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Matthew
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Today we’re proving that when you make a sequel, you can take the original title, and you don’t just have to put a new word at the end.
You can put it right in the middle. We’re talking not about Avatar: The Last Airbender, but Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a movie that came out to very little fanfare, streaming only. It’s animated, and it’s from the creators of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender. Paul Hoppe and I, who are great fans of the original, have had a lot of mixed thoughts, from very bad to middling to really liking some of it, about the various remakes and sequels that have happened in the Avatar-verse, and we’re here to talk about it.
So, Paul, as always we’re going to have some review-type stuff, but a lot of what we’ll talk about will take more of an ethical lens, since this is the Superhero Ethics podcast. Today, though, we’ll probably lean a little more into did we like it, did we not, because one of the things we want to talk about is the responsibility you take on when you remake something, do a sequel, or add to the canon of something that’s truly beloved. So, Paul, with that, what did you think?
Paul
Did not like. That would be pretty much the most concise way I could say it. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t like it. I don’t even think it was bad. About ten or fifteen minutes into the movie, I was just asking myself, who was this made for? Not me, was my immediate thought. We can get into that question later.
It felt like it had so little of what I loved about the original series that it bordered on a difficult watch for me. Li fell asleep, and she loves the original series. I’d just say it’s an action movie. The original series was an adventure-quest series that had action in it. This felt like an action movie first, and everything else second, third, or fourth.
Matthew
I think that’s really true. I was more excited about it than you were at the start, because of how I felt about the plot, but I think you’re right that the plot didn’t get as much attention as I would have liked, because it played more like an action movie. I want to say one or two quick things about the history of this movie first.
In terms of the official reason it’s being made, Nickelodeon announced Avatar Studios, a subdivision of Nickelodeon where theoretically they’re going to put out more Avatar projects. I don’t know the full history here. A lot of people have done great breakdowns of it, and I don’t want to just find one and read it to you. But I do know the original creators were involved with the live-action TV show that’s now on Netflix, that they had creative differences and split away from it, and that this was what they decided to be involved with instead. How involved they still are is up for some debate.
That’s roughly the official history of how it came to be made. Let me jump into what was my first real issue, and also the thing that gave me hope at first, which I think raises an issue both inside the universe and, even more, outside it. If you’ve heard us talk before, you’ve heard me say that we did a number of episodes on Legend of Korra, and one of my biggest frustrations with that show is that it raised, in the first season, this question of the equalists, the non-bending people pointing out that there’s quite literally a two-class system and that they’re the lower class in that world. The show has some sympathy for them, but there’s also a whole plot about how their leader isn’t really interested in that issue, he has his own motivations, and we get wrapped up in that instead of ever really dealing with their concerns. Their concerns get raised again later, in the last season, and are, I think, better resolved.
I don’t remember the exact details, but it definitely felt weird and unresolved for a while. So when this movie introduced a group called the Denied, which is an interesting name in itself, since it sounds like something someone made a conscious choice about, these people get to be benders, these people don’t, and whether or not that was ever cosmologically true, the fact that these people feel that way would have been an interesting issue to explore. My first thought was, oh, they’re going to explore this issue that was never really explored.
This should be really cool, I thought. And then my second thought was, wait a minute, if they fix this issue, Legend of Korra doesn’t make any sense anymore. So we get to what I’m now calling the problem of the midquel. Sequels are hard to do, prequels are really hard to do, but the hardest is this kind of midquel, where it’s both.
It’s both. You have to make the characters make sense from where they started, and you also have to make sure the characters and the world make sense as they head toward what it’s about to become. And somehow you have to tell a story in there. Of all the plot points they could have explored, the fact that they chose one that’s a central part of the first season of what comes next really got to me.
Paul
Yeah, me too. My first reaction wasn’t, oh good, maybe they’ll finally do this storyline justice. It was, oh, this again. It’s not that I think it’s an uninteresting idea, it’s just that there are all these militants, basically, and the way they’re portrayed lacks depth. There’s one character who kind of objects, but doesn’t necessarily stick with them the whole way.
It felt like they took this same idea Legend of Korra tackled, felt like they didn’t do it justice, and then said, what if we do it even less justice? I want to briefly talk about format, too. A couple weeks ago, we talked with Pete about Lattice, right?
