Hello, friends, benders and non benders alike. Welcome to Braving the Elements, Nickelodeon's podcast about all things Avatar verse. I'm Janet Varney and I'm Dante Bosco, and we're so psucked to finally be at this point of Avatar the Last Airbender Varney. Since the podcast first came out into the world, we've been hearing from fans about how much they love book one, but how excited they were for us to get into the introduction of Tough bay Ful Faye Fong, Don't I know what my friend. So last week we finally got to meet the blind bandit herself in the wrestling ring and talk about what a great episode that was to bring this introduction to Tough Beyond what we see in this want I acknowledge that that's absolutely a meeting of a sort with Top, but to see her in her full glory, just beating the crap out of some dudes, very satisfying, very very cool episode and such a great character. Yeah. But since Top was such a massive force in the Avatar versus fandom, we thought it might be cool to bring in a couple of people who were there when Top was first conceptualized because they were the people who created her. That's right, buddy, Way back in the early odds, Mighty Martino and Brian Can Let's go, created a powerful earth Bender, one more powerful than anyone we've seen before, one who learned how to earth bend from the world's first earth Benders themselves, the Badroom Alls, one who could strike fear in the hearts of even the most powerful benders, and one who didn't see the world in quite the same way as the rest of say Team Avatar. So let's once again welcome our two dads aka Brike to chat with us a little bit more about the force of name. That is tough. I don't know what I was doing, their dads, but I certainly did it. You did it? You did great? Did I got into wrestler announcer mode? Is what happened? That's what I really did. Oh, that's such a great episode. And yeah, the Boulder, I mean the boulder that's inspired by the rock right. You know, I'm not hitting this, I don't think in the past, but I do have a history of being a fan of the w W. E uh, not so much anymore when I was a kid. Yes, we all know when I was a kid. That's what the World Wildlife Fund properly stepped in and you know, probably was the only people who have ever been able to uh win a legal battle with Vince Witman. But that's probably for another podcast, that documentary. It might be a little slow moving, but I'm into it. Yeah, uh so, yes, So when I was a kid, super inter wrestling, that was the whole Cogan, Roddy Already, Piper Days, Andre the Giant, all those, all those great wrestlers. Side no favorite wrestler that time. Oh at that time, that era was, I mean it was kids. I think Hull Cogan, you know, in retrospect, that was Jimmie super Fast, he was continue and I knew who Mr. T was. That's my contribution. And then I went to high school, stopped watching wrestling. I went to college the nineties, that era, didn't know anything about it. Then in early l A days, me my friend Kurt and I think we roped Brian into it. Eventually for some reason, you know that turn on the TV one night and it started brought back the night, Yeah, Monday at raw like it was like the resurgence, and it was the early era of the rock and I was hooked again The Rock. I don't have any fan crushes. The Rock is my biggest fan crush. Now, Kurt work you know on heards documentary stunt man. So Kurt. Incidentally, he does have a Avatar connection because he directed the Avatar Spirits documentary years ago, but did not executive produce. No, he did not have a documentary. And The Rock is not the voice of the Boulder. This was before he was like The Rock as we know him now, but he was definitely on that trajectory and sensing this character was modeled after him. We tried to get him to do the voice, but he was not doing television at the time. That's what his agents told us. But we got the also from that era mc foley, who wrestled with The Rock many many times, who was also awesome and channeled. It was like a mc foley Rock mashup, Like yeah, it was like him doing an impression of his bunny, you know. It was it was funny. Did he come in? Did you? Was he with the gang? Did he come in by himself? Like did you get to kind of shake his hand and stuff? I think we met him remotely. I think he was not in l a So I definitely don't remember meeting him in person, but if we said hello over the web, well, it's such a great conceit. In introducing Tough that way, was that something you knew from the very beginning as far as how you wanted to bring her into the show, I was always like, yes, wrestling, this is what we gotta do. Well, we get back way up because Tough wasn't just Mike and I creating or you know, it was a big group effort. But her origins go all the way very early on. So when Mike and I did the Development Bible in two thousand two, we knew like, oh, Ang will need a teacher for each element, and who was his teacher going to be? And you know, sweet, we just knew, oh, he'll meet because Qatar is not going to be a master, so they'll have to travel to the Northern Water tribe to meet a master. We didn't really know who that would be. We just knew to be a master up there. And then we had the idea that his earthending teacher would be a kid. And Mike came up with a name Tough in two. Such a cool name, by the way, such a cool