How ‘Cobra Kai’ Honored Chad McQueen & Almost Had Him on the Show

In between the releases of Cobra Kai Season 6 Parts 1 and 2, the Karate Kid film family said goodbye to one of its own. Chad McQueen, who played Cobra Kai dojo member and bully Dutch in The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid Part II, died in September at the age of 63.

So when Cobra Kai returned with its latest batch of episodes, the show paid tribute to the late actor right away. At the end of the first new episode, titled “Benvinguts a Barcelona,” the credits feature a shot of McQueen in character with the actor’s years of life and the phrase, “Cobra Kai Never Dies.”

Netflix

Co-creator Josh Heald told TV Insider it was a no-brainer for producers to find a way to honor McQueen and his Karate Kid character, but they were actually working hard to include both in the show long before he passed away.

“We love Chad McQueen so much. We were so fortunate to have met him and sat down with him, and we explored many times the possibility of bringing him onto the show,” Heald explained. “We tried to pull it off in Season 2, and the schedules didn’t work out. He wasn’t able to be there with the rest of the OG Cobras as they kind of had their motorcycle ride for the Tommy episode. We tried again creatively thinking about something during Season 5, and the production schedule was just so unbearable that we looked again into, ‘How can we bring him into this world?’ Because Dutch is such an important character to us.”

The answer was to have several mentions of Dutch throughout the seasons, from Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) reminiscing about his high school hijinks that translated into adult criminality and imprisonment. 

Heald said he and co-creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were particularly taken with the character’s innate depravity in their youths. “When we watched that movie as kids, he was probably the most terrifying person beyond Johnny because he felt like he wanted to actually like kill Daniel. That night of the Skeleton fight, he’s the one who’s really encouraging everybody to, ‘Let’s kill this kid on the fence.’ So he was so dynamic, and we just would have done anything we possibly could to bring him into the universe in any small way.”

Since that never came to pass, though, Heald is at least glad they could work him into the show by mentioning the character by name and honoring the actor as well. “At least mentioning Dutch and lovingly speaking of where the character is, Dutch gets to live on even though even though Chad has passed.”

Cobra Kai, Season 6 Part 2, Streaming, Netflix