Problem with Avatar adaptations is that even a really good one will be bad in context of a series that has 100% rating (99% audience score!) on Rotten Tomatoes.
You simply cannot improve on perfection.I think the main problem is that they keep inviting the original creators, they sign on, the studio heads explain to the creators how the studio has figured out how to tweak things, creators say “your ideas are horrible and if you execute on them as you’ve described, everyone is going to hate it”. The studio’s refuse to budge, creators depart citing creative differences, studio gets their way. Is a steaming pile of shit. Rinse and repeat.
I heard the reason they left this time was because the showrunners wanted to basically recreate the series, and the original creators were like, “but… we already made that series. Let’s make something new”.
Could be false though, because I don’t understand how they’d get so attached to the project knowing that it was supposed to be a live action remake from the start…
So basically, show runners wanted to make Scott pilgrim vs the world while the OGs wanted to make Scott pilgrim takes off
I like that in the netflix version they added scenes that weren’t in the original. My favorite is the scene of Lu Ten’s funeral. Iroh is just sitting there silent but you can see on his face that is he is broken inside but everyone comes up to him and congratulates him that his son died a hero. No one says it but for me it felt like in the fire nation culture you’re not allowed to mourn the death of those who died in battle, which is a crazy concepts but fits with the Fire Nations fascist ideology.
I couldn’t find the whole scene, but here is the last part of it (https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hwPn2gJ1B_U). For context, Zuko has gone up to Iroh and said that Lu Ten’s death is great honor. But when he was about to leave he comes back and thats when the above video starts.
These scenes add so much to the character of Iroh, Zuko, Lu Ten (whose character we did know anything about in the original) and to war-time Fire Nation culture. It’s amazing!
I hate how Hollywood thinks live action is the highest form of visual media. Like you want remake avatar? Up the budget for animators, pay the shit out of your voice actors, and pay some writers to add some darker themes. Would be better than any of the live action have been.
This adaption, while not perfect due to nothing coming close to the show in terms of perfection, is not bad at all. It’s shorter than the show so of course they had to make things flow quicker and things were cut out. But for a 7 episode take on season 1 I was impressed.
Im only 4 episodes in so I can’t give a full review but I think the problem is there were some choices that were made that ruined the heart of what was good about the show. Uncle iroh and saka are not funny at all. I just saw the 4th episode which has the caves of omashu and the singing hippies were hilarious but got mostly removed. It’s like they think laughing would cheapen then shows seriousness or something. There is no love connection between aang and katara. And they added a bunch of storyline from season 2 for some reason.
Yeah it’s not the best thing since sliced bread, but it was a decent TV show (in a vacuum.) Which was about the best we could hope for when they said they want to appeal to Avatar fans AND Game of Thrones fans.
For a fraction of the cost, Netflix could have instead just frame remastered the original show into 16:9 (not lazy cropping) and spent most of the effort into marketing it properly to gain a much wider audience.
But that would involve talent, critical thinking, and accepting that animation is a format not a genre. So naturally they just bought the rights so they could have their version of Star Wars/Harry Potter.
I could go on an entire rant about how even thinking making an animated show into a live action is a stupid idea, no matter how much money you throw at it, but I think I’ll just wait for E;R’s 2 hour youtube special instead lmao.
Has this ever been done? Taken an entire TV series animated in 4:3, and just adding content to the sides of the screen on every single frame?
God I hope they never try that.
The best visual artists are extremely effective in their use of space. A 4:3 image expanded to 16:9 would just look weird, as the framing would simply not look right.
The alternative is some amount of expansion and cropping but it would still not look nearly as good as leaving the artwork in it’s original aspect ratio.
A great example is Seinfeld which looks frickin terrible in 16:9:
https://consequence.net/2021/10/seinfeld-aspect-ratio-netflix/
it can be done well. off the top of my head, a couple good examples are south park and marvelous misadventures of flapjack
I only know South Park, but from what I remember most of the shots there weren’t particularly cinematic, most of it was pretty “matter of fact” with the main action/focus to the middle of the characters with everything else around just being eye-candy non-important filler. I could imagine it then working much better.
The only adaptation I will accept is one where Dwayne Johnson is playing Toph.
All others are inferior.
But the Fantastic Four had a great movie called “The Incredibles”.
it works pretty well as a recap episode, and as a teaching moment. covers, broadly, the events of the show up to that point (which, remember, is several years of airing and you might have missed a chunk of it), all while coating it in propaganda for the characters to reflect on and for the viewer to learn about. i remember being a kid and being outraged that the events were being portrayed wrongly, and it was a big learning point for me.
The Netflix show wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t better than the original.
It had some really rough moments intertwined with some really well done moments. Overall it’s fine. The shots of the cities and some of the fights were beautiful. I also really liked some of the zuko and iroh backstory that wasn’t in the original show. Some of the dialogue was very clunky and they mashed up a bunch of stories into the same episode which felt weird and didn’t totally work. I enjoyed watching it for the most part. It was never going to be as good as the original so I think going in with that expectation helped.
Which isn’t really possible so I don’t know why they keep investing money into trying. Just make more animated shows set in that universe.
