Survivor 48 is here, and alongside it, we're bringing you a brand new season of On Fire, the only official Survivor podcast. If you're a Survivor super fan, you won't want to miss this deep dive into every episode where we break down how we design the game, the biggest moves, your burning questions. It's the only podcast that gives you inside access to Survivor that nobody else can.
Listen to On Fire, the official Survivor podcast with me, Jeff Probst, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. Benders and non-benders alike, welcome to Braving the Elements, Nickelodeon's brand new podcast about all things Avatarverse. I'm Janet Varney. And I am Dante Bosco. Well, hopefully you were with us for our very first premiere.
number one episode of many to come of braving the elements we of course recapped and did a little bit of a deep dive into episode one of avatar the last airbender from book one the boy in the iceberg now We are going to be heading back over to episode 102 to talk about that soon.
But right now we had to hit pause on the recapping because we have very, very special guests today. In fact, this is such a special conversation that we are going to be splitting it up into two episodes. Let me put it this way. It's like our two dads are on the show. Do you know what I mean? Totally. I mean, listen, Korra and Zuko would not exist without our two dads. I'm sure that's a characterization that everyone will be uncomfortable about forever. And yet I've said it.
This is a very, very special episode for us. We're so glad that they came on early on so that we could get a little backstory, but also hopefully not ask them every single question they've ever been asked in the 20 almost years that it's been since the... The very seed of the idea for Avatar was created. So, please welcome our two dads, the creators. of Avatar The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, Avatar Studios. Please welcome Michael Dante DiMartino and Brian Konetzko.
Yay! I'm hearing the fanfare right now. People clapping over the airwaves as they're listening to this. Hello, children. Hello, son and daughter. Mike, I'm going to call you Mike for the rest of the time. Yes, that's fine. My friends, my children call me Mike. Mike D. Mike D. Yeah, I realize that I always refer to you as just Mike DiMartino, and now I'm feeling like I should have slipped back in the El Dante.
B.L. Dante. No, you threw that Dante. And when I first read the script, it said Michael Dante DiMartino. And I was like, and I was convinced one of the reasons I got cast because we share the same name. Well, I will say. I do recall, here's an early story for you, that we'd get the auditions on CD.
Back in the day. Oh, wow. People used CDs. And they did, like, list the actor or actresses' names on them. And I remember seeing Dante Bosco and I jokingly said, like, that's our guy right there. That's going to be him. And sure enough. It really did end up being you. There you go. It worked out. The name worked out for me. I like it.
Cut to later today, Dante's like, I wonder if that is the only reason I got the part. Actors are very insecure. I've just discovered that's the only reason. The only one. This is awesome for us. We love any opportunity to see you, and I'm... sure you know how important it is to us that we when you see us you're probably reminded of the most stressful times in your life so that's very positive for yeah but you you all were one of them
fun parts you know like towards the end mike was in a lot more of the records than i was but when so when i did get to go it was an even extra special treat you know and i always love hanging out with the actors and especially you two and you know i don't have children so all of the avatar characters are like my children i always think of them that way so it's not that you two
Lovely adult human beings are my children. But yeah, Koran and Aang, you know, they are. And my mom, I have a lot of nephews and a niece, but my mom would always say that. that avatar was her other grandchild, you know. Oh, wow. It takes a lot of...
attention like raising a child. Tell grandma we said hi. I was going to say we're ready to meet her at any time. It's funny you would say that because she is actually going to be on our next episode. I know it seems like we jumped around a little bit and started contacting your family member. But we're just real enthused about this podcast. We're real enthused about it.
you know i did that thing where uh and i think dante is more chill about this stuff because dante is the cool kid and i'm the nerd between the two of us and so he Probably didn't do what I did, which was like such a gross deep dive into stuff that I've actually... I've come all the way back around to having hurt myself because my brain stopped being able to take in all the information that's out there on the web about Avatar. So everything just sort of like melted away.
just back to where I was. I was like, I must know everything. The creators are coming on the podcast. Yeah, now I feel bad like we... we scared you into it like like you had to cram for a test or something it's okay to ask us a question that's been asked before it's just when So how did it all begin? If you could bend one element. I know. How did you ever come up with the idea? This has never before been told. A story you'll never hear.
anywhere else no there are a lot of places that uh that the story has been told um certainly on various uh and sundry tumblr blogs and Mike I think you have a little more on your website now that's a kind of a more recent thing right that you have the sort of hub of a website where people can go I do have a website but all the like blog stuff is kind of
of old it's from my blog i haven't we're kind of old yeah i would say like when people you know the thing we usually refer people to is like the the art of avatar book because like i feel like That's one of the definitive like places where we sort of told like where it began and the early development and you get to see the early art and all that. Oh, the book that I was cramming, even as we were logging on.
