One of the greatest shows on television is coming to an end
this week, and for the second time. And yes, even though Legend of Korra is a cartoon, I will firmly defend its and prequel
series Avatar: The Last Airbender’s
collective spot as the greatest show on television (I realize I haven’t not
seen every show on television, but bear with this hyperbole for a moment).
For that reason, I wanted to write something about the show.
I couldn’t think of anything for the current episodes, though. Which is when I turned
my thoughts towards the future of the franchise, including possible
adaptations.
I realize that the M. Night Shyamalan film exists, and is a
large failure. I haven’t seen it myself, but I have reason to avoid it, though.
However, I don’t think the failure was on the part of the source material based
on its quality, and I am of the opinion that anything could work as a movie if
you do it correctly.
So yes, I think a Last Airbender movie could work; however,
you would have to do it pragmatically. Something like the Scott Pilgrim movie (the
gold standard for adaptations, in my mind; the movie stands out just as much as
the source graphic novel) could work, where the changes are all necessary to
fit the medium, but make sense in the context of the story just as well. It
lost a lot of the detail of the comic, but still made for a fantastic movie by just
simplifying a lot of the plot in sensible ways.
With that in mind, what would be essential in a pragmatic
adaptation of The Last Airbender? What if we wanted to reduce Book One to a
single movie (that was longer than 100 minutes), or possibly even a two-part
film? Well, in season one at least, we have these episodes: