Adapting once again the hit Nickelodeon animated show (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 seventeen 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 final set of two, use fan-created designs. Cover 16 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 17 uses art by Fastpacer, which fortunately didn't need too much editing, other than a little paint-out at the bottom.
Keep and eye out for upcoming seasons!
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