Any objective measure will suffice. Part III of The Karate KidThis is a terrible movie. The 1989 box office flop is about Terry Silver, a toxic-waste mogul who decides to set up a tournament for teenage karate and torture Mr. Miyagi. He also torments Daniel La Russo, a college-age Daniel La Russo, without any coherent reason. “The Karate Kid Part III is one film too many,” Read the L.A. Times Review in a standard pan. “It is a disaster of the most uninspired contrivances.”
The streaming series brought back the franchise in 2018. Cobra KaiThe series primarily focused on characters from the 1984 film and a new generation, as well as karate enthusiasts. As the series went from YouTube Red to Netflix, 2020, and a large audience of over 75 million households, characters, and events, from the original 1984 movie, were added. The Karate Kid Part IIThey found their way into this story. It seemed only a matter if Terry Silver would return.
Now, it’s finally happening, when the fourth season of Cobra Kai premieres on Dec. 31 with Terry Silver back in the mix as Daniel La Russo’s chief antagonist — more than 30 years after his last appearance in the franchise. “We’ve been talking about this since Season One,”Josh Heald was co-creator of the website. Cobra KaiJon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are long-time collaborators. “Terry Silver has always been looming.”
Thomas Ian Griffith played Silver and is the most surprised at this turn of events. Part III of The Karate KidAnd returns to the role in this season’s new season Cobra Kai. “This was something none of us could have predicted when we made Karate Kid Part III,”He says. “But here we are as grown men, back in this world. It’s been incredibly fulfilling. Until we started shooting, I hadn’t seen Ralph Macchio in over 30 years.”
Griffith was an actor on the stage who struggled with his acting skills and had a background in martial art. Part III of The Karate KidHe was casting in the late Eighties. He knew Terry Silver was too far out of reach as he was only 28 years old at the time. The character was also a Vietnam War veteran, about twenty-five years his senior. And since Macchio, then 29, had to somehow play a convincing teenager, casting someone younger than him as Daniel’s older antagonist seemed simply insane. Griffith believed he had a better chance of being cast as “Bad Boy”Mike Barnes is a karate champ who will fight La Russo at the climactic moment.
Director John Avildsen noticed something in Griffith at the auditions, and asked him to return for a screen-test. “I was like, ‘What role am I?’”Remember Griffith. “‘Am I the bad boy or Silver?’ One is 45 and the other is a 17-year-old kid. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’”Griffith claims that Griffith remembers sitting on the Karate mat while filming was being done, looking at Macchio, and thinking about the role. “‘He’s playing one end of the [age] spectrum and I’m playing another.’ We used to laugh about it.”
Problems with ageing were just one part of the problem Karate Kid III. The original script called for Martin Kove’s character of John Kreese to pose as a good guy and train La Russo for another karate tournament, while secretly setting him up for a painful humiliation and loss to avenge the events of the first movie. Kove was committed to the CBS program. Earth in Hard Times and couldn’t fit the shoot into his schedule. His longtime friend La Russo was the one who came up with the idea. However, Silver was portrayed by his creative team as a complete psycho who literally squeaked with delight whenever he discovered a way to cause chaos.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Why does his world come to a stop so he can torture a few teenagers?’” Griffith recalls. “But that was fun for me. I was like, ‘Let’s commit to what I’m doing and make this work.’” Occasionally, Griffith says, he worried the character was too over-the-top. Avildsen encouraged Griffith to bring out the crazy. “John was like, ‘Just go with your instincts. Let’s have every kid in America kicking you in the shins when this movie comes out.’”
Three of the three children were able to attend.Heald, Hurwitz, und Schlossberg. “We were not discerning film critics at the time,” says Schlossberg. “We just accepted it as the new chapter in the franchise, and we saw the Terry Silver character as this really scary Bond villain out to destroy this teenager’s life. As adults and writers now, we understand the issues with that story, and yet we’re drawn to it and have a connection to it nostalgically. Our goal with Cobra Kai was to take the things we liked about that character and infuse that into more modern storytelling.”