Right, about how it’s a novella. I was talking about how much I love the novella as a form. If you have a story where the novella is the right format, great, make it a novella. If you have a story where the novel is the right format and you make it a novella instead, you have a problem.
Matthew
War and Peace as a novella, not great, right?
Paul
Probably not going to work out so great. The original animated series had sixty or sixty-one episodes. That’s a long time, made over several years, twenty in each of three books, as they called them. Each episode was only twenty minutes, but that’s seven hours of screen time to develop one segment, basically one act of a three-act story. When the first live-action Last Airbender movie came out, before it even came out, I was concerned, because I thought, how are you going to take seven hours of screen time and boil it down into a two-hour movie? And the answer turned out to be by cutting out a lot of the good stuff.
And by using expository dialogue to explain everything instead of showing it. So when that movie turned out as bad as I expected, I thought, well, you could have done a better job with what you had, but it’s understandable that condensing all of that was a real challenge. When Netflix did the live-action series, I think it was eight episodes.
Matthew
Eight episodes, I think, around forty-five minutes each.
Paul
So that’s about six hours of screen time. It wasn’t as episodic, they didn’t hit every point, but there was a lot more room for the story to breathe. I didn’t love some of the choices in that series, and there was a bunch of gratuitous violence I wasn’t a fan of, but I did feel like it was more true to the original, at least in certain aspects and in how the story was told. Then there’s this movie, which is a different situation. Legend of Korra told four stories, each in about thirteen episodes, instead of one story in three segments over sixty episodes, so it was already fast-forwarding. They did a lot of great character development there, though. In terms of the overall arcs of the antagonists, they didn’t take the time.
I don’t want to say there’s no time in thirteen episodes, but it’s more challenging, there’s less time available. And now here they’re trying to tell a whole story, while also recapping some of what happened in the originals in case you haven’t watched those, in about an hour and forty minutes. An hour and thirty or forty minutes is a great runtime for an action movie. It’s not a great runtime for a story that wants to get deep into character motivations, with a lot of characters and a lot of action.
If you’re going to have a character-driven story that’s ninety minutes, fine, you get a lot of conversations, things can develop over time. But when you have all these huge set pieces, and there was so much action in this, which I thought looked really cool, it also felt harder to follow than in the original series, like it was suffering from sequelitis: we’re trying to make it big, we’re trying to make it look great on the big screen. If I’d never seen the original, maybe I would have liked it. But within the frame of knowing what I loved about the original, and seeing those characters on screen without the story, or the way the story is told, really matching the original, it was a tough watch.
Matthew
I think that’s really true. I agree the animation was incredible, fantastic even. Part of that is just that animation technology has improved over the years, but I also think they clearly wanted to pay homage to the original, and I have a lot of respect for that.
There are varying stories coming out, and I think there’s going to be a lot of what-really-happened discussion about this movie for a while, especially if we do get more from Avatar Studios, though the way this movie’s been received, barely known about and not well received, makes me think Avatar Studios might not get very far off the ground. We’ll see.
It was meant to be released in theaters, and it does have that feeling. One thing I wanted to ask you specifically: I’m not a martial artist, but once you pointed it out, I could really notice that the different kinds of bending were clearly based on different martial arts.
Paul
Waterbending is like tai chi, firebending is like Northern Kung Fu and similar styles of karate, airbending has more circular motion, more like Goju karate, and earthbending is very rooted in style. Each style has an earthly counterpart but also very much its own character.
Matthew
I didn’t really see that here. I think it’s because we weren’t seeing the precise motions of the hands so much as big swirls of wind flying through the air. That looked cool, but it didn’t look like Avatar to me.
Paul
For sure. There was something about the original where, for the most part, everything was very visible. The whole idea behind the bending styles was to come up with something that would look good in hand-drawn animation. I don’t know exactly how they do things now, and technological innovation can be a double-edged sword, sometimes the technology takes away some of the personality. I didn’t really feel that here, I thought it was visually spectacular, but maybe impersonal is the word. In the original, the way the characters moved felt real, like real people doing martial arts. Here, I felt farther away, like I couldn’t relate to the martial arts as much.
