Cobra Kai showrunners talk THAT iconic Mr. Miyagi scene in the final episodes

Cobra Kai managed to bring us Mr. Miyagi, and not just through photos. The showrunners talk about the iconic fight scene and more in this interview.
Cobra Kai. (L to R) Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso, Yuji Okumoto as Chozen, William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai. Cr. Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix © 2024
Cobra Kai. (L to R) Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso, Yuji Okumoto as Chozen, William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai. Cr. Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix © 2024

The final season of Cobra Kai made us question a lot about Mr. Miyagi. The series explained it all in the end, but I wanted to know from the showrunners how they decided to go the route they did with the character.

I especially wanted to know more about the fight scene in “Skeletons,” the third hour of Cobra Kai season 6, part 3. Why choose that moment from the whole of the Karate Kid movies?

Choosing the skeleton fight scene to bring Mr. Miyagi back into the story in Cobra Kai

There are many iconic Mr. Miyagi moments from the series, and we have seen some of them via the use of the movie for flashback purposes. However, Cobra Kai brought Miyagi in via AI with the skeletons. What was the decision behind that scene?

Josh Heald explained this one:

“We wanted to have two moments in this final season where Daniel, who’s having a little bit of a tortured relationship with his memory and his understanding of Mr. Miyagi, you know? He has a nightmare in the middle five episodes, and this one feels like it starts as a nightmare but it actually turns into a very sweet moment between Daniel and Miyagi.

Daniel’s tortured. This is his journey; this is his dream. He’s trying to look for answers. For the entirety of the series, he’s been living in a world without Mr. Miyagi and just resting on Miyagi’s legacy—this infallible idea that can make everything better. Now he’s wrestling with the idea that, your parents, for lack of a better word, are not infallible. They’ve lived a life and…they didn’t always share everything with you. There’s not the full context unless you were there sometimes. So that’s what is represented.

Our job is to tell that story in a way that is exciting, and one of the most exciting parts of Karate Kid was Mr. Miyagi coming over the fence and beating the s**t out of the Cobra Kais, and we wanted to see that happen again.”

The risk of changing the character of Mr. Miyagi in Cobra Kai

There was the risk of changing everything we once knew and loved about Mr. Miyagi. The series wanted to tell the complete story, but why go a route that has us questioning everything we once knew?

Again, Heald had the answer to this one:

“It was important to us to not tell a fully complete story with Mr. Miyagi, because that wouldn’t be authentic. What we wanted to do was not just say ‘haha, just kidding, the Mr. Miyagi you remember from the movie was a terrible guy’ because that would be bad storytelling. We wanted to tell an authentic story about a man who in the series and the franchise has been treated like a saint, like a pope. But he’s a man, and he’s lived a life.

From the stories Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel in Karate Kid and Karate Kid Part 2, Mr. Miyagi dealt with a lot of tragedy, a lot of adversity, that could be the tip of the iceberg. We wanted to show that a bigger story exists. The unread pages of his life that he never sat down to write. Not all memories are happy.

We didn’t want to wrap things up wholly and completely by saying ‘now we have the full context, and we totally understand.’ We wanted Daniel to really end at a place where he realizes that ‘I wasn’t wrong to put my faith in Mr. Miyagi and to think of him as a good man. He is a good man. That’s the man I knew.’ There’s always going to be parts of people’s past we don’t have full context on, and that’s okay. It was important for us to tell that story in a mature way for Daniel.”

Cobra Kai is now available to stream on Netflix.