Warning! Spoilers ahead for Karate Kid: Legends.
By the time Karate Kid: Legends rolls around, the saga of Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence’s (William Zabka) complicated rivalry has already wrapped up. They’ve put aside their differences (for the most part) and raised a whole new generation of karate kids. But on the East Coast, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) is helping one of his own students come into his own: Karate Kid: Legends’ Li Fong (Ben Wang), a Beijing-born kung fu master who finds himself having to learn karate in order to enter New York City’s finest martial arts tournament. Mr. Han, an old friend of Mr. Miyagi’s (Pat Morita), enlists the help of Daniel LaRusso, dragging him away from the San Fernando Valley to help teach Li “Miyagi karate.”
With the help of both kung fu and karate masters, Li, of course, wins the tournament and gets the girl — and saves an Italian pizza parlor in the process. The end of the movie sees that pizza parlor get a very strange delivery: one that takes us all the way back to the San Fernando Valley.
In the final scene of Karate Kid: Legends, we get a little scene back at Miyagi-Do, where Daniel LaRusso receives a pizza delivery all the way from New York. He shares that pizza with none other than his best frenemy, Johnny Lawrence, who has an idea for their next business venture: a pizza shop. They can call it “Miyagi Dough,” Lawrence insists, before rattling off a few slogans (“No mercy, no anchovies,” etc.) that LaRusso ignores.
Per director Jonathan Entwistle, a fun cameo that exists to pay homage to Cobra Kai, the beloved Netflix series that was the first to reboot the Karate Kid franchise for a new generation.
“Johnny Lawrence is a part of the franchise, always has been from day one. He's obviously absolutely key to what Cobra Kai is. That world has been very much trod by Cobra Kai,” Entwistle tells Inverse.
So it was a no-brainer for Entwistle to bring Zabka in for a short cameo as Johnny Lawrence, in a stinger showing off his trademark wit and humor that made Cobra Kai such a hit, and gave Daniel LaRusso a newfound depth as an adult.
“Cobra Kai is Johnny's show. For us, I think it's just a nice way to round out Ralph's Daniel LaRusso character,” Entwistle says. “That's where it's the most important, for bringing them together.”