Matthew
Another thing that made this a hard adaptation for me, and we’ll talk more about the why of it and whether it should have happened, but just to name more of the concerns: I think there’s a number of ways you can tell stories about the same characters at different points in their lives. The hardest, though, and one we don’t see very often because it’s genuinely difficult, is taking characters who are literal children and showing them as adults. I don’t just mean teenagers now in their twenties, these kids are all around the age of puberty. Aang is definitely pre-pubescent at the start, the others are a bit further along, fourteen, fifteen, up to Zuko, who’s probably the oldest.
To take all of them and make them adults is a huge transition, both physically and in terms of personality. If you take a person and show who they were at twelve or fourteen versus who they are now, it’s hard to find those connections, not that you can’t see them, but imagining what a fourteen-year-old will be like at forty is a lot harder than imagining what an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old will become. There’s still room to grow at that age, but it’s a bigger shift. It also means the characters don’t have the same voice actors, even though they mostly looked the same to me. It reminded me of something I liked about Korra: it kept some of the original characters, but aged them so much that they became background figures rather than leads, which is smart. They had characters like Toph and Katara, and I don’t think Sokka was actually in it, just Zuko.
They were in much smaller roles, and even then, a lot of people asked how Toph became a cop. That was also part of why this movie showing them after a much smaller time jump was one of the bigger problems for me. This is really just a couple of years after the Hundred Year War ended and the original show ended, and yet it was really hard for me to see the connections with these characters.
Paul
Is it only a couple of years? I had no idea how much time had passed, do they say? Did that feel clear to you?
Matthew
I was going by a couple of context clues. The biggest one is that Aang and Katara don’t have children yet. So to me that means it’s probably at least twenty years, or something in that range.
Paul
Sure, probably, not necessarily, but also probably not within three years, since he was twelve in the original.
Matthew
Exactly. It’s probably been a while, he seems like an adult, though again, you don’t fully know. I don’t know what the drinking age or voting age is in this world. I’d guess somewhere between five and fifteen years.
Paul
Well, Republic City is a city, right? So they built a whole city in this time.
Matthew
I think she says at the start that it’s the third anniversary of the founding of Republic City. There’s one moment where Sokka does a very Sokka thing, when they’re talking about being stuck in this world with the forever storm around them, and he does his sort of freak-out, like, what are we going to do?
And zooms all around. That felt weird to me, because that’s the kind of thing Sokka the child would do, showing that he’s one of the ones carrying the weight of the world while still being a kid sometimes, which was part of the brilliance of the original. Watching him do it here felt like they were trying to remind me that this is who Sokka was, but because the rest of the time he’s been portrayed as an adult, it didn’t land for me.
Paul
None of that really bothered me, but I hear you. I think it’s objectively difficult both to portray a character at very different ages and to imagine what someone’s going to be like later. I think we all probably have our own experiences of changing, or not changing, at different ages, and that colors what we expect someone else to be like. This is not as much later as some other stories dealing with that same challenge.
But I think it’s just difficult. None of it felt wrong to me, but there wasn’t enough time to really know how much they’d changed. Sokka maybe had five moments, Toph had three or four, Zuko had a couple, Katara maybe a few more, but not a lot.
She had her whole “I’m Katara, I’m going to do the scolding thing and say we shouldn’t do the plot, but then the plot happens because somebody else decides to do it” bit. There just wasn’t time to really feel how they had or hadn’t changed. I can see how something feels like a false note when a character seems too much like they were at another age. Some people change a lot, some people don’t change much. If you have time to really sit with a character, and something surprises you or doesn’t feel right at first, it can end up making sense if the story does a good job and gives it room. But when a character only has a little screen time to do anything, if something feels a little off, there’s no time to make it right.
Matthew
Another moment that felt like they were trying to shove in something people loved about the original, but out of touch and out of tone: in the middle of this fairly dark fight, over whether a city will be destroyed by this incredible violence, we get the cabbage man.
The cabbage man gets knocked over, all his cabbages go flying, we see him go off screen, and he doesn’t say anything for a good two seconds. I thought, oh, they had the restraint not to do the line. Then, there’s the line. Earlier, when they’re just showing Republic City, someone is singing “Secret Tunnel” in the background.
