IGN sits down with Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunner and executive producer for a wide-ranging interview about the changes they're making, the cast, the pressures of taking on ALTA, and a lot more.

I think one of the big questions is, despite all the remixing, is the point A and the point B still the same as the original?

AK: Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, I think the state of the world and the stakes of the world are still the same. So we decided to make Aang’s narrative drive a little clearer. In the first season of the animated series, he’s kind of going from place to place looking for adventures. He even says, “First, we’ve got to go and ride the elephant koi.” It’s a little looser as befits a cartoon. We needed to make sure that he had that drive from the start. And so, that’s a change that we made. We essentially give him this vision of what’s going to happen and he says, “I have to get to the Northern Water Tribe to stop this from happening.” That gives him much more narrative compulsion going forward, as opposed to, “Let’s make a detour and go ride the elephant koi,” that type of thing. So that’s something, again, that’s part of the process of going from a Nickelodeon cartoon to a Netflix serialized drama.

  • emptybambooEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Thanks so much for your very detailed comments. And I take many of your points. I think you are largely right - perhaps I need to go back and rewatch the show because it has been a while. And I think you are right that ATLA is uniquely well-balanced between its serialized elements and its larger narrative.

    Also, I think we agree on a fundamental point I was trying to make:

    Am I saying that the adaptation is automatically going to fail because it’s leaving some of these out? No, absolutely not. In fact I think for the way most TV is told these days they’re probably making the right decision. More highly-serialised longer episodes are kind of by definition going to necessitate certain more fundamental structural changes, and collapsing many of these arcs and themes into side plots within the same episode. So no, I’m not criticising the live action showrunners based on what we’ve seen so far.

    The conventions or parameters of the live-action show (longer episodes on a streaming service) mean that structural changes will happen. The original show had to work within certain parameters and the new one will have to as well. I am excited to see how they tell the story in a new way with those conventions or parameters. We have a lot of movements and story beats for each character but can they get there in different way that ultimately leads us to the same place?

    The perfection of the original show was in that they took their story and worked within the conventions. In other words, I think that if they were making the show now, they would do things differently. That can bee seen in how they approached The Legend of Korra. They found a way to work within the need for 20 episodes by making sure each episode did count towards something (the Great Divide being the exception).

    Another thing that just popped into my mind as I was writing is that if you take the total number of minutes, the Live Action show will actually have more time to tell its story than the original show (Original ATLA - 20 episodes at 22 minutes each = 440 minutes versus Live ATLA - 10 episodes at 60 minutes = 600 minutes). But because the episodes will be only 10, you will need to remix things.

    Thanks again for your comment!