By Brendan Kaufman, Staff Writer
On Feb. 22, Netflix finally released the first season of their adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” onto their streaming platform. The eight-episode season follows book one of the original series with a few changes made by the creators to make the show fit their vision. This adaptation took the previously animated series and put its world and characters into live-action for the first time since M. Night Shyamalan’s film in 2010.
The changes made to the original series and the live-action style have seen mixed to negative reactions from both fans of the original series and people who have never seen the original in the first place.
Senior actuarial science major Vincent Randazzo shares a few gripes he has with the concept of the adaptation.
“Quite frankly, I think it’s redundant,” Randazzo stated. “I don’t think there was a reason to remake the original series in the first place since the original is such a well-made and put together story.”
Junior music technology, entrepreneurship & production major Thomas Leone raises similar questions about the purpose of the remake.
“I’m gonna be honest, I haven’t seen it yet,” Leone said. “But I want to see it even though there’s a part of me that thinks that we don’t even need this kind of thing in the first place. Even if it is good, we already have the original and that’s really good. I get trying to reintroduce it to a new audience, but why not just make the original series more accessible?”
Many people have compared the original series to Netflix’s live-action adaptation and pointed out the various changes made to the original, for better or for worse. The original has a first season of 20 episodes while the adaptation drops that number down to eight, whilst making each of those eight episodes longer in length. Randazzo thinks that these types of changes are pointless.
“The original is just a wonderfully well put together story that flows really well,” he said. “It’s beautifully animated and is overall a solid 10/10 show. To try and make the live action version is just redundant in the first place because a lot of what made the original so great was the medium it was made in. When you adapt an animated series into live action, it’s much easier to point at weird visual choices but in animation it just looks awesome.”
Leone shares this opinion.
“I remember watching the original on Nicktoons when I was a kid,” he stated. “It was a fun little show and it had a really long story and it was great for little kids or older kids or anyone that really enjoyed that kind of thing. The Netflix series kinda has the problem of being made by Netflix, which is never a good sign. It seems different from the original enough but I don’t think it can live up to said original even if it isn’t bad.”
Netflix and other streaming services have been putting out similar live-action remakes of animated series such as “One Piece.” Many of the complaints with these types of remakes and adaptations are that a lot of the charm of the original is lost due to the medium of animation enabling a lot more visual creativity.
Randazzo agrees with this sentiment of live-action remakes not being able to capture the magic of the original.
“They’re all redundant,” he said. “For a lot of these remakes of animated shows, it ends up being worse because animation is a lot more flexible as a medium and allows for a lot more creativity or imagination. Animation doesn’t have to work around the physical limitations of the real world and you never have to worry about suspension of disbelief because it’s all animated so something that would look weird in real life, looks totally normal in animation.”
Leone is tired of these kinds of remakes in general and wants these services to make more original stories.
“Looking at this as a music guy and somewhat of a film guy, I’m more interested in original characters and stories,” he said. “In the past 10 years, there have been a lot of sequels and a lot of remakes. Back in the 80s, they made a million movies a year so making these kinds of films was fine. But nowadays, movies are worse and all you can see in theaters is Marvel or sequels or remakes and Netflix making more remakes like this really isn’t helping that problem.” The new “Avatar: The Last Airbender” adaptation has had a mostly negative reception on campus and this style of remaking something old to try and appeal to a new or older audience seems to be fading in popularity. Only time will tell if it will remain like this.
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