Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most beloved fantasy shows to ever air, animated or otherwise. The Nickelodeon series takes place in a fantasy world inspired by Eastern cultures where a chosen one figure known as the Avatar must put a stop to a brewing war between the four great nations of the world. The show aired its series finale in 2008, but it has never stopped gaining fans. And now, Netflix is making a live-action adaptation.
That’s risky, because a lot of people love this story and will be very displeased if Netflix makes a botch of it. How much should they change? How much is too much? Should they change anything?
The show is still a ways away from premiering, but cast member Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who plays fan-favorite character Uncle Iron, talked about how the tone is shifting in a Q&A. Apparently, the new Last Airbender show will be a bit more “mature.”
Avatar: The Last Airbender fans will be “very very happy” with the remake
According to Lee, the new show intends to grow the audience for the franchise. He thinks teens and tweens will enjoy it, but suspects the new series “might be a little bit too intense for younger kids. But I also see it being accessible to adults.”
"While the Nik cartoon…really was for the younger audiences, it didn’t mean older audiences couldn’t enjoy it. I think they’re making it a little bit more mature in that sense…and I think that’s part of growing that audience, and I think a lot of fans of the animated show will be very very happy with what they see, because there is a definite respect for the source material, but it’s an adaptation, it’s not gonna be word for word, page for page, because why do an adaptation? Just watch the animated cartoon."
The danger, of course, is that viewers will reject the new show and do just that, especially if the team behind it doesn’t strike the right balance. My fear is that when Lee talks about parts of the original show playing with with kids, he means that the original series had a lot of humor in it, which it absolutely did; it’s hard to imagine The Last Airbender without that goofiness. M. Night Shyamalan’s famously terrible movie adaptation took a lot of the funny material out, and no one wants that to happen again.
The Last Airbender remake will bring season 1 in line with the later seasons
My fear is the team behind the Netflix show is going down that route again, although Lee says it’s limited to bringing the tone of the first season more in line with that of the second and third, both of which still had plenty of funnies:
"Let’s be frank, the first season of the animated series was geared toward little kids, but as the books went on, the themes became way more mature and you still have that whimsical quality for the little kids, which is awesome, but the themes were so much deeper and the character arcs were so heartbreaking and so much more mature. That quality is what they’re trying to bring into the first season."
Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.
We don’t have a release date for The Last Airbender remake yet, but perhaps we’ll learn something at Netflix’s Geeked Week event next week.
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h/t ComicBook.com