'Avatar: The Last Airbender' live-action series

I want Dae Kim to be MY FireLord.

The bitch is 55, can you believe it?

Anyone else really looking forward to it? Really hope it doesn’t suck like Rings of Power. At least it has a great storyline it will hopefully be faithful to and memorable characters. The animated series was an absolute joy. So much potential here.

I did enjoy the series. Which makes me question why we even need a live action remake of it that inevitably will be worse than the original was.

I’ll watch, but I’m kinda tired of hearing about it everywhere. The original show was great back in college and Kora was the last Nick show that I watched as an adult. I’m old now and like most folks, prefer to forget the previous live adaptation.

*Korra

I liked Avatar and Korra was all right but a massive step down in quality. But so far every announcement I've heard about the live action has increasingly lowered my interest. The original creators left quite early due to differences, there's now a large age difference between Aang and Korra so that whole relationship is probably going to play out differently, and fuck knows what they're doing with Sokka.

I might be rare but I actually kind of prefer Korra to Avatar. They were constrained by thinking each season was their final season and had to be wrapped up, but I loved the extended family of characters. Lin Beifong was rather cool, loved Tenzin and his siblings, and the family dynamics and think Varrick is one of the greatest characters on TV (“Zhu li, DO THE THING!”). I rewatch it every couple of years and really enjoy it. Anyway!

I liked Ken Leung on [italic]Person of Interest[/italic], so I'll give it a try.

Is the Up arrow on his ass?

James Cameron works fast. Didn’t he just have a sequel last year?

r8 Frankly I'll never forgive LoK for doing Assami/Korra in the last 30 seconds and claiming it counts as LGBT representation rather than doing Varrick/Bolin or letting Mako fulfil his inevitable destiny as the long suffering service top of former emperor Wu

r7 I'm sorry, but that tweet is one of the weirdest complaints I have ever seen. Sokka's sexism is what made his character interesting, really? As if there weren't any other forms of humour out there.

People need to stop being so attached to every single aspect of the original, no one's taking your fucking blankie away, calm down. Some things just need to be changed when adapting to another medium two decades later.

[quote] Sokka's sexism is what made his character interesting, really?

r13 Well yes. He was the only male left in a tribe that had just been decimated by an invasion, his dad had gone off to fight and left him in charge with him constantly trying to prove himself as the man and protector of the tribe is the reason the way he is at the start of the show. Him learning women aren't just there to do his laundry as Katara gets more powerful, and especially as he spends time with Suki and Toph is genuinely one of his fundamental character arcs. Ripping a storyline that was clear and well written enough to be understandable to children in the mid 2000s because it wouldn't play to adults in 2024 is moronic. I'm interested in how they're planning to do the Northern Water tribe now because those guys were so sexist they made Sokka look like a suffragette.

R12 admittedly I found Asami a rather useless character latterly. They did signpost something between Korra and Asami but waiting until the last two seconds of screen time was a…choice.

Gotta admit I had a weird crush on Mako and Bolin.

Final trailer.

Looks pretty damn epic. Some of the line delivery by the kiddies is still wonky, though. But maybe I'll get used to it like I did with One Piece.

Watched the first episode and actually thought it was pretty good. The visuals are beautiful, the pace moves along at a fair whack.

The extended prologue, which was only alluded to in the animated show, was surprisingly violent and graphic. If I’d been a parent I’d probably have switched off after the fourth person was shown being incinerated to a crisp.

I’m not feeling all the performances. It’s hard not to compare them to the original voice actors who were generally perfect. But they’re fine. Think the Sokka actor will be carrying this, definitely the strongest of the young performers, even if his humour is dialled right back. Hoping to see much more of Iroh, always the greatest character.

I've not seen any really good reviews... they all say it pales in comparison to the animated version.

Being better than the movie is not enough because that movie was so utterly terrible.

It's getting mixed reviews although much better than the movie that came out a few years ago.

The Guardian gave it 4 stars I think. I need to watch more before I can rate it, but I think it’s worth a watch.

It's been years since I saw the animated show (and I loved it back then), and I really liked the live-action series. I hope it's getting a second season. From what I've seen, most of the reviews either complain that the original was better/the live-action series is unnecessary or that the series is not perfect because it's not enough it's own thing. (Then again, what did they expect?)

If you liked the cartoon, I recommend watching it. Just have an open mind and enjoy the ride.

*its own thing

The critic reviews are awful, and audience reviews are worse. Saying the acting is wooden and embarrassing. Wasn’t there already a terrible movie of this?

