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We can't underrate how important the pair of episodes The Storm/The Blue Spirit is for the show's sucess!
Think about it. Nickelodeon only granted 13 episodes, not even a full season, to the creators. Time to properly develop and polishing the writing of characters and budget also were far from ideal. These are growing pains of almost any show's first season, but it's even worse in animated shows. And there is specially huge pressure for good ratings too. Some of the episodes from the first half of season 1 really suffer from some clunkiness in pacing, structure, writing and animation, and also overly childish humor that undercuts the drama, though a beautiful simplicity and charm was already there. It was at least a decent and enjoyable kids' show. Nickelodon is a kids' TV after all.
Mike and Bryan openly talk about how the overall quality of Season 1 ended up being inconsistent as a result, with "some episodes faring up better than others". They said in a recent podcast that The Great Divide is a truly terrible episode.
But they knew that they had to make the last episodes of those first 13 truly amazing. If the show was sucessful enough, Nickelodeon would allow them to finish the first season. Those two last episodes could be the difference between life or death for Avatar. They had to be truly AMAZING, SPECTACULAR! If I'm not mistaken, Mike and Bryan said that they wanted to leave the best last impression on the viewer before the series went to hiatus for a few months.
I wouldn't be surprised if far more time, attention, care and budget was given to these two episodes in comparison to all the ones that came before. I wouldn't be surprised if they painstakingly revised and polished every line of the script and supervised every draft of animation for countless times.
And these are the first episodes that truly showcase, in my opinion, the creators and writers' fully realized, mature, uncompromised, unadultared and polished vision for the entire series and what they really wanted it to be. No thoughts about having to please kids and network with poorly timed childish jokes. The best of the action and also very strong drama for both our main character, Aang, and our antagonist, Zuko. These episodes show Avatar being a masterpiece for the first time!
The Storm/The Blue Spirit were the creators' big statement of the show that they wanted to make, saying to the viewers why you really should stay watching the show despite some bumps on the road and why you can trust them that it'll truly be worthy it. To win over people with doubts about the series and if they should continue watching (specially after an episode as terrible as The Great Divide, which is at best just passable kids' entertainment).
And they are also an amazing way to grab viewers who did not watch the show before for some reason. Maybe they didn't hear about it, maybe the ads didn't give an impression (I remember the youtuber Schaffrillas saying in one of his videos that he hadn't given the show a chance when it originally aired because Nickelodeon's ads for it made it really seem very childish, banal and passable, he said that Nickelodeon's marketing was truly terrible and very misleading).
The Storm/The Blue Spirit is a very self-contained pair of episodes. You don't need to know much beyond maybe the very basics to not only understand everything going on, but to feel the force of the drama and get complete, rich characterization of our main protagonist, Aang, and our main antagonist, Zuko.
If anyone wants to see why they should watch Avatar, this pair of episodes is how I'll introduce the show. Episodes such as Zuko Alone are amazing, but far more reliant on the viewer's already well established attachment and understanding of the characters' natures and the plot to have great effect.
Book 1 has many flaws (maybe I'll someday make a post detailing all the flaws), but I think that both Avatar fans and non-fans can often be very over-critical of it. It's not like Avatar is the only TV show to have an uneven and sometimes rough first season. It happens with so many shows, so many masterpieces. Despite all the flaws, I still think Season 1 already showed lots of promise, characters you get attached to, amazing magic system and so on. The potential was there since the beginning, making clear the show was worthy to follow. And it has a unique simple charm too! A solid foundation for the immense heights reached in Seasons 2 and 3! Watching seasons 2 and 3 of Avatar is near uninterrupted bliss for me.
Overall, I don't think that the first season's issues are much of a big deal and negative for the show as a whole because there is nothing more common in TV shows than having clunky first seasons. It's totally understandable, and happened with countless amazing shows widely hailed as masterpieces, if not most of them. A show having an amazing first season is the exception. Making TV and a first season, specially in animation, is really tough. And even when the first season is amazing, it's not rare for the show to quickly burn itself out in the second season already. The first Avatar season also sucessfully mirrors the evolution of the characters. And it is a wonderful foundation for all that happened in Seasons 2 and 3. The fact that nearly every Season 1 episode has something that will come back later in the story really showcases how amazing it is as a foundation for the other seasons. Or at least how the other seasons really built upon it so wonderfully, almost nothing from Book 1 was wasted! This is amazing long-form storytelling. Highly recommend the video essay below.
I've been also following the YouTube channel Overanalyzing Avatar, an Avatar fan that makes entertaining videos with a healthy and fun mixture of praise, criticism and humorous nitpick, recommend the channel. He is analysing every episode of Avatar! His latest video was on City Of Walls And Secrets!