name, and we wrote that character into like the season two section of the Bible, like kind of overview, and look, some things from that overview made it in. Some things didn't. A lot of things that we went back and read it, and some of our original we just kind of had to like flesh out an entire three seasons, like in a couple of days or something, and so some of the ideas are kind of wacky, but some stuff, it's pretty interesting when we go back and look at those old documents. Some stuff made it in. So anyways, Tough was there. Tough was a boy, So we had conceived Tough as a teenage boy who was essentially it's who Bowlin ended up being. That was much more the kind of character we had in mind. He was gonna be like cuddly jock, kind of goofy, sweet but jockey, kind of like meathead, you know, like like a kid in like a character of the Rock would play. Yeah, maybe Rock as a teenager, you know. And so that was just in our heads for a long time. I've said before, like by the time we got to season two, Mike and I have been working on the show for like three years. So a lot of that stuff oh, you know like this was going to come. You know, we knew that like O Prince Zuko as a sister, and we just were like really set on Tops void. But it was Areny has who was like, you know, I think we should make Top a girl. And it's not that Mike and I were like we don't want girl characters. It's just that we were so used to the idea that we had had for all these years that we were like, I don't. I mean, you know, like I just got this character in my head. And we actually see evidence of who that character would have been in the test pilot that we did, the old opening where the four Benders do the elements in front of the backdrop. The earth Bender was a prototype design I did for what I was thinking of for Tops. So again, it was like the Avatar equivalent of like a linebacker in high school. You know, like he's a teenager, but he's like a really big kid. He had just like big chest, And it was one of those things. I used that test pilot as a test. I was like testing out designs, testing out our aisles and stuff. So it wasn't like setting Stone, but I was like, oh, well, like that's who this kid will be, and then that character sort of evolved into the one that's in the opening, and I think that one is more of like an adult, and then that one kind of looks like the bolder right a little bit. Anyways, that was how we thought of it. Well, do you remember brand I could be totally wrong about this, but my memory was that he was still meant to be a blind Earthbender though for sure. Yeah, that it was like teenage big jockey dude, but sweet and goofy blind. Yeah, we always had that idea. And then there was, you know, the really neat synchronicity when we picked Southern pretty Mantis, this rare style for Tough, and we met with seafood Man and well and he was like, you know that the legend is this style was created by a blind woman. And we were like, we had no idea. It was just one of those cool secret disease. But yeah, we knew Tough was blind. And I remember he wasn't trying to come up with like some like love triangle, like, oh, it'll be fun to have a because it's just a different energy. I think we need that energy. Yeah, instead of three boys in the group at that time, and he convinced us. He made a really good case for it, and then we were on board. We're like, you know what, yeah, and then I was like, dude, she should be tiny. So I went from you know, I had this idea of this big linebacker and I was like, I want her even for her age. She looks really young, like she's about as age, but she should just be tiny. And then that's where all the wit the wrestler stuff came, because we really wanted to contrast like she's just this little kid, you know, and he's a and a girl, and you get to play against sort of expectations and stereotypes and stuff. Yeah, I think we had the idea that related to the wrestling part. It wasn't that it was going to be a wrestling per se, but it was that I think we had the idea that they were going to meet her in kind of an underground bending type of environment. And then I probably slapped on the wrestling stuff later, I don't remember. It makes sense that we had a much harder time, you know, Aaron convinced Mike and I, but we had a much harder time convincing the network to allow to be a girl there was resistance, but obviously we won that argument and got to make tough tough. No. I love it because you know, Earth is kind of a masculine kind of like element to a degree in the way earth bending, moving mountains, and then you have the small girl doing it, which is the most powerful one is really and she's still quite masculine and beautifully so, you know, and beautifully so yeah, or just androgynous, you know that just sort of androgyns. Yeah, yeah, masculin is just an energy, you know, It's like it's just an energy. Feminine and energy, mascos and energy. You balance these things. Everybody has these things in them and to different degrees and different expressions. And I am forever grateful to Aaron for really sticking to his guns on that because it was absolutely the right call. And then we got to do Bolin, So it was like we got to do that character that had been rattling around in our heads for years and they rattled around even longer. But so