Well, it’s practically impossible to fit everything in eight episodes, isn’t it?

All eight episodes of Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender were recently released on the streaming platform and the show was met with mixed to positive reviews from critics. While the live-action series stays true to the original masterpiece to some extent, creator Albert Kim also took the creative liberty of adding new elements to his show.

Making live-action adaptations of animated source material is certainly not an easy task. You have to constantly make tough decisions about what storyline gets to stay and what storyline has to go. Whether the reason is financial or simply practical, you just cannot have everything! Talking about this exact thing, showrunner Albert Kim opened up about the one scene in the original show that he regrets not bringing to life in the live-action series.

The Scene Albert Kim Regrets Not Including in the Netflix Show

The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender received a 59% approval rating from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. While the number isn’t as high as we were hoping, it’s worth noting that the Average Audience Score for the series sits much higher at 75%. Clearly, the show is not perfect but it’s still a step in the right direction, isn’t it?

During a recent interview with Variety, showrunner Albert Kim talked about the regrets he has pertaining to the first season of the show. The media outlet asked, “Was there anything you didn’t manage to incorporate from Season 1 of the animated series that you want to explore in the future?” To this, Kim’s answer was simple – why not?

The showrunner stated that since they added some elements of the original season 2 into their adaptation, there was no reason why they couldn’t do the reverse. He also talked about his regrets, stating,

“We pulled in elements from Season 2 into this season, so there’s no reason you can’t do the reverse. My biggest regrets in the Season 1 are the stuff we couldn’t include. The original series had so many amazing characters, storylines and scenes that I wish we could have done, but for practical, financial or just storytelling reasons, we couldn’t include.”  

While it is not at all possible to make an adaptation that is a hundred percent identical to the source material, Kim regrets not adding this one scene to the show:

“There’s a great sequence in Roku’s temple when Aang and the gang figure out how to get into the shrine. I would have loved to have done that. We just ran out of resources. We have to make hard decisions along the way, but that’s not to say that we can’t revisit them at some point in the future.”

Here’s hoping that Kim does not walk out of season two with any regrets!

Avatar: The Last Airbender is Not an Exact Translation

During his interview, Kim made it quite clear that his version of the story was not a “note-for-note translation” of the animated series. He added that the live-action adaptation is “within the mythology of the original,” and thus, fans will be familiar with the concept despite the show going in a “slightly different direction.”

Since the animated series is more targeted towards kids, Netflix’s darker tone came as a surprise to many. When asked if they were trying to age up the show, Kim stated,

“It wasn’t about aging it up. It was about setting the stakes for this world. One of the things we wanted to do was show how dangerous bending can be. Firebending should feel dangerous; it should feel something that could hurt you. Also, as fans know, the tone of the original series starts shifting in the later seasons. It gets to some pretty dark places, so we had the benefit of hindsight. We knew that the fans understood where the show could go, so we were able to just start off in that place.”

Don’t worry, though. The creators knew not to go off the rails too much as they would constantly stop and ask themselves if their choices felt “like Avatar” and whether or not they passed the litmus test.

All eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender are available to stream on Netflix.