Paul
Right, and you see the cabbages, but nothing really happens with them. That was fine. That’s the sort of thing that didn’t really bother me, but it did feel a little perfunctory.
I did appreciate that at first it seemed like he was genuinely sad about his cabbages, a slightly different tone. That was Ken Jeong, one of the more famous actors I didn’t recognize in the moment, which I found a little distracting, a couple of times I’d think, oh, that’s so-and-so.
Matthew
It’s a little hard for Dave Bautista to be anyone but Dave Bautista.
Paul
Yeah, I didn’t know that was Dave Bautista. I was thinking of Ronny Chieng and Ke Huy Quan, but yeah, you noticed too. There’s a thing, going back to Aladdin, where I think Robin Williams said, I’ll do this role, but please don’t market it as Robin Williams as the Genie.
And they said, sure, no problem, Robin, we won’t do that, and then, of course, they did. Part of the idea is that voice acting is its own craft, and there’s no real need for famous voice actors all the time.
But there’s obviously a financial incentive, since you get to put a recognizable name on the poster. I love all the actors I mentioned, I think they’re great, but I’d usually rather have more, essentially, nameless voices. I thought they did a good job here, though.
Matthew
That’s another issue we can discuss more at some point, and have before: a lot of voice actors have talked about how unhappy this makes them, especially when a project starts small, without a big budget, so they hire voice actors, and then it becomes a big hit, gets taken to a larger format, and suddenly they’re hiring well-known names instead. I don’t think this affected this particular movie in terms of timing, but there was a glut of projects with very famous actors doing voice work because they were allowed to while on strike, since that wasn’t covered under the same kind of contract.
Paul
And before that, you probably had some of that because of COVID, people doing sessions from home instead of, you know, whatever the alternative would have been.
Matthew
There may be a baseball lockout next year, we don’t know. I hope those guys, I mean, they’re doing pretty well financially, I imagine they’ll be okay with a strike or a lockout, whatever it ends up being.
A bunch of them went down to play in the Mexican League last time. That’d probably get some pretty great names.
Paul
Yeah, Robinson Canó would be out there like, hey, what’s going on, let me lead the league in batting in peace. I’m forty-three.
Matthew
So, back to this. I think we have a sense of where we are, but let me put it kind of frankly: why do you think this movie was made, and should it have been made?
Paul
I think there’s a couple of things. My framing was, who is this made for? Why is it made? The answer’s always money, I think, when it actually gets made. Maybe there’s some artistic drive too.
That’s obviously part of why the people doing the making make the thing, that’s often a big part of it, and it might have been here. Maybe it’s, we felt like we had more story to tell, so we wanted to tell it. But as far as why it gets backed, why a lot of money gets invested, it’s because they think they’re going to make more money. The financial people look at Avatar and think, this is a very popular show, it’s valuable intellectual property.
And so I think, in that regard, that’s the cynical take. Then there’s the question of who it’s made for, which I find more interesting, because I can think of three groups, primarily age-based, but also based on relationship to the series.
Maybe a fourth group that’s not age-based. One: people like us, who watched the original as adults and would like to see more of it, and are probably watching this with a similar lens to how we watched the original. I love the original series, it’s maybe my favorite series of all time, definitely top five.
Maybe top three. But I don’t have nostalgia tied to it. I remember watching it while I was writing my first book, I think in 2010, five or so years after the series came out, so I didn’t watch it live and wasn’t part of anyone talking about it at the time. My wife and I were just on the couch watching it while I was relaxing, actually it might have even been before I started writing the book.
It was during this ridiculous grind-a-thon where I locked myself in my apartment for twenty-eight days straight. The point is, we don’t have a childhood memory tied to watching this. Then there are people who watched the original as children, around the age of the characters or a little younger, who probably have real nostalgia for it, and a new movie could be trading on that, though it would have to be a more adult story, since the characters are more adult now.
You watched the show as a kid, and now you’re watching something a little more for adults, as an adult. Then there are two more groups: new people who aren’t that familiar with the original, which I think is plenty of people, some of whom might like this movie and then go down the rabbit hole into the original, and kids now, around the age the original series originally targeted. Of course, the original was good enough that it resonated with people of all ages.