Was I supposed to read that textbook? Is that textbook I was supposed to? I have it here also. This is why you're the cool kid. You're the cool kid. That's right. And you're the one who drops profound references to other literary gems while I'm... scrambling to the remember something like very specific i just try to take it in the crazy thing is it's 20 years ago, fellas. I mean, you know, almost 20 years ago. And obviously I was there too, and it so blows my mind when I'm talking to fans or...
And these kids are, I mean, barely 20, if not. And I'm like going, hold on, we did, we did this. We started doing this like before you were born. Like, how is that? Yeah. It seemed like yesterday, fellas, like going in there and auditioning with you guys. I have all these crazy memories of the whole journey. I remember at the premiere party where Brian handed the mic to you.
at the premier mart he's like i want to have you know the beastie boy reference like i'm handing the mic to mike d like i have these like weird memories in my head and i'm like how was that that many years ago well and we were like We were young for show creators and show runners. Oh, for sure. I thought you guys were young too. I'm like, do these guys know what they're doing? Not really. We cast you because your name was Dante. What does that tell you?
Good taste. I was like 25, almost turning 26 when we came up with the idea in 2002. And, you know, it took some years through development and working on the test pilot and then getting into production. But by the time we were like actually running the production, I think I was 28. So, you know, so we were sort of known as like the young, the young guys for a while. And then we once had this like meeting.
This was, I think, during Quora, like some live action network pulled us in and we had a meeting and they were like, you know, you guys are like veterans, you know, you're like veteran world builders. And we came out of meeting and I was like, wait. Did we become the old guys? There was no in between. We went from young guys to old guys. Everything in the middle was a blur.
Yeah, I can't even, I mean, Dante and I do cons together, and I now have kids who are teenagers coming up and saying, I grew up watching Korra, and that's a mind blower, and then I look over. and in Dante's line and someone who's like twice their age is saying, I grew up watching Avatar. And people are naming their kids after characters from the series. And I mean, it's really something. And that is a different way.
We all have our own internal clock or lack thereof in terms of how we account for time going by. And if you're a parent, you know, it looks different because you're seeing it through your kids. And if you're not, maybe it's through your work or your animals or your. relationship or whatever but it's really interesting when you sort of see it reflected back to you through someone who
Like, they're marking time by naming their child Korra. It's a whole different experience. And time warps. All of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, hold on. Are you from the past? The future? What's happening? This doesn't seem possible. But somehow, it is.
And you guys knew each other far longer than the inception of Avatar. Because, of course, you met as students at Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, right? And Brian, I believe you were dressed as Iguana Man. I feel that has not... been addressed deeply deep cut deeply enough in the art book I'd like to know a little more about why iguana man and I consider that to be the first hybrid animal
because you were part Iguana. So that's basically the first hybrid animal from Avatar. What are you guys doing at RISD? Well, the first hybrid animal that... inspired me was opus from bloom county because you know he was just a penguin but he didn't really look like a penguin you know he had this big huge schnoz and um and i loved him and i actually just found the
stuffed animal that I had at my mom's house I brought it back home to LA and so when I was in like second or third grade I would just draw hybrid animals it was just something I did and that was a time when I used to just lay on the floor and just draw from my imagination and then a few years later i got more into i mean i always took art classes outside of school and stuff but i got more into like music and playing guitar and i wasn't
so focused on drawing even though I still consider myself an artist but you know ended up going to art school and I'll get into the whole story about meeting Mike but it was like it wasn't until I've been working on shows for other people's shows for like four years, but I really hadn't been doing drawings for myself. I would just do drawings for a class assignment or drawings for a job.
When Mike and I were trying to come up with a show, I started finally doing drawings for myself at night. And when we started what would turn into Avatar... It was kind of the first time in my adult life I was just really sitting there drawing like when I was a kid. There was no assignment in mind. I was just letting my imagination run free, and my brain just went to that.
second or third grade state and i just started drawing hybrid animals and i didn't question them i wasn't like this is a so-and-so and you know coming up with some cute like combination it was it was honestly just a Just tapping into that old thing of being a kid and Miyazaki, you know, so I think it was like the cat bus and it was sort of just this floating, floating manatee bovine of some sort.
but like with opus like i wasn't thinking like i just thought oh in this world this is what a bison looks like you know it's just different than ours you know it wasn't that it was it was such a hybrid thing I remember seeing one of the South Korean animators saying something about feeling very worried about having to animate. uh appa and like sort of not knowing like why does it this is very strange they have he has six legs what am i gonna do with this like should i make him insect
How is this going to work? And then cited CatBus as a very reassuring reference. Like, oh, thank goodness for CatBus. Now I can wrap my head around Alpha. Finally! CatBus have like... Eight or ten legs or something like that. Listen, that makes six a dream come true. It's just easy peasy. Six legs, ain't no thing. So back to Iguana Man. Yeah, Mike and I met, yeah, when I transferred to RISD.
