Adapting once again the beloved Nickelodeon animated show from 2005 (and after the disastrous 2010 film), Netflix secured the rights to make a live-action television adaptation, which premiered in February of 2024. Originally, series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino were attached as executive producers and show-runners, but after some time they departed the project, citing creative differences and issues with Netflix. Albert Kim ended up taking over as show-runner for the first season. The show needed to abridge the narrative into roughly half the run time per season, and balance the cartoon's childhood antics, with a more serious tone necessitated by the more realistic and darker look of the show, and aimed to authentically capture the Asian and Indigenous cultures represented in the show. The show received mixed-to-positive ratings, with some lamenting the condensing of the plot, but overall the series showcased a talented and diverse cast, and brought the various bending action to life in a stunning way, and the next two seasons were green-lit almost immediately.
Joining the quest was Japanese-American composer Takeshi Furukawa, who rose to fame due to video game scores like "The Last Guardian" and "Planet of Lana", as well as writing incidental music to the TV show "Mythic Quest". The show is treated to an epic orchestral and choral score, recorded in Vienna, London and Budapest, and featuring thunderous action music, as well as a plethora of exotic Asian instrumentation. The score is heavily thematic, with various character and location themes, including melodies for Aang, Zuko, Katara, and a family theme for Team Avatar, all of which are developed throughout. Furukawa also smartly retains some fan-favorite musical elements from the original cartoon show, composed by Jeremy Zuckerman--including the Fire Nation motif, the opening and closing titles themes, and the song associated with Uncle Iroh and his lost son--rendered with rich orchestrations that the cartoon's budget could never allow for. Overall, the music is a tremendous achievement, touching just the right buttons to reward fans of the original show, but also developing its own rich symphonic world that brings the world to life in an ambitious and emotional way.
Season 1
Released digitally by Netflix Music, the first season's album contains about seventy-five minutes of music (though the overall music written for the show was somewhere between four and five hours of total music). I present here a total of twenty new covers.
I mostly matched the font style as used on the official album/other marketing material, which includes a very modern font. For cover 15, I tried using a more fantasy/period looking font, which I also liked, but it didn't quite seem to match with the blocky white treatment of the title logo. Speaking of the logo, I originally really wanted to use the gold textured title more often, but found that it got largely buried under the busier, more colorful imagery, so I often ended up reverting to the plain white version.
I also did my own variation on the credits text. I generally hate the way albums for streaming services blast their network branding all over the art, so I wanted a more subtle reference to Netflix in a more traditional credit. Most of these pieces required various edits, cloning out text/poster credits, and combining with wider artwork, and in some cases using AI wallpaper edits that I found online to slightly widen out the canvas, and then trying to blend it all in so as not to call too much attention to itself.
Covers 1 - 12 all use official promotional imagery as the primary source.
Covers 13 - 15 use commissioned artwork. Covers 13 and 14 feature art by Andy Fairhurst, created for a vinyl release of the score by IAm8Bit. I matched my overall text style and made increased the size of Aang's blue arrow in the middle cover so as to stand out better below the title.
Cover 15 uses a lovely illustration by Phantom City Creative.
The next set of three were late additions to the set, but I think add some nice variety, especially for those of you who prefer having some more minimalist/textural covers. Cover 16 uses a piece of early promotional teaser art, a simple, but iconic image. (I actually took the similar version in better quality released for Season 2, and then applied various color-corrections to match closer to the first version). I also liked being able to use a different, more elegant font here (and for 18).
Cover 17 uses a digital design by illustrator Huntley Woods, a version of this art was feature on IGN's Fan Fest magazine, though that had large blocks of text covering the image. I was eventually able to find the artist's page and here he had some alternate presentations or the art (in much lower quality), which I overlapped to be able to patch in missing bits, and then clone in and try to blend it all together. Overall a very cool edit and I'm delighted to add it to the collection.
Cover 18 was my own little contribution. I wanted more minimal matching pieces, and wanted to highlight the Nations/Elements, again, using the three "books" of the original cartoon, the three nations which take center stage for each season, and the new element that Aang must master. For the image, I took screenshots from Netflix's very first teaser trailer, which had a push-in montage of animated crests from all four nations. These should make nice matching sets over the three new seasons, though again poor Air gets the short shrift here.
The final set of two, use fan-created designs. Cover 19 features art by Augusto Garcia (AGT Design). A nice collage edit, but one that I had to spend several hours editing the lower half of the image, moving various characters and elements around to better accommodate the title in the needed position.
Cover 20 uses art by Fastpacer, which fortunately didn't need too much editing, other than a little paint-out at the bottom.
Season 2
Season 2 of the show takes the Gaang into the Earth kingdom. Here they meet Toph, and blind girl, who is secretly a master earth-bender, and Aang convinces her to join their mission and train him in the new element. The a large portion of the season takes place in the major Earth kingdom city of Ba Sing Se, where things are not as they seem, and our heroes must make unexpected allies, and test the strength of their friendship. For the new season, Albert Kim stepped down as show-runner, and previous executive producers on the show, Christine Boylan and Jabbar Raisani, took over the reigns for Seasons 2 and 3 (which were filmed simultaneously, in large part to curb the noticeably visible aging of the adolescent stars). Fortunately the sequel season had higher production values and replaced most of the virtual backgrounds with practical sets, lending to a much more grounded look overall, while still boasting impressive VFX for the bending and other magical elements.
For the score, Netflix Music released the digital streaming album. Netflix also collaborated with Music on Vinyl to release the score on that format. As to the music, Furukawa returns with another strong effort, composing six hours of new material for the show (though only about eighty minutes make it onto the album). He continues to build on his strong collection of themes (though sadly the Gaang Family theme is still criminally underplayed on album). New material includes an alternate theme for Katara in her "Painted Lady" persona, a pipa (Chinese lute) and taiko motif for Toph, a villainous motif for Azula and her friends (as well as her swirling gamelan sound from the original animated show), and an ominous theme for Ba Sing Se. For the Earth kingdom, Furukawa drew from Central Asian influences to lend a cultural and sonic authenticity, alongside the orchestra and choir, delivering another densely layered score with a strong narrative.
As to the covers, I present a total of seventeen here. The first fourteen all use official poster artwork.
Cover 1 is an alternate of the official album cover. This requires patching various sources together and blending, but then I chose to raise up Toph and the city at the bottom a little higher in the image, to then keep my placement of the title consistent with my primary Season 1 cover, rather than how the original art places it higher in the image and puts an awkward shadow behind it.
All the individual character posters requires some painting out by hand, as they all had the title down at the bottom of the image.
For Cover 15, I again created my own version of the nations series, using artwork from that teaser trailer of the different elements, overlaid with additional rocky textures here as the original image was rather low in detail.
Finally, the last two covers feature fan-created artwork.
Cover 16 features a stunning action piece by Nigerian designer Umo Raymond, I simply tweaked the colors a little bit, added a bit of a gradient shadow at the bottom, and then made Momo a bit smaller.
Cover 17 features an edit by Spanish designer Axel Almirón. His version featured a green frame around the image, which I liked, but in the end opted to edit out, as it was tricky to incorporate the top and bottom sections of the frame around the text credits.
Hope you enjoy, and keep an eye out for the final season once that drops!
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