it's like it's cool, you know, we've still got to use that idea and kind of bring that character to life. Oh absolutely, And I mean I love the character of Bullen so much in the legend of Cora. I know many of us are very glad that that you were able to bring him to life. Now, getting back to when we first meet Tough, we see her running and giggling, which is funny because she is very childlike and you know the sort of giggling. You really don't necessarily put those things together because she doesn't have that, and it's not how we ultimately no Tough later on her and her outfit and because she's wearing like parents clothes that her parents make her wear. Yeah, her gown stuff. This is such an obvious thing to say, but even just down to her hair, because one of my pet peeves in live action movies is when action heroes have a lot of hair in their race and I'm always like, how can you see? What are you doing? You have you're a super chic, cool woman who's like a fighter, but you also have a curtain of hair over the right side of your face, Like, isn't your equilibrium off? That bothers me and I really appreciate that the character who has their hair in their face doesn't need to be able to see in the same conventional way. It really works. It's a great touch. So there's something related to that in the Bitter Work episode where she's teaching ANGG. We were behind in design, you know, as always, I was running the art department, but we were behind. So Ethan Spalding just in the storyboard he made tops rock suit that like suit of armor that she bends onto herself, and he was just thinking like I don't know, like a ninja or something, and I could have this backwards, but I think he had her eyes like a space open around her eyes, and we were like when we finally got to design it, so he kind of designed it in the storyboard that happens sometimes. It looked cool, but we were like, oh, well, she doesn't need that because she doesn't need to see. So we did it more like RoboCop where the opening was around her mouth, you know, so she could breathe, and so we just covered her eyes, which now is like everybody loves these like mix and helmets that just look like they have no eyes or no visor. You know, it's like very in vogue. But what happened was we did the right thing. We fixed it in the design, but the animation studio followed the storyboard because it was so well drawn. They didn't follow the design we forgot when we did retakes, no one remembered, and then we were like, oh, we looked at the designer like why didn't we fix that? So that one got biased. So it's interesting that it was wasn't and then was, and then that's how it ended up. Um, I feel like people can forgive you again. It's very clear that there was just a lot going on and a lot of shuffling and a lot of things to be focused on. To the fact that you guys had to oversee everything and be looking for the smallest to the biggest stuff is mind blowing to me. The storytelling, the introduction of Tough and This is sort of a broad it's more of a statement of appreciation. But I like the way there's conflict in the characters. It's not deep abiding dark tension between characters, but just the sort of way it would be if you were sort of thrown together with people you didn't know. Katara and Socca obviously have their brother sister tension. It's attention that is really well written because it feels like it comes out of having grown up together. But then you have the tension of say, Tough and Qatara, you know, as we first meet tof and I just love and the same with Zuko. That the show really gives a place for all of that stuff to go and grow and develop. It's not like hi, and now we're best friends. Great to meet you, Like, I guess I'm just part of this now. You know. You do have conversations about that, about how to shape the dynamic of introducing Tough to the other characters and what that was gonna look like, you know, and I think back, I do remember broadly it was like Ang Soccer and qatar if now Benny in it for a while. Yeah, they got their stuff or whatever, but you know, they've kind of figured out their dynamic and they're getting along and whatnot. And then yeah, you throw this like not just another person, but someone who's like really has no manners, is just gonna say whatever they want. Like it throws the whole dynamic off in a fun way. And then yeah, she has her interpersonal conflicts with Qatara, and then you know with Ang, especially when she's training him, and then there you know, there's a little crush going on with the soccer later. So it definitely helped like make that group dynamic feel kind of fresh and new moving forward in the series, it's great. I love with all the bending. You know, you kind of take it past, just like firebanding water bending, like with the earth bending, you took it past and started just the idea of metal bending started coming into play. How only that vision come with you guys were crafting top and how she's this person cannot just bend earth but also takes it to like the next level of bending as you push all the elements and you actually ask the question I think the fans asked as they're watching the show. They try to like outsmart the riders and stuff. You guys are constantly doing that to yourselves as you're kind of developing the show, and when did that