Cobra Kai Boss Explains That Jaw-Dropping Part 2 Cameo: [Spoiler] Is ‘the Beating Heart of This Series’
The following contains major spoilers from the Season 6, Part 2 finale of Cobra Kai!
Daniel LaRusso has had a rough go of it in Cobra Kai’s final season thus far, as the mysterious box full of Miyagi’s secrets leads him to question his mentor’s past and teachings. And in the first few moments of the Season 6, Part 2 finale, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad nightmare rattles him to his core and gives us viewers a shock of our own.
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The nightmare is a literal one, transporting Daniel to the past as he prepares to fight in the last match of a Sekai Taikai. His opponent? A younger version of Mr. Miyagi. As the two trade jabs, Daniel tries to ask him why he kept so much from him. “That was always your problem, Daniel-san,” says Miyagi. “So eager to understand, but unwilling to accept.” Daniel is then thrown to the ground and punched repeatedly, stunning him. After blinking a few times, he sees a vision of the elder Miyagi we all know and love: the version played by the dearly departed Pat Morita. “Miyagi never tell you everything Daniel-san because you’re never strong enough to accept truth!” Daniel then wakes up in a panic.
We had a lot of questions about Morita’s posthumous cameo [the actor died in 2005 at the age of 73], so we went right to the source: Cobra Kai’s creators.
“Pat and Miyagi are the beating heart of this series,” says co-creator and executive producer Josh Heald, “and without Mr. Miyagi, there would be no Karate Kid and there would be no Miyagi-verse, as we like to call it. For so many seasons, we’ve told a Miyagi story that was focused on the absence of Mr. Miyagi. This season, we’re digging into a little bit more of the looming presence of new information, new ideas or a new glimpse into a part of Mr. Miyagi’s life that the series has never focused on. That Daniel has never been aware of. So by digging more into that and getting more and more in Daniel’s head with his kind of tortured idea of, ‘What didn’t he know?’… does that affect and infect his opinion of Mr. Miyagi?”
In order to replicate Morita’s likeness and voice on screen, the co-creators — which also include Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg — employed an assortment of visual effects and AI to pull it off. Naturally, approval from the late actor’s estate was also a factor.
“There’s a lot of technical things that you need to do with visual effects,” adds Heald. “There’s obviously talking to Pat’s estate and making sure that they’re aware and that they’re comfortable and that they sign off on that. We’re still coming out of the wild, wild west of AI and visual effects, and we’re entering a place of needing to have some standards in terms of how you present that. You can’t just do anything you want. Even though you’re not having an actor there on set, it’s still his likeness. So we went through all of that process, which was important to us and the studio, and feel like we’ve captured this unfortunate vision that Daniel is having of being trapped in this nightmare that he’s been in. He’s been kind of in a waking nightmare and then he’s having a literal nightmare where a Miyagi like we’ve never seen visits him.”
Surprised, Cobra Kai fans? What did you think about Morita’s finale cameo? Sound off by dropping some comments below.
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