And Mike had also been a transfer, but he was two years ahead of me. So when I got there, Mike was a senior and I was a sophomore. But our mutual friend Angus McLean, who's a big animator and director over at Pixar, now he ended up being my roommate at RISD. And he brought me over to a party that Mike and our friend Kurt were having. RISD parties.
This is the meet cute. Now we have, we've sort of heard Brian coming in on his side, Iguana man style. And then Mike, here you are situated at the same party having transferred in. Was it a costume party? No. I'm so glad you asked. There were a lot of those. My memories are always a little foggy of those years, because I've always mixed up the Iguana Man thing with the first time I met Brian, but that was not.
apparently the first time. So I think I actually have very little memory of the first time I met Brian's, unfortunately. I don't remember that party. I will concede. Actually, that might have been the first time we met. Because I did tag along with Angus to a Halloween party. Oh. So it is possible. Yeah. So the whole Iguana man thing, if you've not seen pictures from my, you know.
instagram or whatever it was my friend michelle had designed this really cool sparkly like green lame costume and it had like the
I don't know, a little turkey gizzard thing, whatever that is, on the frill. It had like a frill. And she let me borrow it, and I just, I didn't know there was like a... scrawny superhero alter ego inside of me but when i got this costume i just started running around with like nerf guns and kind of creating this character around it um and then i ended up making like a
my own version of the costume but yeah it was it was michelle's kind of her kind of character but i like drew comics around it and stuff so yeah i don't know maybe maybe i was wearing that i did graduate in it Did you really? The Iguana Man costume made multiple appearances around the campus at RISD. Here's the thing. At RISD and in art school in general, you are encouraged to sort of dress up. in something imaginative or in a costume. So yeah.
It's not that weird at RISD to graduate in an Iguana Man costume. Now I'm actually disappointed because I'm like, oh, you could have made it. Like, oh, you should have made another costume. Now I'm actually kind of disappointed that it was just Iguana Man gets trotted out again when he could have made it.
Brand new. You guys are like the pride of RISD. I spent a lot of time on it. I spoke at Brown University, and all the RISD kids bum-rushed the show. And the Brown kids would not let them into the... into the show oh and then i mean i know and they're like chanting outside and like trying to disrupt kind of like the keynote thing i'm doing and then afterwards uh you know i did a signing and then we i mean i signed well
well till after midnight and just the pride of risd students being a part of you know the creators of avatar even when i go to concerts if someone's from rizdy they got to come and talk to me like you know i went to rizdy and i know oh that's cool i know the creators of rizdy and you guys are like you know we're not the creators of rizdy i want to be clear i was not there i was not there in 18 1875
five or whatever. But definitely RISD kids roll hard for you guys. I was like, wow, there they are going hard for Mike and Brian. I love it.
they're willing to disrupt and ruin your speech the person they wanted to know they just wanted the brown students to know like you know you guys got dante bosco but he really belongs to us i was like okay i do remember when i you know knew about risdy is in high school it was it was because of i was a big talking heads fan and david byrne had gone to to risdy along with a few of the other yeah they formed there in the tap room so like to me like when in my
my day like that was the like oh my god so cool david byrne went there i get to go there that's i think david byrne got kicked out even cooler that's even cooler that's even cooler i think he might have left but There's a few big names over there, like Bob Richardson, who's a big cinematographer. And then we were there at the same time Seth MacFarlane was there. Oh, wow. Angus, the most Scottish name outside of Scotland I've ever heard.
Well, his name is Angus Tyler Sebastian McClain. McClain. Of the clan McClain. Survivor 48 is here and alongside it, we're bringing you a brand new season of On Fire, the only official Survivor podcast. If you're a Survivor super fan, you won't want to miss this deep dive into every episode where we break down how we design the game, the biggest moves, your burning questions. It's the only podcast that gives you inside access to Survivor that nobody else can.
Listen to On Fire, the official Survivor podcast with me, Jeff Probst, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. But even with all those luminaries who have come through RISD through the years, I did read in the art book that when you, Mike, first moved out to California, you got a job almost immediately, even though you only really had one contact.
right yeah it was a mix of like good luck and like a contact that paid off like and it was also a time when like there wasn't a ton of animation yet but it was starting to like pick up
My first job was on King of the Hill when it was just starting. So there was like, Simpsons were around, there was King of the Hill, and there were a few other shows around that time, like the primetime animation stuff that was like picking up. So like, they just needed people to work. It wasn't like now where like... There's so many people coming out to get jobs in animation. It was definitely not the coolest thing to do back then. So there are a lot of good opportunities.
were in the right place at the right time and could draw. But it would ebb and flow. I mean, there would be in those, even now, you know, it happens, but it... In that era, like the late 90s, early 2000s, there would be, like when I came out two years after Mike, they called it the Toon Boom. And there are a lot of sitcom animation shows picking up. But then there'd be a slump.