happen from metal bending? I don't remember the exact timing on that, but we always would try to think of like kung fu movie stuff. Yeah, like shell chamber, like what's that inners circle, locked door technique, like what's likes the technique. So a lot of people would say, oh, what about metal Because in Buddhism or you know, or like different kind of more Eastern philosophies, it's not just the four elements, but it's not just metal and would like that's in certain kinds of philosophies, but there are ones in Eastern philosophy that are four And actually I think it based the tops of the earthbenders helmets. It was it's a sort of spike that's on the top of it. It's like a cube, and then a circle and then a like a cone. And I think I found some architecturaling where it was referencing like the four elements or something, But anyways, I digress. That's to share me the detail. I think we knew, you know, pretty early on that we were going to aim towards that, so we wanted to set it up as a limitation and fire nation being firebenders, they smelt, they make a lot of metal, and if earth venders can't bend metal and fire vendors big technological advantage in the war is all of their metal steam stuff. That's usually how wars happened, right or invasions. It's like someone has some better technology, military technology that no one else has. So it was just kind of like, oh, but then you could have a character like ultimately figure out how to break through that barrier. So great, She's Magna it's so great. Let's talk about Michaela. She played Maan in Book one. Did that stay with you or was it just you know, oh, we remember Michaela. She did a great job. We're auditioning a bunch of people and and it end up working out. Yeah. My recollection is she was great as man. Once we all were like, yes, tough girl, she's gonna be this cute, tiny girl, but she just kind of trash talks people and whatever. We're like, I think our idea was like, oh, it would be so cool to take that cute voice that Michaela did on this totally different kind of character. I mean, I think there were auditions because we had to see like she pulled that off, and she did, and we couldn't imagine tough any other way or as we knew her back then, you guys Jesse Flowers, Yes, for sure. I think we're on studio, like, Jesse, what's your real name? Mikaela Murphy were like, I didn't learn that until years later. I thought her name was Jesse Flowers. I didn't know that was a stage name. I just thought that was her name and I never thought about it. Yeah, we loved her as man that character was so memorable, and we certainly had voice actors. You know, you need people to do multiple voices, like, oh, can you be guard number two? And oh, d can do different sounding voices, you know, like no one will notice if he plays another character. But to my knowledge, that was the first time we took someone who was a kid who just does one voice and just said like, we're just gonna do that over again, like that was a one time character, but we just I want more of that, you know, And we were just such fans. Mag was such a fun character, is just so much personality. So yeah, and Jesse was so young that she by the time we got around to doing Tough, I mean maybe she was a year older, but she actually sounded a little different so or she could just play a little She was like aging into that voice a little bit. So yeah, it was fun. Well you did that with another voice actor later character that came back to a very similar voice that was like not just like he's aging, sounds different, He's aging so good. It's perfect. How has it been for you to get feedback from fans about Tough being blind about inspiring people and having people who are differently able to feel recognized and represented in some way. You know, we always get like great feedback when we're at cons and stuff of like what the characters mean to people, And Tough has meant a lot to everyone, like a lot of different people, not just people who are differently able, like some of the more memorable ones. Was like guys who look really tough to be like Toss my favorite character. Yeah, that was great. You just get that. Like she it kind of transcends like just one type of person. She's very inspiring in different ways to different people. I think in part because she is who she is. She's not making any apologies for it and take it or leave it. You know, I'm so glad you reminded me of that. Like, like you know, we would fight our battles, like when they were making the toys, they wouldn't make a Qatara toy and then the fans like drowned out that toy panel at Comic Con, like where's guitar? Where's It was just always so validating, and like I said, we had quite a battle to convince the network to let us make Tough a girl, And you know, it's just I think they were still clinging onto this idea that they wanted like a boy audience. But Mike and I've always been like when I was a kid, I watched shows with girls all the time, and I was never like it wasn't a problem if it was a good show. I was into the show. And I think I remember those tough looking like muscular teenage kid and we were like, so, who's your favorite character, and he's like tough. We got so many of those, but that one was really memorable, and it's just vindicated. You know. You're just like you could