Trivia / Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024)

• Approval of God:
  • Jessie Flower, Toph's original voice actress, has made videos on her YouTube channel expressing approval of the trailers.
  • Greg Baldwin, Iroh's second voice actor, has expressed similar optimism and even defended it from the pre-release skepticism.
  • Grey DeLisle, Azula's voice actress, has given her seal of approval of the show's teaser.
• Children Voicing Children: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Aang is voiced by 14-years old Kenneth Lavill, being this series his first lead role.
• Creative Differences: The creators of the original animated series, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino left during preproduction in June 2020 because of unspecified creative differences with Netflix, but didn't announce it until two months later.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Dallas Liu was 20-21 while playing 17-year-old Zuko. In a far more exaggerated case, he also plays him in the flashback scenes with little-to-no de-aging, where he can't be any older than 14.
  • Azula's actress, Elizabeth Yu, was 19-20 during filming despite the character being only 14, but she has enough of a baby face to pass for her canonical age arguably better than her animated counterpart.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Gordon Cormier shaved his head for his role as Aang. In fact, the actors who played the Air Nomads in the first act of the first episode either had their head shaved or in case of women, cut part of their hair to show off their foreheads with the arrow tattoos.
  • Paul Sun-Hyung Lee shaved part of his beard for his role as Iroh, while Dallas Liu shaved most of his hair to play Zuko after he gets the left side of his face burned by his father in Agni Kai.
• The Other Darrin: The Latin American Spanish dub suffers a meta cast change, as, unlike the dub of the animated adaptation, which was done in Chile, this one was done in Mexico instead, through with a different one from the live-action movie instead.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Zuko's actor Dallas Liu was a big fan of the original series before being cast and what's more is that Zuko was his favourite character in the show.
  • Kiawentiio (Katara) and Elizabeth Yu (Azula) revealed in an interview with The Kelly Clarkson Show that they're also fans of the original series, having watched it when they were younger before being cast.
• Role Reprise:
  • James Sie reprises his role as the Cabbage Merchant from the animated series. He's one of four actors from the original series to be in this show and the only one confirmed to play the same character; Clyde Kusatsu played several bit players in the original's first season and has an Unspecified Role Credit in the first episode of the remake, possibly the same Air Monk he played in "The Storm". Daniel Dae Kim and George Takei voiced major one-shot characters and are now Fire Lord Ozai and Koh the Face Stealer respectively.
  • In the German dub, Sokka, Katara, Zuko and Zhao's voice actors reprise their roles from the original series.
• Saved from Development Hell: The series would go over three years between its announcement and production. It was green-lit in September 2018 and was steadily worked on for a year. Right around the planned February 2020 start of production in Hawaii, the COVID-19 Pandemic stopped it in its tracks since they had planned to film extensively on location, causing their travel to be severely limited. That summer Mike and Bryan left the project because of Creative Differences with Albert Kim being hired as the new showrunner later that year. The cast was announced in the summer of 2021. Instead of delaying the show further to film on location, the decision was made to shoot on a sound stage in Vancouver and make use of the same technology made famous by The Mandalorian to create the backgrounds with Unreal Engine. Finally, the series was set to have a release date of early 2024.
• Self-Adaptation: Mike and Bryan were initally involved as showrunners until departing due to Creative Differences with Netflix before production began. That said, they still receive writing credits on two episodes, "Aang" and "Masks".
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Meadow Kingfisher (Young Katara) looks nearly identical to Kiawentiio in costume. When the two swap places during Katara's fog-induced flashback, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was still Kiawentiio in the scene.
• Underage Casting: Justified for obvious reasons, but the 39-40 year old Utkarsh Ambudkar portrays the 112 year old Old Master King Bumi.
  • Despite Iroh being a decade older than Ozai, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee is actually four years younger than his on-screen brother Daniel Dae Kim.
• What Could Have Been: See here.
• Working Title: The project initially started production under the name "Trade Winds"; it was changed to "Blue Dawn" a couple months later. None of the young actors knew that it was an Avatar project during the audition process, as they were given scripts with altered character names and scenarios (Aang was "Alan", Katara was "Carrie", Zuko was "Juno", the Fire Nation was a "company", etc.) to maintain secrecy.

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