It had depth and layers. So I don’t have a clean answer for who this was really made for. I’d ask you the same thing: who do you think this is most meant to appeal to?
Matthew
I think I have an answer, though I’m going to complicate a couple of things you said. I think I’ll combine two of your categories, since I’m already thinking about the fact that my child is one year old, they wouldn’t understand anything they’re watching yet. But I’m excited to show them the things I love, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, The Wire, when they’re older, at least seven for some of it.
Paul
Sure, yeah.
Matthew
I’ve been talking to a lot of parents about this. One thing several of them have said is that stuff changes fast, and to modern eyes, movies from the seventies or even the nineties can seem slow or dated. A lot of them have found that sitting a kid down with something from the seventies doesn’t really work, but if the kid is the right age for the prequels or the sequels, they watch those, get interested in Star Wars, and then want to go back and watch the older stuff.
And that isn’t really true just for adults with nostalgia, a lot of these nostalgia-bait projects are made with adults in mind, but it has particular relevance for parents: I want to introduce you to this world I love, so I’ll show you this, and hopefully you’ll go watch the old-fogy version I really love afterward. I think that’s part of it. I also think Legend of Korra has a lot to do with why this one was made. Korra was fairly successful, though not as successful as the original, and there’s a lot of debate about how it was made. One of the reasons it was disappointing, especially to the people who grew up with the original show, is that they wanted to see what the Avatar gang was like once they grew up.
The thing you and I both said was kind of a benefit of Korra centering Aang was totally off the table there, since Aang wasn’t really in it and the others were older and mostly absent. I’ve read a lot of people say they were pretty frustrated that Korra didn’t give them that. So I think that’s part of it too. And then there’s this whole battle over, and I’ve found a lot of things online, much of it built on one small fact or one line from an interview blown up into a lot of speculation, so I don’t want to claim I know who’s right or wrong here.
But clearly a lot of people have strong, conflicting feelings about what the legacy of this beloved show should be, who should get to tell it, and how it should be told. I can look at that from a sympathetic angle, artistic vision and so on, or from a more cynical one, ego, who gets to cash the checks, and the truth is probably somewhere in between. I think all of those things played into it, along with the fact that some of the other recent Avatar projects have done well. I’d imagine all of that had a hand in this movie getting made.
Paul
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I find it so frustrating when people go back to older things and just decide, this is slow, so it’s bad.
I feel kind of fortunate to have watched forties movies as a kid and not been entirely shaped by the MTV-generation style, all the quick cuts. I’ve got nothing against that style itself, just against the idea that it has to be the norm, that everything has to look like short-form video now. It’s rough, watching people’s attention spans shrink around that expectation.
Matthew
To be clear, I think that’s part of it. There’s also a bigger element of people struggling to enjoy things from other generations, some of which is fair, come on, it doesn’t have to be exactly the way you want it. But some of it really is that animation technology has improved a lot.
Paul
I can see someone going back to watch the first seasons of Clone Wars and thinking, this doesn’t look good. Even at the time, it didn’t look great.
Matthew
Or, a lot of stuff gets remade because it’s, hey, this is a cool idea, but maybe someone besides white guys can play the lead this time, that kind of updating. There’s also the idea behind the new Star Trek movies, the original Star Trek was great, but the technology was pretty rough.
Paul
Right, right, yeah.
Matthew
I agree with all of that, but I very much agree with you that just because we can remake something now, with better and faster technology, doesn’t mean we should. I think that’s part of what happened here. What I balance that against, though, and what you were saying about how a lot of these things happen because of money, and I don’t think you’re wrong, is that one of my real heroes is Suzanne Collins. Suzanne Collins wrote the Hunger Games books, and she’s written a number of sequels over the years, when she could have written far more of them, much faster.
She’s said she’ll only write something when she feels she has something to say. It’s clear that each of the two sequels that have come out, and the movies alongside them, aren’t just filling in background on different characters. She has specific issues she looks at in the world and wants to comment on through the story, and it’s not just one specific thing, like Gaza, but broader societal issues too. Now, granted, the first trilogy was wildly successful.
The first set of movies was wildly successful, so I don’t think she’d say everyone else is only writing for money and should only write for art. I think she’d be the first to say she can do that because she has enough.