just get the suits to understand, you know, let go. I don't want to tell them I told you so, but yeah, but we told you so. She's so great. She just represents a different type of kiddo too. I mean that's something that she I relate war to her as scrappy and barefoot, and that's me. I'm not this this or this, but I am that, you know. Yeah. I was at an art fair in l A. It was right before the pandemic, and I was with my partner and she was looking at books and stuff, and so I was just kind of like killing some time and then all of a sudden, there was like a zine I don't know if people know what zines are anymore, but it was kind of a zine. It was like a self printed zine and it was on green paper, you know, and you're just there's like you're tired. You've seen a ton of art and all these little booths and there's people wandering around and I just noticed Tough on the cover and I picked it up and it was this whole zine about how tough was like a queer icon for this author of the zine and for people, and it was so cool. I was just like sitting there again that feedback loo. You and a group of people put your heads together and come up with something, you can put it out. You do your best, you put it out there. You think it's something that needs to be brought into existence, and then it takes on a life of its own and it weaves into people's lives and arts and brains in a way you can't predict. And and then I'm standing there reading this zine in like two thousand nineteen. It's just wild. That's wonderful. I'm good. Do you got any more questions before we let our dads get back to her? Amazing? I just love this story of the name talk. I think there's like another episode we again to just like breakdown where you came up with these names, because they're all interesting names, from Top to Zuko to Zula to Qatara, So like where do they come from? How did you muster them up? But that's for another conversation. Should we talk about the design? Please? Yeah? Please? You know, by this point we're into season two, we had Angela song Mueller doing character designs. Aaron Alexevitch had done a bunch of character designs on season one. I would still either do, like sometimes a concept for a character, or I would like, if there was a special character like this, I would like I want to design it, you know, like the Top is like part of the group, like I want to do it. So yeah, I remember being as always insanely behind in my work, behind schedule, everybody's waiting for my designs, deadlines whizzing past my head every hour. But I always ask some artists at Avatar Studios how to pronounce this artist's name as Japanese artist. They've tried to teach me like and I still can't do it. So I'm gonna just butcher it. I'm sorry this is the wrong way to say it, but that is how all of my like American animation friends, there are a lot of them say it WRONGA Murada it's r A N G E. But toss design was inspired by Ronny Murata's work did like Blue Submarine six designs just absolutely incredible. So yeah, it was really fun. And I had gone to the Brand Library in Glendale has an incredible art book collection. You can't check the stuff out, but you can go research stuff there. And I had done a lot of research into different traditional clothing around the different ethnic groups in China, and that's where I came up with toughs like the costume that you think of, the one with like pom poms in her hair and stuff, not the kind of fancier garb that her parents make her wear. So yeah, it was really fun to do that design. And yeah, I was thinking about the hair in the eyes Janet, I was trying to think of ways to this might sound maybe you've never thought of it, but like I was trying to think of ways to make her seem blind in animation. It's so hard. I mean those kind of subtleties you know, an actor on screen could study blind people or do to the Hollywood version, which is probably not very realistic, but in the animation that like it's hard to get that kind of thing. So we did stuff like I gave her eyes a kind of soft like her iris is. Her pupils aren't black, they're like a soft, kind of cloudy look, and she doesn't have highlights on her eyes. And we made rules that she never blinks. They might have had her blink a couple of times slips through, but we tried to never have her blink. And I had a rule that her irises don't look quotes around, look, they don't look left or right, or up or down. They just stay fixed forward as much as possible. And then we made notes for the storyboard artists and the animators that try not to have her face people when she talks to them. She's not trying to make eye contact. She sees them, she knows where they are, and if anything, we would have her turn her ear towards them. And so that stuff kind of helps because it was not only were we trying to like make this character seem blind, but we wanted to make her seem blind, yet she could see, she knew where everything was. Probably better than people relying on the site. So that's an extra challenge, like an extra layer of subtlety. But those things I think they kind of helped. It helped. They do give her a different body language and you kind of get the idea. Yeah, I grew up around a wonderful blind woman who was kind of a parental figure to me, and all of the things you just described I recognized immediately, Like