Avatar... huh?

Everything changes...

 

Ahh crap, that pesky old sky is falling down again. I try to keep it up the same but damn it the roof won't just stay up there! I tried a bit of sticky tap, little dabs of strategically placed blue tack, even an old broom wedged up against the door frame in an angle so bizarre it's practically gravity defying. But no matter how much I try the sky, the seat of all that is rational, seraphim, uncorruptible in the world slips and drags it's way back down to the dirty, flawed and perverse world of imperfect man. That which should remain sacred is despoiled and thrown around like paper ball scrunchies in an office tin bin tossed across the cubicle. One guy over there got the Death Note paper ball, and god did he make a mess of it. The Cowboy Bebop recipient all but went to war against his scrunchie- tearing it apart with disturbing abandon. But this latest hazardly tossed idea, a live action adaptation of The Last Airbender.. That one lands different for me. That one tastes wrong. And that one is coming here, whether we like it or not.

And why shouldn't I be afraid, despondent, unresponsive in the wake of learning how that which already died has been resurrected to be murdered once again. The Live Action prospects of an Avatar adaptation- we all saw what happened the last time we allowed such a travesty to land upon us. We all witnessed the sheer boiling dumpster fire, fuelled by what seemed to be a intentional and genuine hatred for the material, it's fans and the very muse who wove her song to it's scribes. How else can one justify getting everything wrong, from the racial makeup of the various factions, (a lesser evil for sure given that the original was animated, but mind bogglingly consistent for how wrong they got it) the pronunciation of every character's name, (They had a whole show full of reference material to address if anyone was confused) and the very spectacle of bending itself. They missed the point, missed the mark and missed their chance at making Avatar something far bigger than it currently is.

But the boogie man is gone, I am told. M Night Shyamalan is not tucked in the closet ready to jump out in the middle of the night in order to corrupt my dreams with his 'subversive' trickery. (You know, like 'pretending' to be a fan of source material.) We are safe. Safe to place our trust in the hands of... wait a second... Albert Kim. Who the hell is- he worked on the series Sleepy Hollow. Well I wouldn't call that a glowing endorsement for the man's ability to run an action-focused adventure show but- well, at least the guy has experience running a show. Then again, M Night had a lot of experience making movies and that only fuelled his methods for systematically attacking every aspect of the Avatar show that he possibly could in what must have been the first recorded attempted murder upon a piece of fiction. And he was only making a movie! 8 Netflix-length episodes per season? Oh god, this could do some real damage to the Avatar we love.

Just as we were hearing about the brand new animated series which, somewhat lamentably, would have translated the action into the modern age. I wanted to get excited for that, to enjoy watching that show, before having to grit my teeth and bare my head against the falling of the sky that is the live action adaptation. But I suppose we can't all get what we want, can we? >Sigh< I just- wish people would understand the sort of undertaking they are mounting here. Avatar isn't just a good show, it's not some loose and lofty collection of stories that tightens up over the years and can be disseminated in a strict and quality structure with some thoughtful editing. (Thank you One Piece.) Avatar is tight, it's masterful, it's exciting, it's poignant. It's one of the best shows ever made. Adapting that to any degree, even a single short, would have been a challenge. Full adaptation? Well it's not even needed.

That all being said, I'm not a total bore. I can see that Avatar's newest Netflix partnership has money behind it and that money has gone into making everything look the way that it should. People has already rightly noted how there's none of that muted 'realism' which made the Movie so bland compared to the world of the animation, and the colours of the animation almost felt brought to stark life. The cast look about right, even though I think their Azula looks much younger than she should. (But if they are doing bi-yearly seasons then I suppose they want actors who aren't going to look twenty five by the end of their 6 year run.) The brief glimpse we see of bending certainly looks a more interesting than the infamous floating pebble that we all remember. On a very surface level the show looks the way that it should. On any more substantive level, all we need is to hear someone say the name: "Awwng" and we riot.

Now if we look at some of Netflix's examples from the recent, such as the birth of One Piece's adaptation, we might be looking at a content producer slowly on the up. I mean, that was a show that truncated the One Piece anime into a tight and enjoyable show. I would argue that Avatar doesn't and hasn't ever needed that treatment, but it's good to know they're capable of pulling it off when push comes to shove. Then again, we all also remember Cowboy Bebop, which took a stylised masterpiece and turned it into a gut churning embarrassment of Television, proving that Netflix absolutely crumble whenever shove comes to kick. Personally I think if we're comparing the states of material we're dealing with here, this has more in common with Bebop than One Piece- not least of all because of who's actually involved with the project.

You see, One Piece was made in close conjunction with Oda- the mangaka responsible for the property to begin with, and his guiding hand helped keep the spirit of the show alive, and probably justified a lot of more insane expenditures to the studio, such as the physical ship building. Bebop was made completely out of the purview of the original creators, and had a script so bad that fact was painfully obvious, as they desperately tried to chase the very letter of the original show and fell far short. Well this Avatar show was started in conjunction with the show runners, but they ended up splitting up years ago thanks to 'creative differences'. Now who's to say what the show even is anymore? Or more to the point, are they going to be adapting the spirit of Avatar, or chasing after it fruitlessly?

So I want Avatar to be a good show because I want it's prospects to be expanded out to as many people as possible. I want Aang to be a household name, and I need a more common-sense reworking of the Korra narrative to place Season 2 in place of Season 4 because there's no way that a knowing writer would have laid out the stakes-scaling like Korra did if they had the franchise planned out beforehand. But I'm prepared for the absolute worst because let's be honest, we've got more in way of bad examples to colour our expectations so far. So I'm not going to be optimistic. Cautious or otherwise. I'm expecting a disaster of such proportions it makes the toes of Yog-Sothoth turn inside out and makes scurry the man-eating Cats of Ulthar. And if I'm wrong, then I'll happily take that knock on the chin, but if I'm right... well, there will be a reckoning to pay.