She probably doesn’t hate getting some pretty nice checks as the movies keep coming, but she’s reached a level of financial stability and independence that I doubt the people who made a successful Nickelodeon show a couple of years ago have reached. I get some of that. But with something like Avatar, I kind of wish it were more like this: I watched a TikTok review from a creator I really like, and his take was, it was fine, wasn’t terrible, wasn’t great, it was an Avatar movie, and it was fine. I had a visceral reaction to that, if all you’re going to get is fine, don’t make the movie. Something as beloved and as close to perfect as the original deserves more, if a writer has a genuinely new take on the benders-versus-non-benders idea, or wants to explore something new about the four elements, or a different kind of bending altogether, I’d love to see that.
But the fact that I started with the benders-versus-non-benders angle, which, as you said, has been done before, numerous times, and it felt like there was nothing new these writers wanted to say, no new discussion, no new take on the characters. It was just, let’s tell a story and have a lot of cool action.
Paul
If pressed, I don’t think the benders-non-benders thing was really the point, I think it was a bit of a red herring. I think the story was really about what it means to be a culture, what it means to be a people, and whether, if a people is nearly wiped out, with maybe a couple of survivors left, rebuilding that culture is something that can even be done. If you just give a bunch of people airbending, that’s not the airbending culture on its own.
Matthew
And what do you do with the anger of having your culture almost wiped out, and everything that comes with that?
Paul
Well, you go out and find another culture to wipe out. Wait, sorry, that’s getting a little too real-world. It felt like, oh, we’re going to be the Earth Empire, and it’s, wait, didn’t we already do this with the Earth Empire in season four of Korra? When it comes to the actual creators, the people originally involved in the original series, I’d guess it’s mostly about creative control, wanting to keep telling a story they had enough left in them to turn into graphic novels. I don’t think they made graphic novels just for the money, it’s more, well, we’re not doing a fourth season on screen, so we’ll do it in books. To me, there’s a real love of the game there: these are my characters, and I want to keep telling stories with them. I don’t have a problem with someone making something that’s just fine, because if you make something fine, some people are still going to love it.
And that’s fine, you’ve made it for them. I’ve accepted that the Star Wars prequels and sequels, and a lot of other shows, just aren’t for me. They weren’t made with me in mind, they were made with someone else in mind, and some people love them, some people hate them, I have mixed feelings about different ones. One of the other movies I thought of while watching this was The Phantom Menace, an absolutely beloved original trilogy, and viewing the original Airbender as three books, water, earth, and fire.
And then, twenty years later, give or take, okay, now we’re doing something again. They did something in between, but this is really a continuation of that story, which I guess makes it more of a prequel in this analogy, whatever. The point is, there was a big gap of time, and then, here’s something new from the same people. And it just wasn’t what I wanted.
I knew enough this time not to get too excited going in. These kinds of things, where you make something, step away for a long while, and then come back to it much later, are really hard to get right, or to please the people who love the original with. It’s hard enough to make a sequel, but a sequel twenty years later is next-level.
I think it so rarely works out. I wish people would stop doing it, but I also hope there are people who love this movie. I hope some of them go watch the original because they got into these characters here, maybe they love it, maybe they don’t. It just didn’t do it for me. I wish there weren’t so much of this kind of thing, and that we could just tell some new stories with new characters. Does everything have to be a cinematic universe? I guess so.
Matthew
I definitely feel that. Can I say something briefly about how I felt about the newest Spider-Man movie? Not really spoilery, but I think it says something related.
I think it’s a fantastic Spider-Man movie on its own, and it does a very good job connecting itself to the larger world. Since it’s the last movie before Doomsday, something built up to an Infinity War kind of scale, a lot of people, myself included, are frustrated that we haven’t had more setup for it in other movies along the way. That was in my head in a way I didn’t want it to be.
I kept waiting, okay, how is this movie going to help me understand what’s going to happen in Doomsday? Where is Thanos at the end, reaching for the glove? Where’s the Chitauri?
Paul
Anyway, you’re wearing kind of Doomsday colors today, by the way, that same green with black.
Matthew
I don’t know, honestly, I don’t know anything about Doomsday, so you brought it up. There’s apparently a lot of silver in the Doomsday look.
