The voice cast for Avatar: The Last Airbender virtually reunited over the weekend to discuss Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series that saw a massive surge in popularity last year after being added to Netflix. Those in attendance included Dee Bradley Baker, the voice of Appa and Momo, and Olivia Hack, the voice of Ty Lee, and they shared their thoughts on the streaming service’s upcoming live-action remake.
“I just don’t know how you fulfill that any better than this show did. I’m open to whatever they do with the live-action series, which I know nothing about, but it’s like, ‘Well, how do you do this better than the way that it was rendered on this show?’ I don’t know how you do that! I hope you can,” Bradley Baker said. Hack added, “Especially when you’re doing the exact same series, but as a live-action. You’re not adding onto it or expanding the universe. You’re doing the same thing, which feels redundant, but I don’t know.”
I will watch the live-action The Last Airbender remake partially because the original series is one of the greatest animated shows of all-time, and partially out of morbid curiosity. But Bradley Baker and Hack make a good point: why mess with perfection? We all know what happened the last time someone made a live-action The Last Airbender…
Speaking of, the show’s voice director Andrea Romano also took part of the reunion, and she called M. Night Shyamalan’s film “very disappointing. It’s not good, I’m sorry. The first thing is: we were so good with what we set up. That’s it. Because it was animation and because we were setting the bar… I believe there was an ego involved about, ‘This is mine and I’m doing it this way. I don’t care that you two guys [creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko] created this incredibly successful series and have all this information you could give me. I’m pretty much not gonna listen to you and do what I wanna do.’ Which is fine, that’s his prerogative, but that’s why [it didn’t work].”
Also this:
Dante DiMartino and Konietzko departed the remake over “creative direction.”
(Via Winter is Coming)
