The real-life event that partially inspired Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender begins with Aang being found frozen for decades in an iceberg. In a weird way, this was inspired by real events:

Flameo, hotman! We’re here to talk about one of the greatest animated series in existence: Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The very first episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” first aired on Nickelodeon in 2005. Here we meet siblings Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack De Sena) of the Southern Water Tribe, a society that’s managed to survive the harsh conditions at the South Pole. However, over the years, the Fire Nation has captured most of the tribe’s waterbenders, with Katara being the only one left.

At the beginning of the episode, Katara and Sokka are searching for food when they come across a young boy frozen in an iceberg. His name is Aang (Zach Tyler) and he is miraculously alive despite being frozen for decades.

As it turns out, series creators Michael DeMartino and Bryan Konietzko started their series like this because they were inspired by a real-life event: an Antarctic expedition undertaken by explorer Ernest Shackleton, which lasted from 1914 to 1917. In 1915, Shackelton and his 28-man crew were stranded when their ship became stuck in the ice and eventually sank. They spent months traveling by foot and boat in severe conditions until they were rescued, with not a single life lost. It was that idea — that people could survive despite the harshest condidtions.

This came out in Avatar Spirits, a documentary that explores the creation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  DeMartino and Konietzko talk about Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition and how it inspired Avatar: The Last Airbender at around the four-minute mark:

Also, when the pair were originally thinking through the series, Appa was a polar bear dog and Momo was a robot, but things change in translation.

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h/t Screenrant