dated Prince Harry.

SPO!LER

Does your family support your career?

ELEANOr matsuura

They think it’s hilarious I have managed to make money from pretending to do jobs that I am in no way qualified to do in real life.

SPO!LER

You said that you rarely get recognized because you live in a small town in the UK. Do you sometimes wish you lived in an area where everyone noticed you?

ELEANOr matsuura

Yes. I imagine being hugely famous will fill the empty void inside. [laughs]

SPO!LER

Are you getting excited for 2021 in the hopes that you can get back to a normal working schedule and hopefully go to conventions all over the world where you can meet your fans face-to-face?

ELEANOr matsuura

ELEANOr matsuura

The cast are great and all, but have you ever heard of craft services? Free coffee and snackies all day!

The accessories. Yumiko needs sunglasses in the summer and a woolly hat in the winter.

SPO!LER

SPO!LER

ELEANOr matsuura

By the time The Walking Dead the series is over including the spinoffs, movies, etc., etc., almost a decade of your life will be dedicated to it. How do you feel about that?

ELEANOr matsuura

[laughs] Old. And a little tired. But mostly old.

SPO!LER

What would you say is the best part of being in The Walking Dead?

Any final words for your fans and our readers?

“Thank you so much for your patience. It’s been a hard year for everyone.

I know the finale being stalled was really hard for a lot of people who are diehard fans of the show. You guys are the best. Your loyalty is incredible and I hope you love the finale as much as I did. I want to promise you that this final season will be incredible. I can’t wait to hear what you think about it all. And once this is over, I can’t wait to meet you all in person. I really can’t. I’m so excited!”

ELEANOr matsuura

SPO!LER

If all of your fans from around the globe read this article, what message would you give them?

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Eleanor Matsuura/IMDb/Getty/AP

I’m excited and worried in equal measure. I haven’t been around large groups of people in so long. I’m worried I might just burst into tears or spontaneously combust.

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by Matthew McLachlan

Here’s the thing, folks. I love writing

this year and the pandemic specifically: All of this BS has been like a weight placed on top of everyone’s life. And just like any weight placed on something, if that something wasn’t sturdy enough to begin with, that weight was gonna bring it crashing down. Meaning, if you had a job, relationship, career, or anything else that wasn’t totally solid, this pandemic has made that very clear to you. And isn’t that a gift? On the flip side, if that weight didn’t break what it was put on, then it strengthened that which you already had! Sure, we would’ve liked to have come to that conclusion without ruining our favorite pajamas because we wore them 100 days in a row, but some sacrifices are necessary.

So, the next time you want to flick off 2020 or rant about how it was the shittiest year ever, perhaps it was exactly the year you needed to reset, get stronger, and see what

O And I love writing for this magazine. I mean, where else am I allowed to make as many obscure references people will actually get while being sarcastic and bitter all at the same time? Buzzfeed?! Ew, no. Regardless, I pride myself on doing good work and delivering that work on time.

This month I was bringing you top-notch articles about what the Geekdom has in store for 2021 and why New Year’s needs more movies centered around it. Alas, 2020 wanted to give me one last kick in the pants before shoving me into whatever the hell 2021 has planned by deleting said articles off of my computer the day they were due with literally no means of recovering them. What else can 2020 bring us before it goes kicking and screaming into the void? Hey, the government’s officially acknowledged that aliens exist! Why don’t we just

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go ahead and get invaded by those little assholes! It’s true, look it up.

In truth, I’m actually very excited for the New Year and what it may bring for not just the Geekdom, but for everyone out there. Sure, we’ve all taken a punch to the gut this year, some harder than others, but at the very least, we’ve all had our lives severely inconvenienced. But here’s the thing I like to say about

a movie. Maybe next year. So, take the bullshit from 2020 and let it guide you through 2021. I truly believe that 2020 was the embodiment of the phrase, “It’s darkest just before the dawn.” Granted, Harvey Dent said that in The Dark Knight right before his girlfriend died and half of his face was burnt off, but I’m pretty sure 2021’s gonna be just fine, right? Right?!

