Mr. Miyagi returns and creators 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 thing 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 resurrected—and some of the latest technology available today—Mr. Miyagi.

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

Learning this story devastates 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 in the same?

Section 10 entitled, Eunjangdo, opens with a confused Daniel at a former Sekai Taikai seconds before he battles a young Miyagi, played by Brian Takahashi, in the competition’s final match. Fans cheer loudly for Miyagi as Daniel pleads with him to explain what is happening. Without a second to think about it, Daniel starts playing defense.

“Mr. 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’s saying.

Daniel asks Miyagi to talk to him because there is so much he has 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, the sound coming out of him being Morita as a character.

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

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

In it 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 they worked 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 did something most people thought was impossible, you brought Mr. Miyagi back! Please share your secrets.

JON HURWITZ: This was something that was a long time coming. It was something we weren’t sure we wanted to do on the show. But as technology has improved 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 delved into this story, we dug deeper into Mr. Miyagi’s past and learned elements of his life that Daniel or we ever knew about. To learn that Mr. Miyagi apparently killing someone on Sekai Taikai might be something that would roll 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) property and making sure they were comfortable with it. We also contacted one of Pat’s daughters with whom we have a relationship. Ralph talked to her about the scene to make sure everyone was on board and comfortable with what we were doing. We did our best to work with a great company to deliver and there were lots of rounds of notes, from voice AI to deepfake. We were satisfied with the result.

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

Josh Heald: We are not completely familiar with it, as it is not exactly our field. But there is a combination of practical and digital and artificial technologies coming together to make it happen. There is a real stand-in performer for that moment. There’s some digital design, like face mapping, that’s happening and using artificial intelligence for all that, especially when it comes to voice. With the voice, it doesn’t just start out as computer generated. It has to start with a performance and a tone to match so it doesn’t feel flat. We used some technologies that were not available a year ago.

DEADLINE: Is it something you have used before?

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

LUCK: Yes, 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 that we have now.

DEADLINE: So for the voice we hear that sounds like Mr. Morita, is that his voice?

HURWITZ: They took in all the sound from his performances The Karate Kid film and they feed it into a machine and then the AI ​​does its thing.

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

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: Absolutely. In our middle 5 episodes, 6 to 10, we always knew we were going to end it with a big bang. It’s our last chance to really have a huge cliffhanger for the audience because the next 5 coming out will end the series. So it was a matter of how we wanted things to develop at Sekai Taikai. We’ve always liked the idea of ​​a brawl between players off the mat. You see this all the time in sporting events, where all of a sudden there are a couple of opponents on the team who start fighting. Then all the players mix 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 it would take a fight to another level; it would be explosive. This situation allowed us to have adults and children involved in the middle of a karate match. We felt it was a wild way to throw the whole tournament into chaos. And in that chaos we pay off all these different stories we’ve been following and let all the rivalries be unleashed.

All this time Kreese has had this Eunjangdo knife and you wonder 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 that the brawl also served to highlight everyone’s fighting skills? You have such a large cast that one has to imagine that there is not enough time to show as much as you would like.

LUCK: 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 mood, and this one is 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 are dead,” that’s how we start to lay (the foundation of) the mystery and the danger of it .

So when you watch the tournament itself and it unfolds, we want to make sure that the audience is in the same position as our characters, and our eyes into this tournament. This is where we see different types of martial arts and events that we have never seen before The Karate Kid universe. Like the tag team events, floating balance beams and all sorts of things that just inherently and without weapons involved feel like someone could get badly hurt.

The more you get into it, the more it just becomes the status quo of the tournament, and I don’t think you really think about anybody getting hurt badly. The deeper you go, even if 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 emphasize the gravity 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 thing happen in front of the world. So in terms of what’s coming next, it puts us in the best position to be in to hopefully get well ahead of the audience and not let the last 5 episodes looming feel like an obvious payoff for what’s coming next time. 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.