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
Haha yeah exactly! Maybe that’s why they got attached originally. Perhaps they thought they could redo parts they were unhappy with or show new perspectives and storylines.
This is the lifecycle of live action.
That and most come at it with the standpoint of animation is for kids rather than recognizing animation as simply a medium.
If they just took the original series and drew an extra frame between each frame I wouldn't be surprised if it made more than any of the live action works.
The only adaptation I will accept is one where Dwayne Johnson is playing Toph.
All others are inferior.
Unacceptable, he has to play The Boulder.
This and only this is acceptable, but they should still be voiced by the original voice actors.
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.
Well.. Paramount, which owns Nickelodeon, allows Netflix to make an adaptation and makes a fat check off the IP. They don't really lose any money either way. The good news is that they've given the creators of Avatar their own studio now and tons of new animation projects are in the works.
I loved it. And I was (am) a fan of the animated show. I think the adaptation was creative, approachable, and overall excellent. Fans forget that there's a big potential audience that isn't interested in watching a cartoon, just the fact that it's live action gives so many more people an opportunity to see this world.
First episode was shit though
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.
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.
I just don't get it. Who wants a live action avatar. The show holds up just fine.
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.
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!
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's not bad. Stop perpetrating this clickbait.
Edit: I was wrong y'all. It's trash
I watched an episode. It's really bad. I rewatched the series this last year so I could compare it. Just because someone agrees with the popular sentiment doesn't mean they're perpetrating (perpetuating?) click bait.
You watched an episode. That's not representative for all episodes. Simple as that.
I gave a show an hour of my time to get me to watch a universe I already like and know. If it can't "get" me in an hour, and THAT'S your front facing first episode? Nah, not worth my time
Aang flies like Superman in the first minute of his first appearance in the first episode. I rolled my eyes so hard that my brain reset to zero expectations mode. It's good enough to be background noise, specially if you don't watch or ignore the actors faces most of the time (except Sokka, he kills it). But it is nowhere near anything that can be called good.
It is though and I've watched the entire thing. Dialogue lines are trash, they constantly "tell" instead of "show," timelines don't make any sense, Team Avatar has no Chemistry, Katara learns to waterbend at a master-level from a single scroll, Aang never waterbends, there's no obvious through-line for the plot (it's just assumed you know why Aang is going to these places), Aang literally has no passion, and the show is trying to straddle the line between shot-for-shot remake and a retelling, but failing at both. There's ZERO character development. I could go on with things that are wrong with this new series.
I think the young actors and the special-effects crew have been failed by the writers, directors, and producers.
That play was pretty solid though, I'd watch it live.
HONORRRRRRrrrr
Is it bad? It’s bad isn’t it. I bet it’s bad.
It's not bad, it's certainly enjoyable.
My take: the original is the real story. The Netflix is a summary. They skip a lot, but it's only 8 episodes. The things they skip, I just remember "still happened". The things they merged/combined are just part of the summary.
You are able to like the Netflix, as long as you know it's not a replacement. Just enjoy the retelling, and seeing Uncle iroh as a real person!
It's only eight episodes, but they're an hour each, so it has exactly the same runtime. Also, the cartoon has the Great Divide, so not adapting that should have given them another 24 whole minutes to work with
All I needed to see was a clip of Aang saying, out loud, in the first episode, "but I'm just a kid who likes playing games and eating food and hanging out with my friends! I can't fight the fire nation!" Like. The Netflix show has exactly the same runtime as the first season of the anime. There is no reason why they couldn't have just shown us Aang being a kid and hanging out with his friends instead of telling us, unless they only wanted to save that runtime for flashy CGI fight scenes.
That and instead of Katara opening the series with her famous "water, earth, fire, air" monologue, the show has their grandma recite it word for word directly to Aang's face
Haha as a German I am lucky and can just switch to the German synchro. The voice acting is directly 300% better... Still that leaves the bad visual acting... As a bonus I get the old voices though. Somehow they where able to get the original voice actors for katara, sokka, suko, azula, Ty lee, Zhao, jet (I think), and suki
I enjoyed Netflix' Avatar so much that I finally started the anime. The acting from basically all the children actors is atrocious but I just love the realism and animation of the worldbuilding that an anime just can't give me. Any plot points with minor characters are great and with the exception of Azula, the fire nation actors are great.
Ember Island Players is my favorite episode. It's such a good capstone.
"Did Jet just die?!*
"It's not clear."
I really enjoyed the live action. Imo, it cut a lot of the filler from the animated show. I dislike wasting my time watching an episode that adds nothing to the plot.
I really think they should have just continued the story, rather than try to reboot it. I really hope they continue it though.
Slight difference between a tongue-in-cheek self-aware parody of your own creation, and an earnest and serious attempt at an adaptation that falls flat...
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