Revista Digital Inesem/BKA Content/El Observador Del Sur/John Nacion/Nurphoto/Getty Images/Milenio Diario/AP/Arte de Prudencia/Asgard Computers

it is you truly need from this life. Kinda like getting all your articles deleted by one of the smartest machines on the planet: You take the hit and find that maybe what you’re really supposed to write about is something personal that people may connect with instead of a sarcasm-fueled paragraph about how When Harry Met Sally is one of the greatest instances of New Year’s Eve in

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SPOILER MAGAZINE

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JERSEY GODS Issue #3

Written by: Glen Brunswick | art by: Dan McDavid | colors by: Rachelle Rosenberg As far as indie comics go, this does a great job of touching all the bases. The humor is pretty light, the art is every bit up to par, and there’s plenty of action without dragging out or becoming boring. The way the narrative bounces around from heavy action to revealing dialogue is very impressive and shouldn’t be overlooked.

The bad

For all the action we get, the story never really pulls you in the way a really good comic book should.

Obviously there’s no staple superhero who we all know and love/ hate. These are no-name guys, and to overcome that disadvantage you need a really compelling story. And while the story isn’t bad, it’s not compelling either.

The Veredict

The best thing this book has going for it is how it balances the action with the dialogue, never allowing the latter to clutter the former and interrupt its flow. Indie comics are a matter of taste. It’s typically a genre I love to indulge in, but to rank up there with the best, you have to separate yourself a bit more.

While Jersey Gods doesn’t quite do that, I still think it’s a comic worth reading, just not one I’d have high on my recommendations list.

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score

6.0 Jersey Gods/Image Comics/Echo/Terry Moore/Abstract Studio

The Good

ECHO

Issue #3

created by: Terry Moore

The Good

Black and white comics aren’t generally my cup of tea. Even when the stories are compelling, the artwork almost always comes off as bland. Likewise, the art in Echo doesn’t pop off the page by any means, even though I can truly respect the attention to detail, which is the one thing this book really has going for it.

The bad

If you’re big on action, then this is definitely not the comic for you.

And while a comic book can definitely be great even without action, it usually has humor to make up for it. With no action and no humor, it’s very difficult to engage your audience. Echo has neither, and by the time I got to the midpoint, I had lost my interest to keep reading.

The Veredict

I wouldn’t go as far to say this is a bad comic book. While I personally can’t connect to a single part of it, I can see it having a niche following. Comics need a solid blend of art, detail, and dialogue

score to create a smooth flow. Yet at no point does this comic even attempt to do that. Clunky dialogue needs be loaded with humor. And dialogue-heavy comics can absolutely work if you can balance action, humor, and vibrant art. But this comic is much too talkative with nothing else going on. Other than the details in the drawing, nothing stands out in this one.

4.0

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SMAx

Issue #3 of 5 Written by: Alan Moore | art by: Zander Cannon | Colors by: Ben Dimagmaliw

An indie comic book HAS to be unique, otherwise it’ll end up lost in the shuffle and only get read by people who buy a bundle of random comics online. Saying Smax is unique would be putting it mildly. The humor is very dry, but it’s definitely present and keeps the story flowing even when there’s no action to intensify it.

The bad

The tough thing about dialogue in comics is finding the right balance of how much exposition you want to incorporate without being verbose. There’s a fair amount of talking that happens in the middle of this story that can be taken out without skipping a beat in the slightest. Despite how wordy it is, the story doesn’t drag or make you constantly feel like checking the page count.

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The Veredict

The artwork is neither helpful nor hurtful. Generally the art is what really grabs our attention in a comic, so looking simple isn’t ideal.

However, the character profiles are intriguing, each with their own mythical vibe and specific superpower to help differentiate these brand new characters. This might not be for the casual comic book fan, but if you’re looking for something new and uncommon in the comic book universe, Smax is a great change of pace.

Smax/America’s Best/DC/Jack of Fables/Vertigo/DC

The Good

score

7.0

JACK OF FABLES Issue #23

Written by: Bill Willingham | art by: Mark Buckingham

The Good

I’m not typically a fan of Westerns, and I was never the type of kid who dressed up like a cowboy on Halloween, but admittedly there’s something pretty cool about a comic book based on a cowboy.

Jack Homer is a raging sociopath, which some might say is a bit of a cliche. However, it’s much more rare to see that role be taken on by the protagonist. Tone is very important in telling a good story, and Jack of Fables has a dark comedic tone that, if nothing else, will keep you interested and curious about what happens next.

