Aang is coming back. Can Nickelodeon deliver the Aang we remember, only more powerful and mature? We may need his character now more than ever.
Featured Image Courtesy: Avatar News
One of the greatest shows of all time is Avatar: The Last Airbender. In my opinion, it’s probably the greatest cartoon of all time. With very few misses in its full run of episodes, it is nearly a perfect series.
Yet despite its possible perfection, and despite the untold potential the franchise holds, nobody has really been able to capitalize on the characters in a way befitting the love the story holds. A live-action movie totally missed the mark. A follow-up series didn’t rekindle the spark that made the original series such a powerful narrative. A gold mind of revenue and fan appreciation has sat abandoned by Nickelodeon and Paramount has they have misunderstood how to take flight once again with Aang.
Can that now change?
Just got some HUGE NEWS from @janetvarney at our #NickSDCC Avatar: Braving the Elements – LIVE! panel, the first feature-length movie from Avatar Studios will be focusing on Avatar Aang and his friends! 💨💦🍃🔥 pic.twitter.com/dsbK1XMCe5
— Nickelodeon (@Nickelodeon) July 22, 2022
There are some ways that Nickelodeon can succeed with this new series. I truly want it to do so. And if it succeeds in recapturing the spirit of the original series, I believe this will be one of the biggest streaming properties Paramount+ could imagine. So very simply, I hope these things happen:
- The original series dealt with very adult issues in child-friendly way. Death and separation were real. But childlike wonder and fun remained. If this is to succeed, we don’t need to see a post-modern bitterness take away the sweet purity of these characters’ personas. Let them be who they were, only stronger and more mature. We don’t need to see some idea that their original story is meaningless or that the world is hopeless. Neither of those would be true and audiences will flee.
- Part of what made The Last Airbender so good was that political corruption was faced head-on by the show. The issues of Asia over the last century were brought up in a way that fans could understand. I truly hope that the new movie will avoid a recent pitfall in which political beliefs that brought about a hundred-million deaths in the 20th century are relativized or even viewed lovingly. My family escaped the killing fields many decades ago and Aang’s crew in the original series were purely against the political ideologies that undergird such horrific travesties. I sincerely hope that is not shifted in the new movie.
- Let them be powerful. Let them be strong. Let them be role models. Let the original characters shine even more brightly than ever before. Like Maverick in Top Gun, that’s how we want our heroes.
If Nickelodeon can do these things, all types of tremendous success waits just at their fingertips. Make something that is authentic to the timelessness of the original series. Do not make something that is authentic to changing perspectives of modern quarrels.
We need Aang more today than we did a decade ago. So give us Aang and not any modified version. Give us his whit and his optimism, his good-hearted spirit. And give us all his friends who taught a generation how to approach a broken world at a time perhaps before it became so broken.
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