Mr. Miyagi returns and makers explain how they did it

SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points from Cobra Kai Season 6, Part 2

In what will undoubtedly be the biggest spoiler of the whole Cobra Kai series, co-creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg managed to do the impossible.

In the final episode of the Netflix series’ sixth season, Part 2, the trio (and some of the latest technology available today) brought Mr. Miyagi back to life.

The sixth and final season of the popular martial arts drama focused largely on the mysterious past hidden by the legendary Nariyoshi Keisuke Miyagi. It was revealed that he was responsible for the death of a participant in a Sekai Taikai competition when he was a younger man.

Learning this history devastates Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and it will take him time to come to terms with it. 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 in a few seconds of Sekai Taikai before fighting a young Miyagi, played by Brian Takahashi, in the final match of the competition. Fans cheer loudly for Miyagi as Daniel begs him to explain what is happening. Without thinking about it for another second, Daniel starts playing defense.

“Sir. Miyagi, it’s me!” Daniel exclaims, but the man across from him remains silent and focused.

He adds: “If this is a lesson, I don’t understand it.”

Miyagi replies, “Lesson? Pft,” proving that he can hear Daniel and understand what he is saying.

Daniel asks Miyagi to talk to him because there is so much he never told him.

“I just need to understand why,” he pleads.

“That was always your problem, Daniel-san. So eager to understand, but unwilling to accept,” Miyagi replies and the sound that comes out of him is that of Morita as a character.

Just as Miyagi is about to finish him off, something happens.

“Miyagi never tells you everything, Daniel-san, because you are never strong enough to accept the truth,” said Morita, who died in 2005, as Miyagi (pictured above), before punching Daniel so hard that he knocked him out of his dream woke up.

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 previously said that they worked with Morita’s family and that the person who created the character to ensure respect was always paramount. This part of his story is considered canon. More about this and the technology they used can be found in our Q&A below.

TERM: You did something many thought impossible: you brought back Mr. Miyagi! Please share your secrets.

JON HURWITZ: This was something that has been a long time coming. It was something we weren’t sure we would do on the show. But as technology improved and we were in our final season – before Season 6, we sat down with Ralph and talked about what he would like to see in this final season. And the idea of ​​him sharing screen time with Pat Morita again was something he would love to make happen. As we went through this story, we dug deeper into Mr. Miyagi’s past and learned elements of his life that neither Daniel nor we ever knew about. Learning that Mr. Miyagi apparently killed someone in the Sekai Taikai could swirl in Daniel’s head in an emotional way and possibly 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) legacy and making sure they were comfortable with that. We also reached out to one of Pat’s daughters who we are in a relationship with. Ralph talked to her about the scene to make sure everyone was on board and felt good about what we were doing. We did our best to work with a great company that would deliver results and there were tons of endorsements, from voice AI to deepfake. We were happy with the result.

TERM: What can you tell us about the technologies, since they all seem relatively new?

JOSH HEALD: We are not completely comfortable with it, because it is not exactly our way. But there is a combination of practical, digital and artificial technologies that come together to make this possible. There is a real stand-in performer for that moment. There’s digital design, like face mapping and using artificial intelligence for that, especially when it comes to voting. With the voice, it doesn’t start out as just computer-generated. It needs to start with a performance and a tone that needs to be fine-tuned so it doesn’t feel flat. We’ve used some technologies that weren’t available a year ago.

TERM: Is this something you used before?

HURWITZ: We had a deepfake of young Johnny in season 5.

HEALTH: Yes, for a brief moment in Kreese’s prison hallucination. When he sees the ghosts of his past, Johnny is one of them. It was a little different because we didn’t have the voice technology that we have now.

TERM: So as for the voice we hear that sounds like Mr. Morita’s, is that his voice?

HURWITZ: They took all the audio from his performances The karate kid movies, and they feed it into a machine and then the AI ​​does its thing.

TERM: Episode 10 shows viewers that not only does death occur in these types of tournaments, it’s not even a rarity. Is that why you chose to kill Kwon Jae-Sung (Brandon H. Lee) at the Sekai Taikai?

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: Absolute. In our middle five 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 the audience, as the next five to come out will bring an end to the series. So the question was 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 this all the time at sporting events, where suddenly there are a few 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 everyone 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 engage adults and children in the middle of a karate fight. We felt this was a wild way to throw the entire tournament into chaos. And in that chaos, we pay for all these different storylines that we’ve been following and let go of all the rivalries.

This whole time Kreese has had this Eunjangdo knife and you wonder how and who it will be used for. It could be anyone from Johnny to Daniel or Silver. And yet it ends up in the hands of one of the fiercest students in the world.

TERM: Would you say the brawl also served to highlight everyone’s fighting abilities? You have such a large cast that you have to imagine there isn’t enough time to show as much as you would like.

HEALTH: These five episodes are real, The empire strikes back part of these three drops. We made a real effort 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 atmosphere, of which this one is the darkest. We introduced this in Episode 4 when Mike Barnes said, “This is a dangerous tournament and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. People have died,” so we begin to lay the foundation for its mystery and danger.

So as you see the tournament itself and it evolves, we want to make sure that the audience is in the same position as our characters and our eyes are watching this tournament. Here we see different types of martial arts and events that we have never seen before in the world Karate kid universe. Like the tag team events, floating balance beams and all kinds of things where, just by the nature of the events themselves and without any weapons involved, it feels like someone could get extremely hurt.

The more you get into it, the more it becomes the status quo of the tournament and I don’t think you really think anyone could get seriously hurt. The deeper you go, even if it gets higher and higher, you get used to it and it becomes familiar. But we always wanted to end this moment with this tragedy, to pull the rug out from under the story and underline the gravity of the moment itself.

We wanted to create this, “What the hell is going to happen now?” kind of situation for all the characters. We care about them and they have worked so hard to reach this international stage, only to have the worst possible thing happen in front of the world. So in terms of what comes next, it puts us in the best position to be in, to hopefully get a big head start on the audience, and not make the last five episodes looming feel like an obvious payoff for what comes next. It creates a situation in which the story yet to be told is less predictable and has new highlights and stakes.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.