You know, a lot of you see the studios kind of empty out and a lot of people looking for work. I pick back up again. So it was kind of cyclical. But yeah, Mike, Mike was actually like a good. student where he would like get internships and i was like always too lazy to get internships but his internship led to that that's how he found that connection it was john rice right mike
Yeah. John Rice was a, he's a big director now. Uh, but I worked with, he was a director on King of the Hill at that time and he had, he had come from, he worked at MTV animation. So that's where I got my first job. It was kind of like an, well, it was. It was technically a job, kind of like an internship, because it was just for the summer, but it was on this show called MTV's The Head. It was the era of Beavis and Butthead.
I think they were doing Daria at the time, but it was when MTV animation was still a thing. So I worked there for a summer before my senior year and kind of understood how animation works and how the productions work and stuff like that. That's the thing. I want to, like, try to include it in my talks to schools. And I'm actually talking to some RISD students tomorrow evening about pitching.
I think everybody gets really focused on like the idea, like I need a really awesome idea. And sure, that is obviously crucial to a good pitch. But part of like getting a show made and then actually. Like getting a show picked up and then actually making it is understanding how a show runs. And the thing I, I'm just going to go up and brag about Mike for several minutes now. Cause like.
Yeah, I was a sophomore, Mike was a senior, but we were just part of this crew that all helped each other make films and stuff. And they were older than me, so they had more interesting homework and I had more fun. helping them on their cool like senior films and mike and i just clicked we just really hit it off and mike at you know what was he 21 22 he was already like running a production
Like, he had an incredibly ambitious 2D animated project that had cells and it had backgrounds. And he just had this whole production, like... organized and broken down and at one point we all of us got together in this like uh what do you call it it was like a sound stage almost in the risdy film department
and mike had set up all these tables and we just had movies playing and everybody was a bunch of us came and we were painting cells so we like mike set up like an animation studio and had you know this incredibly ambitious very professional student film at the end of it and a lot most student films people come up with something really ambitious they bite off more than they can chew they get about
pencil test done for about half of it they color like a couple shots and then they cry and turn it in and like and then they graduate you know and like mike like put together this totally professional thing so like He took that experience at the head and he paid attention and he under, he like saw how the production worked, how animation gets made, what the different roles are and stuff. So when he came out here and met John Rice.
Didn't John hire you initially as a storyboard artist and then like within months promoted you to assistant director? Yeah, I think after my first board or something.
he did one sketch and john was like you're in the house forget it was it wasn't very long yeah yeah and when you work with people that are cool like that that don't they're not all about like seniority and politics they just go oh this kid gets it promotion you know i'm giving you more responsibility so by the time i came out mike was 24 and he was a he was a director on the first season of family guy yeah that's huge
But he had a shaved head and a full beard. So all the other directors thought he was like 30 something. And there were a bunch of directors on that show, but Seth and Fox. loved Mike's episodes and they were like why can't you all be more like this guy and then they found out that Mike was 24 and one of the directors like flipped out and like threw a chair and was like
So all right, but there's always that dude in productions starting from very young doing for no money and everything to now It's like you need that guy that for some reason everyone will work for that guy or girl. There's that person that attracts people and people just want it like draw you know do stuff for them for free for some reason there you if you can't have a production without that guy that everyone's like
down to do stuff for they don't even know why like well mike asked me to do it yeah i don't even know why people help me but i appreciate that they did back then i was like i just said you were so organized you were organized too it's like you don't want to take advantage of people time and effort so it was like okay i know everyone's gonna come so like i want to make sure like they feel like they
They got something to do and they know what's going on. And, you know, and it worked out and got cells painted. And what was that? What was that project? Oh, you guys are talking about Mike's short film project at RISD, right? Is that the one with TV in his belly? Yes. See, Janet has done her homework. It was called Kid New Year and Billboard. I don't even know what you would call it, but it was like this kid.
It was kind of like sci-fi-ish, I guess. This kid hanging out with his... I guess he was kind of an android. He had a TV in his stomach, and they drove around in an ice cream cart in the sewers of the city, and they had these... these girls on roller skates chasing them who are called the alligator girls and one of the voice actresses who was one of those characters got her character tattooed on her so a friend of ours still has a tattoo
Film. But yeah, I mean, another friend of ours is super talented. You know, it was art school. He just sort of flaked out. And Mike had all these backgrounds that needed to get done. And I was like, oh, I can help you. So even though we did have those. a night or two where it was a whole crew of us i would just go hang out in mike's apartment and we would just sit there and just work together
Kind of, you know, side by side, he was working on, I think he was animating and I was painting backgrounds and like something clicked. We just, we got along well, we worked together well. I looked up to him. I had a lot to learn from him. I think he liked my art making. And when he and our friend Kurt graduated again, they were two years ahead of me.
