Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunner Albert Kim explains how the challenges of adapting the series in live-action led to some disappointment.

It wasn’t an easy task to reimagine Avatar: The Last Airbender as a live-action series for Netflix, and showrunner Albert Kim has spoken about the challenges of the process.

Now streaming on Netflix, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a live-action reimagining of the original animated series. With the change in mediums, there have been some key differences in the new adaptation compared to the original show. Speaking about the series with THR, Albert Kim said how it was impossible to make an adaptation that was as faithful as he’d have really wanted it to be, as the budget just wasn’t there to realize certain scenes in live-action. Kim also suggested that he understands the disappointment some fans might feel over missing scenes or characters in the new version, but the switching to a totally different format necessitates these changes.

“Well, there’s certain things you can draw that when you’re trying to translate in live-action are incredibly complicated, both practically and financially,” he said. “There are so many epic sequences in the original series that I wish we could have done, but it would have just broken the bank many times over. The Northern Air Temple episode of the first season is a finale in itself, and if we had tried to do that we would be blowing all the resources right there. So, we had to pick and the toughest part of this process was deciding what to leave behind — and I’m sure there will be fans who are not happy that they didn’t get their favorite episodes and their favorite characters, and all I can say is it pains me too.”

He added, “I wish we could have done all of them, but there’s the reality of creating eight-hour-long episodes for a serialized drama and also expanding the world in places and telling new parts of the story that hadn’t been told before. That takes up time. I think people think it’s as easy as saying, ‘Well there are 20 half-hour episodes of the original. That’s 10 hours. And there are eight one-hour episodes of the new show, so they only needed to make two more episodes.’ But it’s not exactly one-to-one there, so that was the process we went through.”

Albert Kim Tried to Maintain the Spirit of the Original

Admittedly, for Albert Kim, the new series is not 100% faithful to the cartoon it’s based on. However, he was still putting in great efforts to try to maintain the same spirit of the original series. He says that as a fan of the original show himself, wanting fans to know that none of the decisions that were made were taken lightly.

“So, for fans, I just hope that when they come and see the show, they recognize that, even though this isn’t a note-for-note translation of the original, we stay true to the spirit of the original,” Kim explained. “Because just like them we are fans first and foremost. And that’s how I approached the whole show: as a fan first, and then I sort of put on my producer cap and went about making the show. I hope they realize that none of these decisions were made haphazardly and they were all very carefully considered, and the ultimate test was whether or not it stayed true to what we felt was the spirit of Avatar.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender is now streaming on Netflix.