- All right, ladies and gentlemen!
- When we conceived of Cobra Kai, we knew we wanted it to feel like a continuation of the original Karate Kid.
Daniel LaRusso's gonna fight!
- The opening scene of our series is the 1984 tournament, the finals between Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence.
How can we show that scene and show something else from it?
Well, it was turning the camera on Johnny Lawrence.
- Sweep the leg.
You have a problem with that?
- No, sensei.
- We've spent 34 years rooting for Daniel LaRusso and seeing the world hrough his eyes.
- Hey, you've been practicing!
- For Cobra Kai to work as a series, we needed to get the audience to understand Johnny Lawrence in a bigger way.
- I'm buying you out of my life.
- I'd rather be homeless than take money from you.
- And that first episode in particular is designed to make the audience see Johnny as an underdog.
- Wait, is this the karate guy?
The guy from the tournament?
- Oh, this is the guy whose ass you kicked.
- When you watch Cobra Kai, and you see that first couple minutes of the show, you're seeing footage from the original movie, but you're seeing 17 or 18 shots that have never been seen before to give you a clearer sense of Johnny Lawrence's side.
It's actually footage from the original movie that everyone's seen combined with footage that we had dug up from the salt mines.
- And there's some Sony executive that we had basically go into the cave with like a lantern... - That's, this is not what--
- Actually, and a suit, and a tie, and a briefcase.
- This is what we're imagining is what happened.
- That final shot that you see in that fight, where Johnny is falling down to the mat, that was shot in 2018.
- But the shot right before he falls down, is that close-up shot of Johnny getting kicked in the face.
Nobody had ever seen it, and the cool thing about that shot is it changes the perspective of the scene.
The wide, triumphant angle where everybody's cheering.
And with that close-up, now you're feeling the pain of that kick.
And it suddenly twists things from triumph to defeat.
But it was also the start of a downward spiral for a new protagonist in Cobra Kai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRgraYjL0XA