It was just this, I mean, I remember Kurt actually saying it out loud, but it was just, I was going to say it was an unspoken thing, but it was actually spoken. He's just like, we're going to go out to LA. One of those unspoken spoken things. Yeah. He's like, we're going to go out to LA.
I guess like the agreement was unspoken, but you know, he just sort of declared, he's like, we're going to go out to LA. We'll get established. You come out and then we're all going to make films together. We're like, cool. Sounds like a plan. That sounds like a great plan. I finished up at RISD.
But, you know, Mike had that one contact. We had a friend who was from the LA area. They all went and lived at that person's parents' house until they all got jobs and could get apartments. Two years later, I came. I lived on a... futon mattress in mike's dining room for a couple weeks and i got a job like the second day because he brought me to work like his son. It was like, bring your son to work day. And I came and...
What y'all drawing? What y'all drawing over there? Actually, you joke, but that's sort of what happened. I just started, Mike's like, here's some characters we need drawn. So I just started drawing them in the Family Guy style, which I had, you know, it was the first time I was drawing it. The art director came in.
he was like who are you where did you come from do you want to take a test and usually you get like a week to take a test but I turned it in the next morning and got hired and so I've just started working but again now we were in a professional setting but My cube was right outside of Mike's door. So we were still kind of next to each other, like in college. Sometimes I was working with him, sometimes with other directors. I guess it's too much to hope that there would be at some point...
moment where you would yell from your office to the cubicle. Let's go! Get in here! I guess that's not really the relationship you two had. really at all mike doesn't really talk that loud yeah no mike's a soft-spoken guy but it was cool and then you know he helped me get he definitely helped me get my foot in the door um And then I got an apartment and then other RISD friends from my year started coming and staying on my couch.
then I would help them get jobs. And then they would get their own apartment. And then the next class graduated, and they would stay on their couches. And so we had a good number of years. Wow, you got that whole system going on. Seth MacFarlane was at RISD also? He was a year ahead of me. Wow. And then he had, yeah, he had, I mean, he blew up.
crazy like not long after moving out here is pretty wild I think the point the point is you don't have to go to RISD you just have to it's good to and you know the word networking can be so gross but it's more of like supporting just supporting your friends and You can be at, you know, a school in LA, in Pasadena that I'm associated with is not in a professional capacity, but I've taken classes there. I've given lectures there. It's the Concept Design Academy.
And that's an awesome school being taught by professionals in the industry out here. But it's like just find like minded people, whether or not you're in a school setting and just.
learn from each other support each other push each other um and and back to my original point of mike as like this you know paid intern it's like pay attention to how stuff is done if you're just blundering in and you even if you have the awesome pitch but you're everybody's like this person doesn't even know how animation gets made you know why would they risk millions of dollars
corporations money on you just for some idea when you don't know how to make it you don't know how to build a crew you don't know how to run a production and not like we knew it's not that we do everything which you know you learn a lot on the job but you pay attention and yeah Absolutely. And just to go back to what you were saying about networking, I have the same those same conversations with myself in my head because that it feels like it flies in the face of everything that I.
believe in or just think you know things that I sort of didn't want to participate in in coming down to LA you know very reluctant and being like if I have to hear someone say it's who you know or you know it's networking I'm gonna barf but then like you realize that all the stories you're telling
Maybe not all of them, but some of them you realize you're just describing networking to someone else's ears. Like on the outside of it, it sounds like they would use the word networking. But when it's you and it's you're on the inside of it and it just means these are people that I've loved working with.
that you know we there was a mutual respect and there was a shared vision and of course you you know feel compelled to work with that person again not to say that there's no room to bring in new people or new spirit to that but you're like oh I guess that is like that
The corporate term for those things is networking. Interesting. Yeah, I hate it when it's, I mean, I can't do anything like that when it's like forced, when it's like forced networking. It's like, you better go to this party because you don't know who's going to be there. Yeah.
And then it feels like really weird and awkward. That is weird. But of course, I grew up here and in this whole town. So I'm always like, people tell me about that. I'm like, no, it's not who you know. It's who knows you and what they think of you. The twist. They're like, oh. I'm like, yeah, it's not who you know. Who knows you? But there's also, it's like who you get to know.
I think that's the part of networking. People think it's just some sort of VIP pass or, oh, I went to this college. I know there are heated debates online and it seems like there are these mafias from these various art schools. There's truth to that, and there's also what we're describing, which is just it's not networking in the sense of, oh, if you just know this person, they're the gatekeeper. Right.
glory and riches and fame are behind the... I would say it's who you get to know, meaning you work. And that person goes, oh. wow and that was how we we met eric coleman you know i worked with him on uh invader zim and he we got to know each other it's not that it was just like hey rizdy guy let's give him a show you know it definitely didn't didn't happen that way he saw how i worked under pressure on a very creative and very ambitious, difficult production and was like,
That's the kind of person I want to work with after having worked with me for over a year, you know, maybe two years. So when I hear networking, I think of those like company soirees and everyone's standing around with a drink, looking nervous. Exactly. Who can I? Who can I meet? Talk to. Yeah, but it's not that. It's like, oh, I can rely on that person. Oh, that person.
works really well with others. Oh, that person is very professional and creative and problem solving. You've told the story about pitching to Eric a few times. One thing that I found so funny. was this idea that he wanted you to make sure you knew it should be about a kid's POV. And I think it's, I think maybe Brian, that was you, but you said something that he was like, you'd be surprised how many stories are pitched to us from the perspective.
of a tax accountant or like a brothel. And I was like, it's Nickelodeon. I don't, that's mind blowing to me. That really happens. That happens all the time. Yeah, know your audiences probably. And that's another thing that you've kind of talked about is as much as maybe someone would love to think that the two of you, you know, were in a magical cave just like coming up with these wonderful ideas and then you emerged from it with.
this complete idea of The Last Airbender and then took it to Nickelodeon and they were like, it doesn't matter if we want this or not. We must make it. Like, this is history in the making. That it was even a collaborative process with the network. Eric was able to sort of...
talk with you about how to kind of tailor something to what they were looking for, but in a way that also allowed you to have your own voice and kind of focus in on what was exciting to you about that stuff, right? I always call Eric the godfather of Zuko. Zuko's character completely came out of a note from Eric. We had our big fire lord, you know, the big bad boss at the end of the story.
And Eric was like, yeah, that's cool, but you need some boots on the ground. You need someone who's going after them the whole time. And we were like, yeah, yeah. And we were thinking of an adult. And he was like, wouldn't it be scarier if it was a kid? who was like really driven and, and I said, can you have a scar? And that's how, that's how Zuka. So like that came from that and that, but that's part of why Eric.
recruited me and I introduced him to Mike it's like it's like he had seen that I was someone that you can collaborate with and it's not just this one-sided you know the artists over here and the suits over there and it's a war. It's like, you got it there. The company's the ones.
risking millions of dollars on these things. And so you've got to figure out, I always say it's a Venn diagram. You figure out what they need and what you need as an artist and a storyteller and just try to figure out what fits in the middle. You know, Dante and I were talking about all the different characters in the show and how much we love them and sort of wondering how you felt you were reflected in those characters. And Dante just totally blew my mind. He was like, you know, Brian is Zuko.
And Mikey Zhang. How much truth is there to that? It's true. There's some truth to that. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot one that revealed to me or you guys revealed it or something happened and I was like. Oh my God. It was like a epiphany. I think it's one of those things that just, I mean, it kind of naturally happened because we're both fueling this world and these characters and, you know.
And like anything you create, like I, especially now I noticed like there's in every character I can see aspects of myself, but you kind of end up identifying with like, one of the the main characters i've always sort of like had a soft spot for ang and brian's always identified with zuko a little more and it's just sort of seemed to work out that way that your personalities sort of you know get infused in the work in different ways and
All the characters like Sokka and Katara, there's like, you know, little parts of us and all those personalities and characters and storylines, you know. Mike is like a peaceful, mellow. Avatar. Airbender. Yeah. perfectly round head. I am definitely much more fiery and impassioned and driven in a sort of self-destructive way.
sometimes but but we balance each other out but have an amazing redemptive arc yeah dude I'm telling you I can't and listen I am by the way dude everyone must know I don't mean anything Like, I love teasing Dante and Dante loves teasing me. There is no part of me that's like, I can't believe everyone loves Zuko the most on Avatar The Last Airbender. Because I love Zuko so much. We love the villain who's been... hurt.
and who is given the opportunity to come back from that. Yeah, well, things that people always ask me, and of course, I don't have the answers because I am the actor who played it, and they're always like, did you know? First of all, they bring me to the side everywhere. Cons, no cons, just people that find out. Zuko they like want to have this discussion with me and they're like literally this is the best redemptive arc in the history of Hollywood I'm like what are you guys talking about a
And they were like, did you know this arc from the beginning? And my whole thing is like, oh, he's like, no, for me as an actor, I'm like, no idea. I don't know what they were doing. I thought I was coming on to be some bad guy with a scar and I was like this. like whatever i'm the bad guy it was a lot like you know like they say when they did uh when they did casablanca like no one knew what the ending was the actors bogey and
Lauren McCall just did the movie, and then by the end, that's what the end was. And I feel for an actor for me in this particular project, I was like, I had no clue what we were doing week to week. Yeah. It's in the series Bible. I mean, we knew that Zuko was going to become Aang's teacher.