You watch an episode and a couple hours later you are hungry for another.

It’s definitely not awful and I haven’t seen any reviews that were scathing. If the original animated series aired for the first time today it would probably get savaged too as it takes quite a while to find its feet.

Episode 2 was excellent. Really well paced and characterised. If there are any “scathing” reviews, they’re simply being MARYS!

Any new treatment of a 20+ year old original is going to be met with "fan outrage at", well, just about anything that is not identical to the original. I've often found this desire for conformity to be a strange thing, it fails to allow for any artistic element or to take into account shifting attitudes and hamstrings development. Adaptations of books are the worst for this, I'm not saying that they cannot be done poorly, they can, but with something where the visuals are unique to each reader that must be hard to please everyone.

After saying all that, I was not a huge fan of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop, partly I think because I struggled with the 50+ year old John Choo playing Spike, but, it was not bad, if you parked any prior knowledge it was actually enjoyable.

Finished watching this. It was okay. Not a trainwreck, but also nothing great. Obviously it has a lot of very young and inexperienced actors and that shows. But overall it is a decent adaptation that captures the spirit of the original.

Also worth remembering that the first season of Avatar was the weakest. The original show doesn't really become a classic til seasons 2 and 3.

Just finished it, a really fun adventure show. Insane visuals and truly outstanding bending fights, coupled with some really horrible dialogue and wooden acting early on, though that improves towards the end. The actors playing Sokka and Aang and so damn charismatic. Zuko is great as well, loved that actor on PEN15 previously.

There are some awkward moments that come with truncating the story, like Aang saying he's been reading Zuko's diary every night (we never see this) or Katara mastering the water element off-screen.

I wonder what they're gonna do if/when the actor playing Aang grows up and matures, if the show lasts for years. Will be a bit odd if he's suddenly towering over everyone and his voice gets all deep.

As with the original, it really turns into the Prince Zuko and Uncle Iroh show. Some of the slapstick doesn't work as well. Young actors generally suck, which is why I hate anything with kids, but they aren't too bad here.

You generally need to get directors who specialise in work with kid actors when shooting shows like this one, and Netflix unfortunately didn't do that. There are so many instances where a Katara scene quite clearly needed another take, but the director just decided to move on because he/she couldn't be arsed. She needed direction, but was left high and dry, which is really unfair to a newbie actor.

The kids in the Harry Potter movies were even worse in the first couple of films

Yeah, the HP kids were atrocious. And not just for the first couple of movies either, in my mind they sucked up until the fourth or fifth one. I hope they cast better ones and/or hire directors who work with kids well for the new HP series.

Honestly I thought the kids that played Katara and Aang in this were pretty bad. The ones that played Zuko and Sokka did their job.

Aang's occasional woodenness was largely offset by his charisma and those huge sparkling eyes. Actress playing Katara had nothing of the sort to fall back on. She really could have benefited from a crash course in face acting before the shooting started.

I can't get my knickers in a twist over kids not being experienced enough to deal with acting against a green screen. They did well for the amount of VFX there was in each shot.

It wasn't even the action scenes that were the issue, the actress playing Katara struggles with the quieter, more dramatic scenes. She literally just has one facial expression and struggles with the reacting portion of acting. But, I'm sure she'll improve in the second season. I just hope no one regresses, which sometimes happens as kiddies grow up.

Airbender was the guy in Prometheus, wasn’t he?

The problem is also going to be the casting of Toph if there is a season two. She is supposed to be a blind 12 year old girl who is funny and one of the most badass benders of all time. Easy to do in animation, harder to find a real kid who can pull this off.

I loved the original show as a kid, and I still have many fond memories of it

I've since become an unrepentant snob and prefer to keep my memories as they are rather than revisiting it. Azula does have DL icon potential though, that girl was a CUNT to the core.

Zuko ended up sympathetic, whereas Azula was a rotten cunt the core (I can’t remember if they redeemed her slightly at the end, been a while since I watched).

Renewed for final two seasons. Better start shooting soon and maybe shoot both concurrently, before Aaang's voice drops too much.

Why we saw from Azula this season didn't exactly give diva icon r40.

Though it's hard, again she is the type of character that only really works in a cartoon. She is supposed to be 14 and the most clever and terrifying of villains. Same with her two friends whose names I can't recall.

Yeah, Azula's sidekicks are so over the top in the cartoon, there's no way you can translate something like that into live action. They tried it with the king of Omashu and it just came across as panto.