Silver, now gray-haired and playing the piano at his oceanfront mansion while ignoring John Kreese’s urgent request. La Russo had teamed up with Johnny Lawrence, his longtime rival, to fight Kreese. Kreese and Cobra Kai were defeated in the previous season, and Kreese desperately needs Silver to stop them. Silver has become more relaxed as he gets older and now enjoys tofu and martinis with liberal friends. Kreese suggests to him that he become involved with Cobra Kai.
“Back in the Eighties, I thought I could conquer the world,” Silver tells Kreese. “I was so hopped up on cocaine and revenge that I spent months terrorizing a teenager over a high-school karate tournament. It sounds insane just talking about it.”
“We figured he had this Charlie Sheen kind of Wall Street-like lifestyle back in the Eighties,” says Heald. “We threw in that cocaine line in to help explain that maniacal behavior when he’s laughing like a crazy person or hiding up a chimney or behind walls. These are things that a normal person, or normal billionaire, probably wouldn’t do, so we figured the cocaine probably helped out a little bit.”
It’s obvious that even Terry Silver, a wiser man, cannot resist the temptation of Cobra Kai. By the third episode, he’s tying his hair back into the iconic ponytail from Part III of The Karate Kidand plotting against La Russo’s karate students. “Because of the pandemic, I hadn’t gotten my hair cut for a year,”Griffith. “They were like, ‘Don’t cut your hair. Leave your hair.’ Hayden was really obsessed with that whole thing: ‘Is his ponytail long enough?’ He wanted it to be perfect.”
“I’ve always said that hair is a crucial component to these characters,” explains Schlossberg. “Johnny’s blonde hair is a defining characteristic. For Terry, it’s the ponytail, and we really leaned into the ponytail in Season Four. In some ways, it defines a little bit of that old Terry.”
The season builds to another All Valley Karate Tournament that pits La Russo’s karate students against Cobra Kai. La Russo’s daughter, Samantha, is one of the fighters, and her entire high school is consumed by the tournament and the various rivalries going into it. A minor suspension of disbelief is required to accept that teens will rather train for karate tournaments than create TikTok videos and play video games.
“We’ve said from the beginning of making Episode One, the buy-in for this show and this universe is that karate in the Valley is like football in Texas,” says Heald. “When you look at it on paper, it looks more ridiculous than it does when you put it up on the screen, because everyone is coming to appreciate the big stakes of the tournament with the same gravity. For the kids, it feels like this is tied into their futures and their families and personal relationships and romantic relationships. For the adults, you feel the wounds of the past and it becomes about something more than karate. It becomes about Daniel’s relationship with Mr. Miyagi and Daniel’s regret not only [about] the past, but for bringing Cobra Kia back into the Valley at all. Even though it’s about karate, it becomes about these other things.”
The show is so popular that Netflix ordered a fifth series long before the fourth. Griffith was filming the last few episodes in Atlanta when we spoke. However, everyone is still unsure about the plot or which characters might return from old movies. “Anyone who has ever appeared in the Karate Kid universe, we call it the Miyagi-verse, they exist in our cannon and our world,”Hurwitz. “We’ve talked about every character, including the minor people that just had one line.”
Is that Mike Barnes? Part III of The Karate KidSean Kanan “His name has been thrown around the writers’ room from the very beginning,”Hurwitz. “We didn’t want to bring him in like, ‘OK, we have Terry Silver. Let’s just bring in Mike Barnes in the same kind of context.’ We wanted to find a fresh and interesting way to bring Barnes into the story, and perhaps at some point we’ll do so.”
And then there’s Hillary Swank’s character of Julie Pierce from 1994’s The Next Karate Kid.Could she be a part of the storyline in a future episode? “It’s definitely possible at some point,” says Heald. “I can’t say whether or not we’ve gone in that direction with our story, but we have acknowledged from the earliest season that The Next Karate Kid is very much in our universe. Julie Pierce does exist. Any movie from the original franchise that does encompass Mr. Miyagi’s life, we respect as the history of things that actually happened. Julie is very much on the table.”
Griffith has been writing for shows like “The View” over the years. Grimm Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings, has been stunned to see the online reaction to Terry Silver’s return. “It’s been crazy,”He says. “Netflix put out a little promo that showed the character for a second. I thought, ‘This will be fun. Let’s see who remembers me.’ And it blew up. They had over a million views. I was like, ‘What?!’ I guess that character really did have an impact.”