she absolutely would turn her ear to interact and her eyes looked just like that. So it's different for different folks and the way that they have or don't have the abilities that they have. But I thought you nailed it. It's wonderful and all of that place. I love the way she fights. I'm a big Daredevil fan comics before all the live action, the way he kind of fights and how he can so nearly navigate a room, and how you depicted that with top I was totally geeking out, Oh man, coming up with like visualizing tough vision in two D animation, Like that's tough vision if you were doing CG. Like if you're doing three D animation, I'm not saying to be easy, it would be pretty easy. You can just have like a shock wave like ripple through like ambient lit models, because that was the whole idea is there's what we were trying to show. There's no lighting, it's just forms. It's just like an ambient lit thing, and then there's these chock waves going through it. What I liked was it, even though that's her specific way of seeing, it showed what Mike and I we're trying to do with bending in that it's not magic in a sense that like, oh, you could just magic wand something over there across a river. Your che has to radiate from you and it gets weaker as it goes out, like a sort of sound wave, like a shock wave. So it was kind of cool to visualize that, but boy was it a pain in the book. You really gave yourself another thing just put on top of the list of challenges of making the show. Well, we are going to let our dads get back to work working on I didn't even leave space for you to feel like you had to feel anything in that time. I just made Yeah, very cool feature film and feature films really hard, fabulous. That's a beautiful tidbit. And thank you so much for talking with us about tough and getting us really in the Tough zone for the remainder of book two. It's been great and I've learned so much about her inception that i didn't know about, So this has been fantags stick. Thank you both again, Thank you guys, Thanks thanks for having us. She's so good and we love Michaela. Thanks for listening to Avatar Brave New Elements and make sure to subscribe and please leave us a review. It really helps the podcast so much and me and Janet really appreciate it. Next week, we are so excited to finally be talking to the voice and wonderful human being behind Tough herself, MICHAELA. Joe Murphy, you might also know as Jesse Flowers. You can follow me on social media at the j V Club on Instagram and at Janet Varney on Twitter, and I'm at Dante Bosco on both of those. Well, see you next Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, friends, benders and non benders alike. Welcome to Braving the Elements, Nickelodeon's podcast about all things Avatar verse. I'm Janet Varney and I'm Dante Bosco, and we're so psucked to finally be at this point of Avatar the Last Airbender Varney. Since the podcast first came out into the world, we've been hearing from fans about how much they love book one, but how excited they were for us to get into the introduction of Tough bay Ful Faye Fong, Don't I know what my friend. So last week we finally got to meet the blind bandit herself in the wrestling ring and talk about what a great episode that was to bring this introduction to Tough Beyond what we see in this want I acknowledge that that's absolutely a meeting of a sort with Top, but to see her in her full glory, just beating the crap out of some dudes, very satisfying, very very cool episode and such a great character. Yeah. But since Top was such a massive force in the Avatar versus fandom, we thought it might be cool to bring in a couple of people who were there when Top was first conceptualized because they were the people who created her. That's right, buddy, Way back in the early odds, Mighty Martino and Brian Can Let's go, created a powerful earth Bender, one more powerful than anyone we've seen before, one who learned how to earth bend from the world's first earth Benders themselves, the Badroom Alls, one who could strike fear in the hearts of even the most powerful benders, and one who didn't see the world in quite the same way as the rest of say Team Avatar. So let's once again welcome our two dads aka Brike to chat with us a little bit more about the force of name. That is tough. I don't know what I was doing, their dads, but I certainly did it. You did it? You did great? Did I got into wrestler announcer mode? Is what happened? That's what I really did. Oh, that's such a great episode. And yeah, the Boulder, I mean the boulder that's inspired by the rock right. You know, I'm not hitting this, I don't think in the past, but I do have a history of being a fan of the w W. E uh, not so much anymore when I was a kid. Yes, we all know when I was a kid. That's what the World Wildlife Fund properly stepped in and you know, probably was the only people who have ever been able to uh win a legal battle with Vince Witman. But that's probably for another podcast, that documentary. It might be a little slow moving, but I'm into it. Yeah, uh so, yes, So when I was a kid, super inter wrestling, that was the whole Cogan, Roddy Already, Piper Days, Andre the Giant, all those, all those great wrestlers. Side no favorite wrestler that time. Oh at that time, that era was, I mean it was kids. I