As the extension of a story that so many of us love from our childhoods, it's hardly a surprise that Cobrai Kai has made such a karate chop of an impact for Netflix. The fourth season of the Karate Kid dramedy sequel has just released, and the streamer renewed the series for a fifth back in August. We've seen with other shows in recent times that the inevitable prestige can be a big draw for blockbuster cameos - see: Adrien Brody in Succession, just about everyone in What We Do in the Shadows - and Kai just had its own superstar stand-in.
The penultimate episode of season four centres on the 51st Annual All Valley karate championship, which is set to determine which of the warring dojos will win out in their rivalry: Miyagi-Do, led by the original film series' protagonist Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio); Eagle Fang, led by Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka); and the eponymous Cobra Kai, led by John Kreese (Martin Kove) and Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith). That's all business as usual, of course: the surprise came by way of a performance by the Grammy-winning country megastar Carrie Underwood, singing "The Moment of Truth" by Survivor, released on the original Karate Kid soundtrack in 1984.
So how'd it happen? According to an interview by Entertainment Weekly, it was the result of a tweet put out by Underwood back in August 2020, in which she described "Kobra Kai [sic]" as "kinda awesome". Cobra Kai creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg waited "about five minutes" to approach Underwood to discuss a possible guest appearance. "Be careful what you tweet about Cobra Kai if you're a celebrity," says Schlossberg. "Because we immediately log it and think about the possibilities." He adds:
"We knew that we wanted this year's All Valley to be, like, the biggest All Valley ever, and we joked about the idea of there being that kind of Super Bowl halftime performer ... [Underwood] happens to sing the Sunday Night Football song, so it made a lot of sense. We didn't know if it was going to come together, but she really loved the show and it was a match made in heaven."
Some fans questioned why the lesser known track from the original film was used in lieu of Joe Esposito's iconic "You're the Best," which famously played during Karate Kid's tournament sequence, but Schlossberg's explanation makes a lot of sense. He told EW:
"A lot of people have asked us about 'You're the Best' and are we going to use that? We felt that if we just did that song, it would just be a copycat of what the movie was ... We love this song "The Moment of Truth." It's a little bit less known, and yet it still has that same 1980s sports-rock anthem vibe. So to have her sing that, it gave that same vibe to the tournament without doing the exact same thing."
Season four of Cobra Kai is currently streaming on Netflix. A release date for season five is yet to be revealed.