Yeah. I mean, the funny part is like, even after in the early days of the internet, when there was like, this was pre social media kids out there. So let me tell you, uh, There was a message boards about, you know, TV shows and I was, didn't know much about them, but I remember after our first episodes came out, you know, there were people online talking about the shows and.
everyone was it would say like oh it's so obvious zuko's become good he's gonna turn and become good in the end so like they were already like picking up on that redemptive arc like pretty And I can't say we weren't like trying to hide it, but yeah. I was just a dumb actor going, I'm not playing it like that. I don't know. I'm like, I want to kill this dude. How about that? I know.
Well, I was going to say, too, that feeds back into the whole idea that, like, how could you have known that there would even be people of a mature age that would be into discussing where the show was going on a message board? I mean, that's perhaps... not what you were expecting when you were creating the show for Nickelodeon and they were sort of hammering in like the age group yeah no I mean back then that was not a common I mean it existed I knew I'd
I remember there was like the Twin Peaks message board. Yeah, that's what message boards were for. Twin Peaks, dude. Yeah, but it was not like going on Facebook or Instagram or something or Tumblr or whatever. This may be the last big franchise IP show.
that has been created without any social media. Well, but maybe not social media. Yeah, because right after us, social media happened. Because I remember when we came out, none of us had Facebooks, none of us had Twitters. Friendster existed because when I... When I was living in Seoul, when we were working on the test pilot, I remember I had a Friendster profile. And there was like, that was the days of, I'm forgetting the music one. MySpace. MySpace, yeah.
That was like around that. I really had that at the ready. It was the birth of MySpace. I still own stock in MySpace. Oh, MySpace? Yeah, still going strong. Feel free to check it out. MySpace pages. Avatarspirit.net was our big fan site. And that formed, I think, right after the pilot premiered. Right on. In 2005. And there was another one, I think Avatar Horizons or something. So these two fan sites formed.
Right in the wake of the first episode airing. So, I mean, people identified with the show right away and it found an audience. And to your point, Janet, not just a. not just like a target demo you know audience that never surprised us i think because mike and i we've always said like our test audience is Mike and I. That's it. Just make sure we like it, you know, and there's so many.
kid shows made for kids that i can't sit through it's like screeching non-stop and i'm like why would anyone want to work on that you know like we we all we made a show we wanted to watch and that we wanted to work on That would be interesting for us to work on.
You don't always work on shows that you want to watch or that you want to work on. So you brought up being in Seoul and had you been there before for Zim? Is that how you ended up? Because that feels like a big leap to go and actually be there for the pilot, which was only like... it 11 it's like 11 ish minutes or something yeah so and again you know this this point i'm trying to hammer about mike mike was gonna be good no matter what but like just one of his many attributes is like
He's very good as a director and I would say also as a producer because Mike looks at the big picture. If he's directing an episode, he's thinking about the entire episode. If he's doing a scene in Act 3, he's thinking about... how that might reference a scene in act one and i being like zuko the obsessive you know
I might zoom in and be like, I'm going to squeeze as much life out of this moment, out of this scene, out of this one turn of character or something. And not that we, each of us don't have the ability to do the opposite. But that's where I think our like tendencies lie. And that's why we balance each other out so well. We have a lot of things that just totally overlap and we have a lot of similar.
traits but mike's always really good at the macro so but it's not like i was i also kind of came into the industry and i was a character designer but i was like what's my friend doing as a director what are his tasks what jobs does he have what is the prop designer doing what is this timer i've never seen that before what is a timer doing how do they figure out the lip movement you know you're just paying attention to everything so yeah when i when i was 24 i got sent
over to South Korea to work with the animation studio that was doing Zim. Had you been there before? No, it was my first time. That's so cool. How exciting. It was awesome. It was super exciting. It's my first time to Asia where I had always wanted to go and I loved it and I made friends and I just fell in love with Korea. So...
When I was there, I wasn't, you know, just like, oh, I'm here just to do my job on Zim and help train these artists to draw the characters on model or whatever. I was like... how does this system work you know i was being provided this incredible rare opportunity for an american animation uh person to see
this other totally integral, really important part of the process. And I just didn't feel like those artists and those crews were being used to their full potential by the American animation industry. And and I so I was really paying attention and asking questions and getting to know people. And. and came back and talked to Mike about it, you know? And so as much as we, I always say this, but as much as we had creative ideas, story ideas, character ideas, we had production ideas.