Overall, I would like to say what is easily my favorite aspect of Avatar, above even the awesome magic system, action and fantasy universe, above even the awesome blend of action, drama, light-hearted fun and comedy. It's the genuine, touching, poignant, heartwarming and beautiful sense of strong camaraderie, amazing chemistry, friendship and family that so smoothly develops in Team Avatar, and their most mundane interactions are so delightful and beautiful to see, like the ending of The Drill. And all the group hugs are earned and touching. And everyone from Team Avatar is a really distinctive character from each other, with very well-rounded personalities, flaws and qualities, they all feel so real. Avatar showcases the greatest triumph in serialized storytelling, which is developing and showcasing characters going through life, often in very mundane, low-key and small situations, and make the viewer attached to them as time goes on, in a way that films can't do really do to the same degree (this is not a knock on films!). The characters feel like real people. Zuko and Iroh are spectacular, they have the biggest amount of scenes showcasing the series' subtlest, most powerful, stunning, deepest and richest writing, and not only when they interact with each other (the entire conversation of Iroh with Toph in the episode The Chase is peak beautiful and delicate writing, it feels like a haiku in its simple poetic beauty). Avatar has lots of heart. It's truly one of the greatest animated shows ever made, my favorite animated show ever. Scratch that, it's one of the greatest TV shows ever made for me.
I would like to comment on the Avatar renaissance and new boom of popularity since it came to Netflix in the United States two or three years ago. I love this happened, and how the series gained so many new fans, active discussion and so on. And I love how the show's likeability means that it doesn't really get hate (aside from the odd knee-jerk reaction in Twitter, but it's Twitter). But there is always a inevitable problem with such huge booms of popularity happen. While Avatar was always regarded as a truly great show, though probably not gaining the same amount of attention as other animated shows, it's now currently being talked about EVERYWHERE in YouTube as the absolute greatest show ever. It isn't a problem to have such opinion, I myself have it as my favorite animated show ever, but it's clear that too many youtubers are getting into the Avatar hype just to get views and pander to the show's fans. I see how that's annoying for people who aren't mega fans of Avatar. But I, a mega Avatar fan, hate being pandered to. And I know when it's pandering. Vailskibum94 is the king of pandering overall. Avatar is, to a far lesser degree of course, being sadly victim of Citizen Kane and Sgt. Peppers syndrome right now. But it will cool down to reasonable and really nice levels, and Avatar will be talked about like a show such as BTAS: regarded as a masterpiece and one of the greatest animated shows ever made, but not shoved on our faces all the time. That's why I don't mind so much the inevitable pandering, and I think it's far outweighted by the positives I talked about early in this paragraph.
Channels that often talk about Avatar, and are truly sincere and thoughtful, are the already mentioned Overanalyzing Avatar, but also AirSpeed Prime, Hello Future Me, Joshua Fagan, Sage's Rain, Kato. There are many other great channels talking about Avatar, but these are the first ones that came to my mind.
I would also like to say that even though I'm a huge Avatar fan, I love it, I don't think it's flawless. Nothing is flawless. Constructive criticism, scrutinizing even what we love, can be fun and enlightening for a greater appreciation of the art work. And I believe that Avatar can fully resist my scrutiny, it's marvelously crafted as a whole, a 9/10. The show's many gigantic qualities and my pure enjoyment from it far overshadow any flaw. (Random thought: I love how in the first season, Katara and Aang, unlike Sokka, are shown as so gullible, naive, idealistic and trusting in episodes such as Imprisoned, which showcases the best of Katara's optimistic and heroic spirit of wanting to help everyone, and in the episode Jet, with the latter episode starting to break that innocence and show moral greyness in the world, it was also an awesome episode for Sokka).
The first season's roughness, mainly the first half of it, is the only thing that makes me not 100% sure of giving Avatar a 10/10 rating. Besides, it's not like we should only love flawless works (not only perfection doesn't exist, but I believe that art often can be flawed in very interesting and beautiful ways, I'll make someday a thread about such works).
I recommend this video on how toxic our demand and scrutiny for perfection can be. The video is not only about Avatar (and I disagree on his criticisms on Aang, I love Aang's character in many levels, and the idealism he represents), it's about the whole topic on how perfection isn't really what makes art great and moving. And how flaws often enhance appeal, and make the art more human and fascinating. Consistency and lack of flaws aren't the be-all end-all of great art. Lots of widely beloved works are very flawed and inconsistent, but they have something special that transcends those flaws.