Paul
Yeah, silver, but I think green too, Cape Crusader green or something like that. Silver, black, and green, yeah.
Matthew
So, Magic conference outfit, basically. I’ll also say something in defense of the writers here. There’s a lot we don’t know about, but we’ve heard stories from other people about what writers have to do to get the money people to sign off on what they actually want to do. In some ways, I don’t love this, but I’d understand it more if the deal were something like, we’ll do a movie, and if the movie’s successful, we’ll fund a series. This is completely conjecture on my part.
And that the studio wanted things to be more action-heavy, or whatever the note was. One example I like to bring up here, I don’t think you’ve ever watched it, but I love The Orville.
Paul
Oh, I haven’t watched it, I’m unfamiliar.
Matthew
Fantastic show. It’s a send-up of Star Trek while also basically being a Star Trek show, Seth MacFarlane doing everything he could to make a Star Trek show without officially being allowed to.
He pokes fun at it in some ways, but it’s also a love letter to it, and it updates some things too. I wasn’t excited to watch it at first, because I’m not a big fan of a lot of Seth MacFarlane humor, I don’t like Family Guy, don’t love a lot of that particular shtick. A lot of the first half of the first season leans on that.
And then it almost disappears entirely. He’s talked openly, in a lot of interviews, especially once his relationship with the original network ended and the show moved elsewhere under a different name, about how they didn’t trust him not to lean on that style, they figured everyone would want a Seth MacFarlane show, so you have to give them Seth MacFarlane humor. That frustrated him, because he wanted to move past it.
It was only once the producers said, okay, you’re doing well, the numbers are good, we’re not going to be looking over your shoulder as much, that he stopped doing that kind of material and it turned into what I think is a legitimately great science fiction show, one that does a fantastic job exploring complicated issues, including sometimes, maybe Star Trek got this wrong, let’s talk about it a different way. So maybe I’m throwing all the blame onto the money people here instead. Some of it, sure, why not.
Paul
Right, like, come on, I don’t even know their names.
Matthew
I do wonder if there was also that same thought behind the kind of show we’re talking about, and whether a lot of people share similar concerns, we’re not off on an island here. I wonder if that’s part of it, and, look, big-budget explosions do sell tickets, I get that. But I think there’s an overcorrection now where everyone wants it to always be big action, big graphics, big explosions, and a lot of people want something else and aren’t getting it.
Paul
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I don’t even know what I want, honestly. I haven’t watched a lot of new things lately. I’ve been watching Murder, She Wrote, Columbo, Cheers. Most of the time when I do watch something new, I end up disappointed.
I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff out there I’m just not watching. It definitely feels, if we just use the original series as an example, like the first season had a lot more of that kiddie-humor kind of energy. That stayed with the show, but they eased into the heavier stuff, and they talked about a genocide in the first episode, so it’s not like they avoided it. They just eased into the heavier, slower-paced material, winning over the audience and also winning over the network’s trust, to the point where the network says, okay, you can do what you want, we trust you to make something people love, and we’ll be more hands-off.
I could see this being that kind of situation. I don’t know anything about how it was actually made, I just know about the live-action series, and that the creators of the original were involved, then not involved, in various ways along the way. I don’t think they made something bad here. I found both antagonists kind of annoying.
I thought the twist was pretty predictable, and honestly I just didn’t like the story overall. I’ve got harsher words I won’t say. At one point, and this is one of the harsher ones, I felt like I was watching Quantumania. It was like, where even are we? I wanted to see the land, something rooted in the elements, and everything here felt like only extreme versions of elements instead of an actual, grounded world, so I felt like I wasn’t seeing the world I knew, not because the world had changed that much, but because they kept going to these ridiculous places.
It felt untethered, like it didn’t have that rooting. I wasn’t incredibly disappointed, because I didn’t have high expectations going in, but it was basically what that reviewer said, fine. They didn’t have characters doing things wildly out of character, I felt like they knew who these people were, they hadn’t grown a ton, emotionally or otherwise, they were pretty similar, not exactly the same, but nothing about it really bothered me. It just didn’t have the things I loved.
Matthew
I think we can draw a clear distinction here, this is miles better than the M. Night Shyamalan version.
