Cobra Kia creator talks plans for Mr Miyagi prequel series

With the first part of the final season of Cobra Kai now on Netflix, we’ve been thrown a new angle, a storyline that we didn’t ever see coming and it seems it’s not there by accident or without a bigger purpose.

The new season has set up that Mr Miyagi, played in the Karate Kid movies by the late Pat Morita, hasn’t had such an innocent back story as Daniel LaRusso, played by Ralph Machio, has always been led to believe.

In a recent interview, co-creator of Cobr Kai, Hayden Schlossberg, discusses the Miyagi character and just why they threw in this new part of the story: “…going into this last season, we wanted to give the Daniel LaRusso character the ultimate conflict, which would be challenging his thoughts about Mr Miyagi. And we just draw that from real life where people view their parents or mentors as perfect people, or at least that they have this authority on their lives, and then you get older and you see your mentor as a human being and in a more three-dimensional way.

“… putting Daniel through that kind of turmoil just felt like in keeping with what we’ve done every season, and gave us the kind of big finale we’re ultimately looking for. The short answer is that as we got into thinking about season six, it became the main central thing we wanted Daniel to be going through.”

He goes on to reveal that the story, while it’ll have an ending in the final series of Cobra Kai, could be setting up something else entirely… a Mr Miyagi spinoff series:  “It is one of the reasons why we did the Miyagi [..] story this season. It opens up all these questions about Mr Miyagi and what his life was like, and that’s been something we’ve been wanting to do for a while.

“We’ve talked to Robert Mark Kamen, the writer of the original Karate Kid who based this whole movie off his sensei who studied Okinawan karate; we’ve been talking about all this Miyagi backstory with him, which helped us with season six stuff. Now that we’re done, we can actually start getting into this stuff. We’ve just been focused on Cobra Kai and finishing it off. And right now, we’re in the process of editing the last couple episodes. Once that’s done, we’ll hopefully have some exciting things.”

WATCH: Cobra Kai’s sixth and final season gets release date(s)

He concludes: “We definitely want to do that [spinoff series] and have been talking about that. But the focus has been on Cobra Kai. As we’re finishing that up, we’ll see exactly what path we take in terms of spinoffs, but it is definitely something that we’ve been wanting to do.”

When Cobra Kai hit screens – originally a YouTube series – it took the world by storm and put the Karate Kid series back in the collective minds of the public, so much so that Machio has also filmed a new Karate Kid movie along with Jackie Chan, further widening the world of these movies and this series, so having more spinoffs down the line seems like it might always have been possible and doing a Mr Miyagi prequel series honestly seems like a no-brainer at this stage as long as you can get someone who can play Miyagi the way Morita did.

Anyways, it seems to be the thing these days to break down iconic heroes of the past, so having this happen is far from surprising, I just hope they treat him with more respect than many others got recently.

Wipe on, wipe off, indeed.

Cobra Kai spinoff shows coming?

Source: THR