think Hull Cogan, you know, in retrospect, that was Jimmie super Fast, he was continue and I knew who Mr. T was. That's my contribution. And then I went to high school, stopped watching wrestling. I went to college the nineties, that era, didn't know anything about it. Then in early l A days, me my friend Kurt and I think we roped Brian into it. Eventually for some reason, you know that turn on the TV one night and it started brought back the night, Yeah, Monday at raw like it was like the resurgence, and it was the early era of the rock and I was hooked again The Rock. I don't have any fan crushes. The Rock is my biggest fan crush. Now, Kurt work you know on heards documentary stunt man. So Kurt. Incidentally, he does have a Avatar connection because he directed the Avatar Spirits documentary years ago, but did not executive produce. No, he did not have a documentary. And The Rock is not the voice of the Boulder. This was before he was like The Rock as we know him now, but he was definitely on that trajectory and sensing this character was modeled after him. We tried to get him to do the voice, but he was not doing television at the time. That's what his agents told us. But we got the also from that era mc foley, who wrestled with The Rock many many times, who was also awesome and channeled. It was like a mc foley Rock mashup, Like yeah, it was like him doing an impression of his bunny, you know. It was it was funny. Did he come in? Did you? Was he with the gang? Did he come in by himself? Like did you get to kind of shake his hand and stuff? I think we met him remotely. I think he was not in l a So I definitely don't remember meeting him in person, but if we said hello over the web, well, it's such a great conceit. In introducing Tough that way, was that something you knew from the very beginning as far as how you wanted to bring her into the show, I was always like, yes, wrestling, this is what we gotta do. Well, we get back way up because Tough wasn't just Mike and I creating or you know, it was a big group effort. But her origins go all the way very early on. So when Mike and I did the Development Bible in two thousand two, we knew like, oh, Ang will need a teacher for each element, and who was his teacher going to be? And you know, sweet, we just knew, oh, he'll meet because Qatar is not going to be a master, so they'll have to travel to the Northern Water tribe to meet a master. We didn't really know who that would be. We just knew to be a master up there. And then we had the idea that his earthending teacher would be a kid. And Mike came up with a name Tough in two. Such a cool name, by the way, such a cool name, and we wrote that character into like the season two section of the Bible, like kind of overview, and look, some things from that overview made it in. Some things didn't. A lot of things that we went back and read it, and some of our original we just kind of had to like flesh out an entire three seasons, like in a couple of days or something, and so some of the ideas are kind of wacky, but some stuff, it's pretty interesting when we go back and look at those old documents. Some stuff made it in. So anyways, Tough was there. Tough was a boy, So we had conceived Tough as a teenage boy who was essentially it's who Bowlin ended up being. That was much more the kind of character we had in mind. He was gonna be like cuddly jock, kind of goofy, sweet but jockey, kind of like meathead, you know, like like a kid in like a character of the Rock would play. Yeah, maybe Rock as a teenager, you know. And so that was just in our heads for a long time. I've said before, like by the time we got to season two, Mike and I have been working on the show for like three years. So a lot of that stuff oh, you know like this was going to come. You know, we knew that like O Prince Zuko as a sister, and we just were like really set on Tops void. But it was Areny has who was like, you know, I think we should make Top a girl. And it's not that Mike and I were like we don't want girl characters. It's just that we were so used to the idea that we had had for all these years that we were like, I don't. I mean, you know, like I just got this character in my head. And we actually see evidence of who that character would have been in the test pilot that we did, the old opening where the four Benders do the elements in front of the backdrop. The earth Bender was a prototype design I did for what I was thinking of for Tops. So again, it was like the Avatar equivalent of like a linebacker in high school. You know, like he's a teenager, but he's like a really big kid. He had just like big chest, And it was one of those things. I used that test pilot as a test. I was like testing out designs, testing out our aisles and stuff. So it wasn't like setting Stone, but I was like, oh, well, like that's who this kid will be, and then that character sort of evolved into the one that's in the opening, and I think that one is more of like an adult, and then that one kind of looks like the bolder right a little bit. Anyways, that was how we thought of it. Well, do you remember brand I could be totally wrong about this, but my memory was that he was still meant to be a blind Earthbender though for sure. Yeah, that it was like teenage big jockey dude, but sweet and goofy blind. Yeah, we