Cobra Kai 's Yuji Okumoto looks back on his first villain role: Howard Cosell guy in Better Off Dead

In 1986, Yuji Okumoto entered the pantheon of Miyagi-verse villains with his role as Chozen "You keep for your collection" Toguchi — wearer of multiple gold chains, tormenter of Ralph Macchio's Daniel LaRusso — in The Karate Kid Part II.

But Chozen wasn't Okumoto's first indelible turn as a big-screen bad guy. One year before Karate Kid II, the actor gave a scene-stealing performance as Yee Sook Ree, a.k.a. Howard Cosell guy, in Savage Steve Holland's cult classic Better Off Dead.

Ree learned to speak English by watching legendary sportscaster Cosell on ABC's Wide World of Sports, and he periodically harassed Dead's lovelorn protagonist, Lane Meyer (John Cusack), by pulling up alongside him and taunting him via loudspeaker in a voice that perfectly mirrored Cosell's nasal tone and choppy cadence. (His brother Chen Ree, played by Brian Imada, spoke no English but was a formidable drag racer.)

While chatting with EW about Cobra Kai season 5 (steaming now on Netflix), Okumoto was gracious enough to answer a few questions about how he landed the role of Yee Sook Ree. "I knew the casting director. She had cast me in a film called Aloha Summer, which was shot before [Better Off Dead]," he recalls. "And she said, 'Can you do a Howard Cosell?' I said, 'Well, I don't know. I can give it a shot.' So I had to watch all these episodes of Wide World of Sports, just to get that cadence down."

He continues: "It wasn't perfect, but I came into the audition, and I did Howard Cosell, but with an Asian accent. The casting director laughed hysterically, and when I did it on the set, the crew was laughing, and thought it was hysterical."

Though he killed on set, Okumoto later learned that the filmmakers would not be using his voice in the final film — and that he'd instead be dubbed over by a famous impressionist. "They decided that they couldn't understand me as well [with the accent], so they brought in Rich Little to do my voice as Howard Cosell," he says. "I was kind of disappointed that I didn't get a chance to actually do the voice of Howard Cosell with an Asian accent [in the movie]."

Same here. That would have been truly a sight to behold.

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