During its six-season run, Cobra Kai — the Karate Kid sequel series created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg — accomplished many things. The Emmy-nominated Netflix comedy proved that it is possible to make a successful, original, and wildly entertaining revival of a beloved pop culture franchise. It reminded us that Ralph Macchio (a.k.a. Daniel LaRusso) never ages, and that William Zabka (a.k.a. Johnny Lawrence) has way more range than just “teen-movie bully.”

Cobra Kai also elevated the art of the Easter egg — those sometimes subtle, sometimes loud-and-proud callbacks to key moments in a given pop culture franchise. From day one, the series has delighted fans and honored the original Karate Kid movies in ways big and small — including major character returns, winky episode titles, and even blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em visual gags (see: the boxes labeled “Fernandez Meats” in season 2, episode 7).

Still, the creators managed to leave some of the best Easter eggs for last. Cobra Kai‘s sixth and final season features callbacks that range from iconic Karate Kid moments that have permeated pop culture to deep cuts for the superfans. To celebrate the series’ successful run, Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg shared some of their favorite final-season Easter eggs with Entertainment Weekly. But don’t worry, fans of the Miyagi-verse: The guys still have more callback ideas they want to use, perhaps in a future Cobra Kai spinoff.

“There’s a lot of potential Easter eggs that we left,” says Schlossberg. “It allows for more fun to be had if we ever revisit this universe.”

Daniel, the fly, and a pair of chopsticks

Cobra Kai‘s final scene pays homage to one of Daniel’s earliest lessons with Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita). In the season 6 finale, Daniel attempts to catch a fly with chopsticks once again — only to have his now-friend Johnny Lawrence take a very different (a.k.a. “no mercy”) approach to stopping the bug from buzzing around.

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: From the very beginning, Daniel catching the fly with the chopsticks from the original movie was such a memorable, iconic moment. I mean, it’s something that we’ve seen used in parodies on SNL — we’ve seen so many different references to the fly with the chopsticks. When we brought back Cobra Kai, we were always thinking about using it. That was just something that never quite found its way [into the show], and after a couple seasons, we realized that we had this big callback that hadn’t been used yet. We would talk about it at the start of each season, “Here are a couple of still big things that we haven’t used yet,” but it had to make sense.

We talked about, “Oh, does Daniel train the kids to catch flies? And they’re all trying by a garbage dump where there’s a ton of flies?” [Laughs] We talked about different things, but it felt like such a big moment, we didn’t want it to just be used for a cheap laugh.

In those early days of talking about the final season, we realized that it could be a great final scene that shows Johnny and Daniel in their final state as kind of odd-couple friends. It was the perfect sendoff, and we just loved having it right there at the very end. It also had a message for the fans, which is, we’ll always have the memories, and that includes everything, every new memorable moment that was created on the show that had nothing to do with the original Karate Kid. There’s a lot of memorable moments on the show that we will always have whether there’s another season or not.

Stevie’s O.G. ‘Karate Kid’ connection

In episode 2, “The Prize,” Johnny goes house hunting and encounters a homeowner named Stevie (played by Adam Herschman), who not only remembers Johnny from his glory days, but he also has a surprising connection to one of Johnny’s high school classmates.

JON HURWITZ: Lil’ Stevie was a fan of Johnny Lawrence’s in high school. He had seen Johnny as a champion, but he missed the fight against Daniel and didn’t seem to know what happened there. So, he still viewed Johnny as this amazing karate champion. [Laughs] Lil’ Stevie introduced himself as “Jerry’s brother’s friend,” and Jerry is Larry B. Scott’s character from The Karate Kid. That was the deepest of cuts that you would miss unless you’re paying attention. He was friends with Jerry’s brother. Adam Herschman is a very good friend of ours and he’s appeared in a number of our projects, and it was fun for us to bring him into Cobra Kai and for him to be this Karate Kid fanboy that’s living on the show, because in real life, that’s the kind of guy that he is as well.

The return of the red mats

For the All Valley board of directors, mat color was no small matter. Early in the series, board member/announcer Daryl (played by Keith Arthur Bolden) advocated for blue mats over the traditional red, which was the mat color when Daniel defeated Johnny in the original Karate Kid. In the final season of Cobra Kai, Sekai Taikai boss Gunther Braun (played by Carsten Norgaard) decrees the tournament will be fought on red mats once again — but this time, Johnny comes out the victor.

JOSH HEALD: The red mats were obviously a big topic of discussion amongst the All Valley board over the seasons. And in The Karate Kid, which we then recreated for the opening shots of the first episode of the series, you see Johnny take that hard fall onto the red mat as the camera kind of comes down onto him, and his life has taken this turn.

In season 1, when we were making the All Valley, we wanted to have this updated color and have that commentary from Daryl in terms of what he was fighting for. I can’t remember what the color was that we were originally going for, but I remember our production designer just couldn’t get the right color. He said we can’t get enough of whatever we had written, whether it was gray or gold or whatever it was. And he’s like, “I can get this blue.” We’re like, “Great. He’s going for blue mats!”

That was in our scrappier days. And it was really nice when the Sekai Taikai comes back to the Valley that the mats will be red, and it becomes a sticking point, so Daryl is coming full circle. And Johnny gets to have a different kind of fight on the same color mat in the same arena, which was another way of coming full circle.

“You’re the Best” gets an encore

Joe Esposito’s inspirational power anthem became synonymous with The Karate Kid after it played over Daniel’s triumphant All Valley comeback. The Cobra Kai creators knew from day one that it would have to appear in the series at some point…but they had to find the right moment.