The bad

It’s easy to feel like this book relies a lot on all the smoking, gambling, and violence, and lacking substance because of them.

However, this is how the writers wanted to portray this deranged

cowboy. It might be bothersome for certain people, but those people probably aren’t picking up an underrated type of comic like this in the first place.

The Veredict

Although the art doesn’t exactly pop off the page, the look and even the texture of the page is perfect for setting the Western vibe. The gambling, the drinking, and the unexpected murders are all things we’ve become desensitized to thanks to music and movies, but there’s a definite deficiency of those elements when it comes to comic books. Jack of Fables is a great read, hitting a lot of its marks.

score

7.5

NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

I 79

JURASSIC PARK

Raptor’s Hijack #2 of 4 Written by: Steve Englehart | PENCILED by: Neil Vokes | Colors by: Renée

The Veredict

This Jurassic Park spin-off stays true to the spirit of the films like very few comics or novels ever do.

The bad

The story isn’t deep and the plot is fairly predictable with no real twists or turns, but this could very well be a desirable quality to some readers. More disappointingly, the comic never gives you a protagonist worth rooting for. In fact, I actually find myself rooting for the dinosaurs instead, which I’m not sure was the writers’ intention.

80 I

|NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020

Jurassic Park Raptors Hijack/Universal/Amblin/Topps

The Good

There’s nothing wrong with knowing exactly what to expect when going into a comic book.

As a matter of fact, those are the exact types of movies that tend to kill it at the box office, so obviously it can be an asset to have.

Just like the movie, this comic entertains, but it’s not going to surprise you or have you excited to turn the page. This is just a solid book that delivers exactly what you were looking for when you picked it up.

score

6.5

Deathmate Prologue/Valiant/Image Comics

DEATHMATE Prologue

Written by: Bob Layton | pencils by: Barry Windsor-Smith | inks by: Jim Lee | colors by: Joe Chiodo

The Good

Right out the gate we have Gayle, a woman begging to be killed because all her friends have grown old and died and she feels alone in the world. One page in and the tone is already set. Solar must part with the woman he loves.

The earlier we have reason to root for our hero is always for the better.

The bad

The direction of the story is where this comic loses me. Everything after the first couple of pages, up until the last couple of pages feels like it’s not strung together at all.

There’s so much action, but so little context for it all. The paneling is impressive, but when we can’t make sense of the bubbles, it’s hard to fully enjoy the story.

The Veredict

There’s a ton of cool imagery along the way, but throughout the first half of the book, it’s like the more you read, the more confused you get. We get a better sense of where the story is head

around the last third when Solar wakes up and it’s the year 1993.

But at that point it’s too late.

We spend way too much time trying to make sense of what’s at stake and figuring out what they’re even talking about. This issue does a decent job setting up issues 2 through 6, and we like where things are headed. Here’s hoping it only gets better because the potential is clearly there.

score

5.0

NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020|

I 81

SPIRIT OF TAO issue #11

Written by: D-Tron | pencils by: Billy Tan | inks by: Team Tron’s D-Tron, Andy Kim, & Jeff De Los Santos | Colors by: Jonathan D. Smith I love how unique this issue feels. There are a couple of pages that take place in this universe’s version of Heaven, filled with kids who were infected with the Tao virus. For two pages, this story takes us out of this dark, grim world and places us in a bright and beautiful one filled with children and animals. This presents an interesting contrast for the next two pages, which show us their version of Hell.

The bad

My only real knock (which, I’ll admit, is kind of a big one) is the character of Lance. He’s the last hope for mankind to survive what Mother Earth is throwing at them, and we really need him to be a badass hero. However, there’s nothing special about him. Even if you argue that Jasmine is the real protagonist here, that statement can apply to her as well.

The Veredict

Spirit of Tao feels like the David Lynch version of a comic book.

82 I

|NYE SPECIAL EDITION 2020

It looks really cool, it’s confusing at times, but by the end of it you’re thinking, “I’m not sure what I just read, but it was pretty dope.” Heroes aside, great art and a captivating story are what’s most important to a good comic, and this one has both in spades.

Bonus points for being the type of comic I wanted to read twice in a row just to get a better feel for it overall.

score

8.0

Spirit of the Tao/Top Cow

The Good