‘Cobra Kai’ Creators Wax On About How They Brought Back Mr. Miyagi
SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points from Cobra Kai Season 6, Part 2
In what will be no doubt the biggest spoiler of the entire Cobra Kai series, co-creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg managed to do the impossible.
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In the final episode of the Netflix series’ sixth season, part 2, the trio—and some of the latest technology available today—resurrected Mr. Miyagi.
The sixth and final season of the hit martial arts dramedy has focused largely on the mystery past hidden away by the legendary Nariyoshi Keisuke Miyagi. It was revealed he was responsible for the death of a competitor at a Sekai Taikai competition when he was a younger man.
Learning this history wrecks Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and will take him time to process. He finds it impossible to reconcile the man he admired with this stranger who did something unforgivable. Are they one and the same?
Episode 10 titled, Eunjangdo, opens with a confused Daniel at a past Sekai Taikai seconds before battling a young Miyagi, played by Brian Takahashi, in the final match of the competition. Fans cheer loudly for Miyagi while Daniel pleads with him to explain what’s happening. Without a second left to ponder, Daniel begins playing defense.
“Mr. Miyagi, it’s me!” Daniel exclaims but the man opposite him remains silent and focused.
He adds, “If this is a lesson, I’m not getting it.”
Miyagi replies, “Lesson? Pft,” proving that he can hear Daniel and understand what he’s saying.
Daniel asks Miyagi to talk to him because there’s so much he’s never told him.
“I just need to understand why,” he begs.
“That was always your problem, Daniel-san. So eager to understand but not willing to accept,” Miyagi replies and the sound that comes out of him is that of Morita as the character.
Just as Miyagi is going to finish him off, something happens.
“Miyagi never tell you everything, Daniel-san, because you never strong enough to accept truth,” Morita, who died in 2005, said as Miyagi (photo above), before punching Daniel so hard he woke him up from his dream.
In the Karate Kid universe, this part of Miyagi’s legacy has never been mentioned. But series co-creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg have said prior that they collaborated with Morita’s family and the person who created the character to ensure respect was always top of mind. This part of his story is considered canon. More on this and the technology they used below in our Q&A.
DEADLINE: You guys did something most thought impossible, you brought back Mr. Miyagi! Please share your secrets.
JON HURWITZ: This was something that was a long time coming. It was something we weren’t sure we would do on the show. But, as technology’s gotten better and we were in our final season—Before Season 6, we sat down with Ralph and discussed what he would love to see this final season. And the idea of him sharing screen time with Pat Morita again was something that he would love to find a way to make happen. As we went down this story we were digging deeper into Mr. Miyagi’s past and learning elements of his life that Daniel nor we ever knew about. Learning that Mr. Miyagi apparently killed somebody at the Sekai Taikai might be something that would be rolling around in Daniel’s head in an emotional way that could potentially lead to an interesting dream sequence.
If we were going to do this, we had to do it the right way by getting involved with [Morita’s] estate and making sure they were comfortable with it. We also contacted one of Pat’s daughters with whom we have a relationship. Ralph spoke with her about the scene to ensure everyone was on board and felt good about what we were doing. We did our best to work with a great company that was going to deliver and there were lots and lots of rounds of notes, from voice AI to the deepfake. We were pleased with the result.
DEADLINE: What can you share about the technologies as they all seem relatively new?
JOSH HEALD: We’re not completely versed in it as it’s not exactly our lane. But there’s a combination of practical and digital and artificial technologies that come together to make it happen. There’s a real stand-in performer for that moment. There’s some digital design, like mapping of faces that happens and using artificial intelligence for all that, especially when it comes to voicing. With the voice, it doesn’t begin as just computer generated. It has to start with a performance and a tone that needs to be matched so it doesn’t feel flat. We used some technologies that weren’t available even a year ago.
DEADLINE: Is this something you guys used before?
HURWITZ: We did have a deepfake of young Johnny in Season 5.
HEALD: Yes, for a brief moment in Kreese’s prison hallucination. When he sees the ghosts of his past, one of them is Johnny. It was a little different because we didn’t have the voice technology we do now.
DEADLINE: So for the voice we hear that sounds like Mr. Morita, that is his voice?
HURWITZ: They took all of the audio from his performances in The Karate Kid movies, and they feed it into a machine and then the AI does its thing.
DEADLINE: Episode 10 shows viewers that not only does death happen at these types of tournaments but it’s not even a rarity. Is that why you chose to kill off Kwon Jae-Sung (Brandon H. Lee) at the Sekai Taikai?
HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: Absolutely. In our middle 5 episodes, 6 through 10, we always knew we wanted to end it with a big bang. It’s our last chance to really have a huge cliffhanger for audiences because the next 5 that come out will end the series. So, it was a question of how we wanted things to develop at the Sekai Taikai. We’ve always liked the idea of a brawl between players off the mat. You see that in sporting events all the time, where all of a sudden there are a couple of opponents on the team who start fighting. Then all the players get involved, and the coaches get involved. What we liked about a karate tournament was that everybody there, from the teachers to the students, knew martial arts. So that would take a brawl to another level; it would be explosive. This situation allowed us to have adults and kids involved in the middle of a karate battle. We felt that was a wild way to throw the entire tournament into chaos. And in that chaos, we pay off all these different storylines we’ve been following and let all rivalries be unleashed.
This entire time, Kreese has had this Eunjangdo knife and you’re left wondering how and who it will be used on. It could be anyone from Johnny to Daniel or Silver. And yet it ends up in the hands of one of the most ferocious students there.
DEADLINE: Would you say the brawl also served to highlight everyone’s fighting abilities? You have such a large cast that one has to imagine there’s not enough time to show as much as you’d like.
HEALD: These five episodes are really, The Empire Strikes Back part of these three drops. We really took pains in the writers room, and the construction even before the writers room, to think of the 15 episodes as three interconnected stories that each have their own vibe with this one being the darkest. We introduced this in Episode 4 when Mike Barnes says, “This is a dangerous tournament and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. People have died,” that’s how we start laying [the groundwork for] the mystery and the danger of it.
So when you see the tournament itself and it evolves, we want to make sure the audience is in the same position as our characters as our eyes into this tournament. It’s where we see different types of martial arts and events we’ve never seen before in the Karate Kid universe. Like the tag team events, floating balance beams, and all sorts of things that, just by the very nature of the events themselves and without weapons being involved, it feels like someone could get tremendously hurt.
The more you get into it, the more it becomes just the status quo of the tournament and I don’t think you’re really thinking that somebody could get badly hurt. The deeper you get, even as it ramps up and up and up and up, you get used to it and it becomes familiar. But we always wanted to end at this moment with this tragedy to pull the rug out from under the story and to underline the severity of the moment itself.
We wanted to create this, “What the hell is going to happen now?” type of situation for all the characters. We care about them and they have worked so hard to get to this international stage only to have the worst possible thing happen in front of the world. So in terms of what comes next, it gives us the best position to be in, to hopefully get well ahead of the audience, and let those last 5 episodes that are looming not feel like an obvious payoff for what comes next. It creates a situation where the story yet to be told is less predictable and has new heights and stakes.
This interview was edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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