Cheers! I hope you guys liked this post!
Think about it. Nickelodeon only granted 13 episodes, not even a full season, to the creators. Time to properly develop and polishing the writing of characters and budget also were far from ideal. These are growing pains of almost any show's first season, but it's even worse in animated shows. And there is specially huge pressure for good ratings too. Some of the episodes from the first half of season 1 really suffer from some clunkiness in pacing, structure, writing and animation, and also overly childish humor that undercuts the drama, though a beautiful simplicity and charm was already there. It was at least a decent and enjoyable kids' show. Nickelodon is a kids' TV after all.
Mike and Bryan openly talk about how the overall quality of Season 1 ended up being inconsistent as a result, with "some episodes faring up better than others". They said in a recent podcast that The Great Divide is a truly terrible episode.
But they knew that they had to make the last episodes of those first 13 truly amazing. If the show was sucessful enough, Nickelodeon would allow them to finish the first season. Those two last episodes could be the difference between life or death for Avatar. They had to be truly AMAZING, SPECTACULAR! If I'm not mistaken, Mike and Bryan said that they wanted to leave the best last impression on the viewer before the series went to hiatus for a few months.
I wouldn't be surprised if far more time, attention, care and budget was given to these two episodes in comparison to all the ones that came before. I wouldn't be surprised if they painstakingly revised and polished every line of the script and supervised every draft of animation for countless times.
And these are the first episodes that truly showcase, in my opinion, the creators and writers' fully realized, mature, uncompromised, unadultared and polished vision for the entire series and what they really wanted it to be. No thoughts about having to please kids and network with poorly timed childish jokes. The best of the action and also very strong drama for both our main character, Aang, and our antagonist, Zuko. These episodes show Avatar being a masterpiece for the first time!
The Storm/The Blue Spirit were the creators' big statement of the show that they wanted to make, saying to the viewers why you really should stay watching the show despite some bumps on the road and why you can trust them that it'll truly be worthy it. To win over people with doubts about the series and if they should continue watching (specially after an episode as terrible as The Great Divide, which is at best just passable kids' entertainment).
And they are also an amazing way to grab viewers who did not watch the show before for some reason. Maybe they didn't hear about it, maybe the ads didn't give an impression (I remember the youtuber Schaffrillas saying in one of his videos that he hadn't given the show a chance when it originally aired because Nickelodeon's ads for it made it really seem very childish, banal and passable, he said that Nickelodeon's marketing was truly terrible and very misleading).
The Storm/The Blue Spirit is a very self-contained pair of episodes. You don't need to know much beyond maybe the very basics to not only understand everything going on, but to feel the force of the drama and get complete, rich characterization of our main protagonist, Aang, and our main antagonist, Zuko.
If anyone wants to see why they should watch Avatar, this pair of episodes is how I'll introduce the show. Episodes such as Zuko Alone are amazing, but far more reliant on the viewer's already well established attachment and understanding of the characters' natures and the plot to have great effect.
Book 1 has many flaws (maybe I'll someday make a post detailing all the flaws), but I think that both Avatar fans and non-fans can often be very over-critical of it. It's not like Avatar is the only TV show to have an uneven and sometimes rough first season. It happens with so many shows, so many masterpieces. Despite all the flaws, I still think Season 1 already showed lots of promise, characters you get attached to, amazing magic system and so on. The potential was there since the beginning, making clear the show was worthy to follow. And it has a unique simple charm too! A solid foundation for the immense heights reached in Seasons 2 and 3! Watching seasons 2 and 3 of Avatar is near uninterrupted bliss for me.
Overall, I don't think that the first season's issues are much of a big deal and negative for the show as a whole because there is nothing more common in TV shows than having clunky first seasons. It's totally understandable, and happened with countless amazing shows widely hailed as masterpieces, if not most of them. A show having an amazing first season is the exception. Making TV and a first season, specially in animation, is really tough. And even when the first season is amazing, it's not rare for the show to quickly burn itself out in the second season already. The first Avatar season also sucessfully mirrors the evolution of the characters. And it is a wonderful foundation for all that happened in Seasons 2 and 3. The fact that nearly every Season 1 episode has something that will come back later in the story really showcases how amazing it is as a foundation for the other seasons. Or at least how the other seasons really built upon it so wonderfully, almost nothing from Book 1 was wasted! This is amazing long-form storytelling. Highly recommend the video essay below.
I've been also following the YouTube channel Overanalyzing Avatar, an Avatar fan that makes entertaining videos with a healthy and fun mixture of praise, criticism and humorous nitpick, recommend the channel. He is analysing every episode of Avatar! His latest video was on City Of Walls And Secrets!
