The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Netflix’s Avatar The Last Airbender
There is a time in your life when children’s television programming reenters your life. Or at least it did if you were Generation X. I have no memories at all of my parents sitting down with me in front of Saturday morning TV. When the subject comes up I’ve rarely run into someone in my age group that has. Admittedly there wasn’t too much available when I was a kid that needed monitoring. Although, there were a few things that should have gotten a thumbs down from a more attentive caregiver. Captain Scarlet had a pretty high and bloody body count for a kid’s show. Starblazers, same notation. My wife is quite certain that her parents would never have let her watch Robotech if they’d paid any attention to it.
However, the Mother of the Darkspawn and I oversaw our kids’ time in front of the lobotomy box. My parents called us ‘helicopter parents’ and I called them ‘criminally negligent by modern standards.’ Their reply that I never got into serious trouble, left me laughing on the floor.
So, yes, we paid attention to our kids’ shows. There were some that got a hard thumbs down like Invader Zim. SpongeBob was questionable but since we could never quite put our finger on why, we would let it slide (H.R. Puffinstuff syndrome). And truthfully it occasionally made us laugh.
There were others that we didn’t mind. Tutenstein had enough actual Egyptology that we approved. Eldest Dark Spawn was addicted to The Saddle Club, naturally.
However, there were a few things I would call exceptional. One show that has stood the test of time is Avatar: The Last Airbender.
It was the first American show done in anime style that had real staying power. Given that it was based pretty strongly in the traditions of Japanese fiction the result was an overarching narrative that proved to be surprisingly compelling. Attempts to maintain anime tropes resulted in the main characters all having strong character arcs. These included a nakama of eventually five main characters, including that anime classic the mortal enemy that becomes a fast friend. Plus, the big bad enemy, Fire Lord Ozai didn’t make a screen appearance for quite a long time.
The narrative however did follow the Western tradition of directed antagonism toward the protagonist and a story structure roughly following a three-act model.
I have never been able to nail down why the team that produced something as superb as Avatar: The Last Airbender produced something as godawful as The Legend of Korra. Most people who admit it’s terrible just shrug and say “Go woke, go broke.” Except that still doesn’t tell me what went specifically wrong with the Avatar team. Some people point out that Dave Filoni left the production team but it wasn’t like he was a secret genius, for fuck’s sake look what he’s done to Star Wars!
My own guess is that there was a Nick executive quietly keeping the production team under his thumb and was providing fairly solid developmental editing notes. That executive was gone or promoted when Korra came along.
Then there was the live-action movie, written and directed by M. Night and produced by Kathleen Kennedy. That one-two punch of fail created a film that was memorably awful.
Consequently, when Netflix released a trailer that had images that were pretty close to the original cartoon there was a lot of excited optimism. Especially in the wake of shows like live-action One Piece.
Then the show was launched.
It’s not as terrible as some products of Post-Obama Hollywood but I can’t say it’s any good either. The show opens with a prologue that was never in the original series, the genocide of the Air Benders by the Fire Nation.
While it’s a bad idea to do a scene-for-scene remake of anything, you still have to maintain the feel of the narrative. In the OG when Aang is introduced he’s just another kid who is pretty happy-go-lucky and optimistic by nature. He’s almost always smiling. The genocide of his people is just too big of a concept for him to grasp and since it happened a century ago the audience feels disconnected from it too.
It’s an odd bit of human nature. Tell your average human a thousand members of the Ndwandwe tribe have been buried alive and that members hundreds of the Al Shammari tribe have been beheaded by Islamic militants they’ll feel equally bad for them. But then tell them that the members former killed were killed in 1799, suddenly you don’t care as much about them. Odd but there it is.
Aang has some flashbacks to when he was happily living in the Air Temple and he had a kind and understanding mentor named Gyatso. When the nakama has to go to the ruins of the air temple and Aang finds the remains of Gyatso it’s deeply affecting for both Aang and the audience.
Starting with the genocide ruins this moment and creates the completely wrong atmosphere from the start. The audience was there when it happened. They saw it. Instead of giving the Fire Nation a slow start and building their menace they just sturmed right in, out the gate. It makes Zuko’s people an immediate and powerful menace. The Fire Nation’s 100-year war was something remote at first in Nick’s version, then became a more active menace.. Again, they started slowly and built it, but not in Netflix’s version.
The acting was poor and while I don’t normally drag children for poor performances, the truth is that they can’t help but come across as drastically inferior to the original cast. The reason is simple enough, the only voice actor who was actually a kid in the cartoon was the one playing Aang. The rest of the kids were played by adults who were trained actors. The live-action cast is fundamentally hobbled by the fact that the show needed to cast kids who strongly resembled the cartoon characters. So not only do you have average everyday problem of child actors not really being able to act, but they couldn’t even hire the ones who had done the best reads.
Given the abject failure of the movie, it’s understandable that they would try not to deviate from the animated show in any real way. But if you go with the exacting recreation route, details become critical and they’ve got too many of them wrong.
Every member of the Water Tribe, to include bloody Korra, all had blue eyes. They were famous for it. In this version, they all had brown eyes. Contact lens technology is a thing now, it’s advanced enough that half the girls in K-pop videos have blue eyes. All of the Water Tribe in Netflix Avatar had brown eyes. We all know the reason why they couldn’t bring themselves to do this.
Zuko for his part has a birthmark, not a burn scar. I mean that’s what it looks like.
I trudged my way through the third episode. That was the one where Aang enters the Avatar state, has a chat with Kyoshi, and then Avatar Kyoshi fights Zuko. Not Aang mind you but Kyoshi. You know Kyoshi? The last woman avatar? This was a standard 2020s remake, they went through the original material for famous moments with the intent of giving those moments to women.
The writing is just plain weak, and that is the show’s biggest problem. Not the soft-shell Wokeness, it’s the writing that’s bad. The original kid’s show was more sophisticated.
At the end of the day, you can tell they just want to get this one out of the way as fast as possible so they can make the one they really want to: Korra.
Normally, I try to finish a whole series before declaring my doom upon it but in this case, there was no point, especially as there is a much better version immediately available. If you want to watch a good version of Avatar, just watch the original. That being the case…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender
