Recently, we reported that Netflix was looking to remove Sokka's sexist elements in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in a bid to better modernise the show. Now, the series' director Jabbar Raisani and showrunner Albert Kim have given us some more details on what else might be changing.
In an interview with IGN Nordic, when asked what they'd be keeping and what they'd be changing, Albert Kim had the following to say:
"I've used the term that this is a remix, not a cover, in that you've got to hit a lot of familiar notes, but you can't forget that this is supposed to be a new song. So obviously, there are story points and characters that you have to do fairly faithfully from the original. But at the same time, you're literally translating something from 2D to 3D, and that meant dimensionalizing the story, taking it into new places, filling in some of the gaps."
Later on, we get a more explicit idea for some of the changes. Extra scenes will be included, such as Ozai and Zuko's Agni Kai and the massacre of the Air Nomads, but some things will be removed to make the narrative cleaner.
"In the first season of the animated series, [Aang is] kind of going from place to place looking for adventures," said Albert Kim. "He even says, "First, we've got to go and ride the elephant koi." It's a little looser as befits a cartoon. We needed to make sure that he had that drive from the start. And so, that's a change that we made. We essentially give him this vision of what's going to happen and he says, "I have to get to the Northern Water Tribe to stop this from happening." That gives him much more narrative compulsion going forward, as opposed to, "Let's make a detour and go ride the elephant koi," that type of thing. So that's something, again, that's part of the process of going from a Nickelodeon cartoon to a Netflix serialized drama."
Katara will also get some changes, according to Kim. "There are certain roles I think that Katara did in the cartoon that we didn't necessarily also do here. I mean, I don't want to really get into a lot of that, but some gender issues that didn't quite translate from the cartoon."
What do you think about the live-action Avatar series making big changes?