Paul
Yeah, for sure, this is a good movie, it’s just not a great story, in my opinion. That other one was a genuinely terrible movie, like, ethically bad.
Matthew
It was racist, so much about it was wrong, and it felt cynical, like it didn’t understand the real story at all. This clearly did understand it. I guess I understand why you’re not quite with this one, and that’s fair. For me, there’s just a sense that maybe we’re on similar pages here, just saying it differently, but I agree with you that I don’t want to keep seeing remakes and remakes and remakes.
Paul
And this isn’t really a remake, right?
Matthew
Right, I mean meaningful returns to the same old IP in general. Some of it’s fine, but I want the bar to be that there’s a genuinely new story to tell, and I didn’t feel like I came out of this having learned anything new, about the world or about Aang.
Like the way Aang solved things felt very much like what Aang would do. There was a moment where Mary and I were looking at each other thinking, does he really want to repopulate all the Air Nomads himself? Is the answer polygamy? Does he just need to–
Paul
Not going to lie, I had that same thought, and figured it would appeal to you. Not even polygamy, just, go plant your seed widely, which is actually the practical solution, right? It’s right there. I mean, Katara, I’m the last airbender, and we need more airbenders, so…
Matthew
And if I have children with a non-bender, there’s a much better chance the kid will still be an airbender.
Paul
Do we even know how that works?
Matthew
I think some of their kids end up being waterbenders.
Paul
It could also be that there’s a bender gene, and when you mix it with another bender’s line, it’s more likely to come out water or air, whereas mixed with a non-bender, it’s more likely to be neither. I don’t know. At least they didn’t tell us anything about midichlorians, we can give them credit for that.
Matthew
No midichlorians, since that argument can lead to eugenics real fast.
Paul
Yeah, that would be bad too, for sure.
Matthew
Last thing I’ll say about it: I think part of why I didn’t like it is that it felt like it was playing with things without understanding their significance. I do think there’s something they say that fundamentally changes the canon as we know it, in a way that actually makes sense, but that I wish they’d explored more. The opening line of the original show is that the four elements lived in balance until the Fire Nation attacked.
And here we get this backstory about the comet, about the history of how the Fire Nation decided to break that balance. This movie says, actually, no, there were numerous times in the past when one nation or another broke the balance, and that’s an important historical detail.
I’d believe that people would forget about that and just think, oh, it was always in balance before the Fire Nation attacked.
Paul
Right, that’s the story the Water Tribe told their kids, that everything was in balance until the Fire Nation attacked.
Matthew
Or especially the Earth Kingdom, since they wouldn’t want their own history brought up either.
Paul
The Earth Kingdom’s official history is, there is no war in Ba Sing Se.
Matthew
Right, exactly, it’s one of those things where you’re throwing these really interesting rocks out into the world without addressing the incredibly interesting, and important, ripples they cause.
Paul
Well, I’ve got nothing more to add. And neither did they.
Matthew
You do have some things to add, though, about poker, and about life, not just poker.
They’re about things like quitting, sunk cost theory, sunk cost fallacy, and how to actually start a project instead of just having an idea stuck in your head. Paul, if people wanted to crack your head open and scoop out the good thoughts to play with a little, in a somewhat less gruesome metaphor than the one I just put out into the world, I just watched some Bluey where the kids play doctor and operate on Dad, so that’s stuck in my head right now, where can they find you?
Paul
Please don’t, no scooping. I had a math teacher once who thought I was going to fall over backward in my chair and crack my head open, and even they said, that would be interesting, though.
Anyway, I have a website, zenmadman.com, where I write a weekly newsletter called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning. You can sign up and get it in your inbox weekly on Fridays, or just go to the site and read the latest entries there. I’ve also put together the first twenty-four entries into a book, Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume One. There’s a code, SHE400, for forty percent off the book on my website, in PDF form.
And then there might be some other links for physical copies in the show notes too.
Matthew
Lots of ways to get the book, and all of them help Paul and help this podcast. One of them also helps Bezos, but hey, you’ve got to keep those yachts fueled.
Gotta keep the yachts fueled. We recognize Amazon’s going to work for some people, and that’s fine, but there are also plenty of other good ways to find it if you’d rather not support that particular billionaire. On behalf of myself and Paul, thank you all so much for listening.