Overall, I would like to say what is easily my favorite aspect of Avatar, above even the awesome magic system, action and fantasy universe, above even the awesome blend of action, drama, light-hearted fun and comedy. It's the genuine, touching, poignant, heartwarming and beautiful sense of strong camaraderie, amazing chemistry, friendship and family that so smoothly develops in Team Avatar, and their most mundane interactions are so delightful and beautiful to see, like the ending of The Drill. And all the group hugs are earned and touching. And everyone from Team Avatar is a really distinctive character from each other, with very well-rounded personalities, flaws and qualities, they all feel so real. Avatar showcases the greatest triumph in serialized storytelling, which is developing and showcasing characters going through life, often in very mundane, low-key and small situations, and make the viewer attached to them as time goes on, in a way that films can't do really do to the same degree (this is not a knock on films!). The characters feel like real people. Zuko and Iroh are spectacular, they have the biggest amount of scenes showcasing the series' subtlest, most powerful, stunning, deepest and richest writing, and not only when they interact with each other (the entire conversation of Iroh with Toph in the episode The Chase is peak beautiful and delicate writing, it feels like a haiku in its simple poetic beauty). Avatar has lots of heart. It's truly one of the greatest animated shows ever made, my favorite animated show ever. Scratch that, it's one of the greatest TV shows ever made for me.
I would like to comment on the Avatar renaissance and new boom of popularity since it came to Netflix in the United States two or three years ago. I love this happened, and how the series gained so many new fans, active discussion and so on. And I love how the show's likeability means that it doesn't really get hate (aside from the odd knee-jerk reaction in Twitter, but it's Twitter). But there is always a inevitable problem with such huge booms of popularity happen. While Avatar was always regarded as a truly great show, though probably not gaining the same amount of attention as other animated shows, it's now currently being talked about EVERYWHERE in YouTube as the absolute greatest show ever. It isn't a problem to have such opinion, I myself have it as my favorite animated show ever, but it's clear that too many youtubers are getting into the Avatar hype just to get views and pander to the show's fans. I see how that's annoying for people who aren't mega fans of Avatar. But I, a mega Avatar fan, hate being pandered to. And I know when it's pandering. Vailskibum94 is the king of pandering overall. Avatar is, to a far lesser degree of course, being sadly victim of Citizen Kane and Sgt. Peppers syndrome right now. But it will cool down to reasonable and really nice levels, and Avatar will be talked about like a show such as BTAS: regarded as a masterpiece and one of the greatest animated shows ever made, but not shoved on our faces all the time. That's why I don't mind so much the inevitable pandering, and I think it's far outweighted by the positives I talked about early in this paragraph.
Channels that often talk about Avatar, and are truly sincere and thoughtful, are the already mentioned Overanalyzing Avatar, but also AirSpeed Prime, Hello Future Me, Joshua Fagan, Sage's Rain, Kato. There are many other great channels talking about Avatar, but these are the first ones that came to my mind.
I would also like to say that even though I'm a huge Avatar fan, I love it, I don't think it's flawless. Nothing is flawless. Constructive criticism, scrutinizing even what we love, can be fun and enlightening for a greater appreciation of the art work. And I believe that Avatar can fully resist my scrutiny, it's marvelously crafted as a whole, a 9/10. The show's many gigantic qualities and my pure enjoyment from it far overshadow any flaw. (Random thought: I love how in the first season, Katara and Aang, unlike Sokka, are shown as so gullible, naive, idealistic and trusting in episodes such as Imprisoned, which showcases the best of Katara's optimistic and heroic spirit of wanting to help everyone, and in the episode Jet, with the latter episode starting to break that innocence and show moral greyness in the world, it was also an awesome episode for Sokka).
The first season's roughness, mainly the first half of it, is the only thing that makes me not 100% sure of giving Avatar a 10/10 rating. Besides, it's not like we should only love flawless works (not only perfection doesn't exist, but I believe that art often can be flawed in very interesting and beautiful ways, I'll make someday a thread about such works).
I recommend this video on how toxic our demand and scrutiny for perfection can be. The video is not only about Avatar (and I disagree on his criticisms on Aang, I love Aang's character in many levels, and the idealism he represents), it's about the whole topic on how perfection isn't really what makes art great and moving. And how flaws often enhance appeal, and make the art more human and fascinating. Consistency and lack of flaws aren't the be-all end-all of great art. Lots of widely beloved works are very flawed and inconsistent, but they have something special that transcends those flaws.
Cheers! I hope you guys liked this post!
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