While it has it’s own merits the live action doesn’t hold a candle to the original.
I don’t know how they managed to have less show in more screen time
The Netflix show has a runtime of 430 minutes. The original is 477 minutes. So it’s actually less.
This here is what bugs me so much about the adaptation, I’ve seen so many people defend the show “because they had to cover a lot of ground in such a short amount of time” the runtimes are so incredibly close it’s absurd how much Netflix botched it in favour of nothing.
Supposedly they argue it’s because they wanted to make Book 1 more exciting and “good like the other Books” which is a disservice to how good Book 1 was back then to make us excited about what comes next.
Obviously the episodic format of the original wouldn’t have translated well into live action and there were some moments that were expected to be cut, like riding the elephant koi or the fortune-teller episode, but the insane mish-mashing of episodes, especially during the Omashu stuff, was ridiculous. For example, between two scenes of Aang and Bumi walking through a hallway, we get Zuko chasing after Iroh’s captors, and the entire secret tunnel section, including the entire backstory of the city, and then it finally cuts back to Aang and Bumi arriving at their destination. All that comes at the cost of giving the audience a rushed and extremely watered-down cliff notes version of the original stories.