HURWITZ: That’s probably the thing we were asked most over the course of making this series: “When are you going to put ‘You’re the Best Around’ in the show?” And for a while now, we knew that it would be in the final season, and I think we speculated that we would save it for the last episode. That was something that we didn’t know exactly how we would use it. Having Johnny and Daniel have this training sequence where Daniel is Johnny’s sensei with that song playing felt perfect.

And within that montage, there’s also the Rocky Easter eggs. Another hallmark of the show is the love of John Avildsen’s work beyond Karate Kid. The Rocky franchise is a favorite of the three of us, of the writers’ room, and of Johnny and Daniel. So, it felt like a perfect time to use it, and that was just one of our favorite montages to film. Their conflict started on the beach, and to bring them back to the beach where they’re working together, and to have them running down Ventura Boulevard with the Encino Commons sign — we as young people learned about Encino through The Karate Kid. [Laughs]

And there are the Easter eggs of a number of the people who are running with Johnny and Daniel in that montage. We have Josh’s boys were running in there, some of our editors, some of our writers, lots of family and friends. They fist bump Hayden’s brother Evan outside of the South Seas apartment, which is another Easter egg. The montage was a celebration for all of us making the show.

Denis the menace returns

“Dennis” was a minor character in The Karate Kid Part III, but his return in Cobra Kai’s final season made a big impression on Daniel. He kidnapped him — on the orders of Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) — and locked him in a dog cage.

SCHLOSSBERG: Most people, when they think back on the original movies, they don’t know who Dennis de Guzman is — and the truth is, neither did we. We knew that Mike Barnes [played by Sean Kanan] had a couple cronies and one of them was named Snake, and the other crony was Dennis. There really wasn’t much about him [in Karate Kid III], but the actor, William Christopher Ford, is very active in the Karate Kid community, and he’s a sensei in his own right, he knows martial arts.

We saw on Facebook that he had this long hair, this bad-boy look about him, and we knew that we wanted him in the show in some way, but he was somebody that we weren’t expecting the audience to remember. It’s fun that we go that deep and we get “Goon No. 2,” as it were. When we brought in William, he had this whole backstory that he had written about his character and that his full name was Dennis de Guzman and all this stuff, which we found entertaining. So we incorporated some of that detail into the character.

Daniel is haunted by skeletons

Back in 1984, Daniel LaRusso was beaten to a pulp by Johnny and his Cobra Kai buddies, who were all dressed in creepy skeleton costumes for Halloween. Over 40 years later, in episode 13 (“Skeletons”), those bony figures came back to terrorize him again — this time in a dream, which also featured an assist (and some sage advice) from his late mentor, Mr. Miyagi.

HURWITZ: Bringing Mr. Miyagi back and having Daniel and Miyagi fight back-to-back against skeletons from the past was an homage to the iconic fight that Daniel and Miyagi had in The Karate Kid.

Before that fight [in Cobra Kai], all these lines from Daniel’s villains from the movies are all rattling around in his head before the skeletons start appearing. That was something that was really powerful to shoot. It was really important to Ralph, and we thought he gave a really great performance in that scene.

Deep-cut dialogue callbacks

Even the most dedicated Karate Kid fans might have missed some of these dialogue callbacks.

HURWITZ: When we had Chozen [Yuji Okumoto] gardening in the backyard [in episode 12, “Rattled”], the mailman comes around the side of the house and has the exact same lines as in Karate Kid II, when the mailman comes back and finds Mr. Miyagi and has a telegram for him. And when Robby [Tanner Buchanan] is injured and the medic is checking him out, the doctor says the exact same thing that a medic said to Daniel in Karate Kid.

HEALD: “I’ll inform the judges. You did well out there, young man.” Also, [in episode 4, “Underdogs”], Mike Barnes calls Johnny a “cream puff.” That’s an off-screen line from the first movie that you hear when Johnny’s at a low point in the final round with Daniel.

HURWITZ: We were joking around on set that it was Barnes who yelled it at Johnny back then. [Laughs]

Rub-a-dub-dub, Terry Silver in a hot tub

Just when fans thought the Valley was safe from former toxic-waste magnate/sadistic karate overlord Terry Silver, the ponytailed villain returned in episode 8, “Snakes on a Plane,” luxuriating in a hot tub just as he did in Karate Kid Part III.

HURWITZ: That was something that I would say was at the same level as “You’re the Best” or the fly with the chopsticks thing… Terry in the hot tub with a cigar. It was something that we joked about for years. At times, we had a bit of a two-bit production. We don’t have the ability to get good locations, and the idea of a hot tub with bubbles and the sound and all that stuff, it’s complicated. It’s not something that you can do without real planning.

SCHLOSSBERG: On Cobra Kai, that’s a big deal to have a hot tub and a cigar and a bunch of people in the room. [Laughs] It was one of those things that was really important to us, and production would tell us like, “Oh, it’s tricky to find a room that feels like a spa.” There was a hotel in Atlanta that allowed us to [shoot] it, and it was very difficult to shoot there. It was very hot and sweaty. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to smoke a cigar. [Laughs]

HURWITZ: It felt amazing to have it be his intro into the season after he had been [away for a while]. At the end of season 5, it looked like he was going to get put away. And we had enough episodes of the season where you kind of forget about Terry and you’re not thinking about him. So, for him to reenter the story in the hot tub, that was something that we thought was really fun to do.

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Cobra Kai season 6 is available to stream on Netflix.