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*** Cobra Kai spoilers ahead ***
Cobra Kai continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. The fourth installment of Netflix’s immensely popular Karate Kid revival series delivered yet another round of sly humor, non-stop action, and youth karate gamesmanship as the rivalry between Daniel LaRusso, Johnny Lawrence, Sensei Kreese, and Terry Silver reached new heights. While Season 4 was filled with a surplus of shocking moments (the sensei showdown between Daniel and Johnny, the returns of Stingray and Aisha, and basically the entire season finale), the biggest surprise was the unexpected cameo from music superstar Carrie Underwood.
The All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament was the hottest ticket in the San Fernando Valley. It was a showdown over 30 years in the making as Miyagi-Do, Eagle Fang, and Cobra Kai competed in a winner-take-all battle for youth karate supremacy — with the losing dojos being forced to disband for good. An event this epic had to have a special guest, and that guest was Grammy-winner Carrie Underwood. So how exactly did this surprising performance happen?
The on-screen explanation is that tournament board member Ron performed some dental work on Carrie’s husband. The off-screen explanation has to do with a tweet and a mutual admiration between Underwood and Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg. During a recent conversation with Decider, the trio discussed how Carrie Underwood became a member of the Cobra Kai universe.
“We had this idea that our sometimes bumbling tournament board members would have a lot of big ideas for blowing up the tournament and making it bigger and better,” Schlossberg explained to Decider. “We loved setting up the low expectations of what they’re capable of, especially with a history littered with mistakes. There was apparently a Malcolm-Jamal Warner debacle. So we kind of used that as a throwaway to set this up, but we knew we wanted them to have a victory, for Ron specifically, to deliver on the promise that’s so much bigger than what he should be capable of.”
It all started on August 30, 2020 when Underwood tweeted about Cobra Kai… or maybe it’s Kobra Kai?
Team Cobra Kai took notice.
Schlossberg told Decider that Underwood’s tweet warmed their hearts, so when they were looking for someone to perform an uptempo version of Survivor’s “The Moment of Truth” (the song that played during the credits of the original Karate Kid film), they decided to reach out to the avowed Cobra Kai fan.
Continued Schlossberg, “We had the idea that it would be ‘Moment Of Truth’… but we wanted to tempo it up a little bit and give it a ‘You’re the Best Around’ feel to use it in that sort of way — but put a spin on it because it’s a live performance and a surprise performance. [Underwood] was really game. We reached out personally to her through mutual connections and she couldn’t have been more excited and more gracious and more willing to get on her tour bus and come down and spend a day with us. It was just a love affair on both sides. She was excited to be working with us; we were excited to be working with her. She worked with our composers in terms of the arrangement and the recording and the mix, and it could not have gone smoother.”
The Cobra Kai soundtrack borrows heavily from the original franchise, and while we’ve already heard Karate Kid classics “Cruel Summer,” “Young Hearts,” and “Feel the Night” on the Netflix series, Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best Around” remains conspicuously absent after four seasons. I asked Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg if they plan on using the iconic song on Cobra Kai (and if so are they saving it for a specific moment), but in classic Miyagi-Do fashion, the trio utilized pitch-perfect defense by simply responding that it’s “always a possibility.”
The fourth season of Cobra Kai is now streaming on Netflix.