I honestly, I think it was like 50, 50. We're like, what if we, a lot of the stuff that we would talk about, I was like, what if we ran a show like this? What if we changed this? What if we gave the overseas animation studio and animators more creative? Like we empowered them to be more creatively involved and we actually.
let them be animators instead of telling them what to animate on those timing sheets and stuff. So, so yeah, that's what I mean about paying attention. It's like seeing how things work and seeing if there's a way to. change the process for a better, more efficient or better quality work. That's amazing. That leads me into what people ask me a lot.
I mean, you guys being in Asia, working with Asian artists and talking about all the Asian influence in the show and other different influences in the show and me being an Asian actor and Mako hiring me and Mako being a part of the show. And this is before. All this whole, you know, what's been going on in Hollywood in the last, you know, I'd say five, six years about cultural influence and authenticity. And even though you guys are.
Caucasian guys I was like these guys actually did it with what we really want is to approach things with respect and Cultural significance and not just brush things off and I was like these guys are doing this 20 years ago I've had a conversation with them. We talked about the way they approached the martial arts with Sifu Kiso and all these guys. I'm like, no one's perfect, but this is the direction.
that we were going in 20 years ago, and now it feels like the rest of Hollywood is catching up with kind of having integrity when approaching ethnic diversity and getting people from different ethnicities involved in the stories we're telling.
And it sounds like you kind of innately went there even before you got on Avatar. And that's one of the things I love about how you guys approached the project the whole time. Yeah, I mean, I think it was just, I mean, certainly at the time, we were conscious of it, but it was also partly... I think we just naturally want to respect people and respect cultures. You know, the whole reason we, you know, part of the reason we created this was admiration of Miyazaki's films.
uh you know asian culture and stuff so it definitely came out of a love of it and an appreciation of it so you know it was just natural to try to honor it as best we could and yeah like you said sure we made some missteps along the way and and now we're obviously even more aware and more conscious and and to uh do it do it right yeah i think the the main thing was we tried not to and again of course we
surely have had missteps but we try you try not to do othering you know when i did get to leave even when i got to go to to the uk that was first time i left the country as a young young person um Right after school, it's like, I just never, when I would travel the world, I never thought, yeah, I'm the, I'm the American, you know, I'm the, and then, oh, there's all these other cultures. I just figure.
i'm no different than anybody else everybody has a totally different experience i could have been born anywhere in the world i'm not you know and i take i just but i find culture interesting i find that fact that everyone isn't born in the same place and has a different experience to be completely interesting. And that's why even the avatar world isn't monolithic. It is.
very multicultural you know and there isn't one we are two white american dudes but there isn't one person who could represent the entire avatar world you know it is it is just And it's very much about these different cultures coexisting and the beauty and the pain that comes out of that. And that's why it's not about, it's just about.
a world that's trying to find balance and it's trying to coexist and so we approached it that way i think like mike said that's kind of our default attitudes anyway you know but yeah just i mean utmost respect not only the cultural stuff but like mike said i mean even just anime you know we wanted to do a love letter to anime and not just copy it you know and in some ways i know it would have looked better if i had just copied stuff But I was trying to do our little...
A little crummy version of it. You know, like put some of our thing into it. That's a big discussion too. Is it anime or is it not anime? And I'm like, yeah, this is American. So at the very least, it's American anime. But I don't know what it is. I mean, you could go speak to 20 top directors.
in japan and i think you'd get and ask them what is anime and i bet you'd get 20 different answers that's also not a monolithic thing also i think it's just short for animation you know like it became a thing but you know um but we we just we love that stuff too and and i felt i mean when i saw foodie i almost
cried i mean it just it destroyed me because i was like oh okay we're in the dark ages over here in this america i didn't think the american tv industry was like some like hey you better do what we're you know we're the we're the hotshot cowboys like i'm looking at foodie cootie in 2000 or 2001 going okay we're 20 30 years behind here Like, what are we doing? And how can we even get a little bit of this magic into an American, a show produced by an American studio?
In a lot of ways, it became like a gateway drug for like a whole generation of American audiences to anime. Now anime is so big on Netflix and on all these other streaming platforms, Crunchyroll, and a lot of people... found it or got a taste for it through, I mean, we're a gateway drug to anime, you know, anime. I never thought of that, but I guess maybe, maybe some people probably were like, Hey, I like this. What else is there that's similar? And that's cool. That's how they got into it.
All right, friends, that will do it for the first half of our conversation with our wonderful creators, Mike and Brian. We have a fantastic second half available to you in just a couple of days, and it is not to be missed. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcasts or the iHeartRadio app or Spotify or just wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe. We'll talk to you next time on Braving the Elements.
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