always had that idea. And then there was, you know, the really neat synchronicity when we picked Southern pretty Mantis, this rare style for Tough, and we met with seafood Man and well and he was like, you know that the legend is this style was created by a blind woman. And we were like, we had no idea. It was just one of those cool secret disease. But yeah, we knew Tough was blind. And I remember he wasn't trying to come up with like some like love triangle, like, oh, it'll be fun to have a because it's just a different energy. I think we need that energy. Yeah, instead of three boys in the group at that time, and he convinced us. He made a really good case for it, and then we were on board. We're like, you know what, yeah, and then I was like, dude, she should be tiny. So I went from you know, I had this idea of this big linebacker and I was like, I want her even for her age. She looks really young, like she's about as age, but she should just be tiny. And then that's where all the wit the wrestler stuff came, because we really wanted to contrast like she's just this little kid, you know, and he's a and a girl, and you get to play against sort of expectations and stereotypes and stuff. Yeah, I think we had the idea that related to the wrestling part. It wasn't that it was going to be a wrestling per se, but it was that I think we had the idea that they were going to meet her in kind of an underground bending type of environment. And then I probably slapped on the wrestling stuff later, I don't remember. It makes sense that we had a much harder time, you know, Aaron convinced Mike and I, but we had a much harder time convincing the network to allow to be a girl there was resistance, but obviously we won that argument and got to make tough tough. No. I love it because you know, Earth is kind of a masculine kind of like element to a degree in the way earth bending, moving mountains, and then you have the small girl doing it, which is the most powerful one is really and she's still quite masculine and beautifully so, you know, and beautifully so yeah, or just androgynous, you know that just sort of androgyns. Yeah, yeah, masculin is just an energy, you know, It's like it's just an energy. Feminine and energy, mascos and energy. You balance these things. Everybody has these things in them and to different degrees and different expressions. And I am forever grateful to Aaron for really sticking to his guns on that because it was absolutely the right call. And then we got to do Bolin, So it was like we got to do that character that had been rattling around in our heads for years and they rattled around even longer. But so it's like it's cool, you know, we've still got to use that idea and kind of bring that character to life. Oh absolutely, And I mean I love the character of Bullen so much in the legend of Cora. I know many of us are very glad that that you were able to bring him to life. Now, getting back to when we first meet Tough, we see her running and giggling, which is funny because she is very childlike and you know the sort of giggling. You really don't necessarily put those things together because she doesn't have that, and it's not how we ultimately no Tough later on her and her outfit and because she's wearing like parents clothes that her parents make her wear. Yeah, her gown stuff. This is such an obvious thing to say, but even just down to her hair, because one of my pet peeves in live action movies is when action heroes have a lot of hair in their race and I'm always like, how can you see? What are you doing? You have you're a super chic, cool woman who's like a fighter, but you also have a curtain of hair over the right side of your face, Like, isn't your equilibrium off? That bothers me and I really appreciate that the character who has their hair in their face doesn't need to be able to see in the same conventional way. It really works. It's a great touch. So there's something related to that in the Bitter Work episode where she's teaching ANGG. We were behind in design, you know, as always, I was running the art department, but we were behind. So Ethan Spalding just in the storyboard he made tops rock suit that like suit of armor that she bends onto herself, and he was just thinking like I don't know, like a ninja or something, and I could have this backwards, but I think he had her eyes like a space open around her eyes, and we were like when we finally got to design it, so he kind of designed it in the storyboard that happens sometimes. It looked cool, but we were like, oh, well, she doesn't need that because she doesn't need to see. So we did it more like RoboCop where the opening was around her mouth, you know, so she could breathe, and so we just covered her eyes, which now is like everybody loves these like mix and helmets that just look like they have no eyes or no visor. You know, it's like very in vogue. But what happened was we did the right thing. We fixed it in the design, but the animation studio followed the storyboard because it was so well drawn. They didn't follow the design we forgot when we did retakes, no one remembered, and then we were like, oh, we looked at the designer like why didn't we fix that? So that one got biased. So it's interesting that it was wasn't and then was, and then that's how it ended up. Um, I feel like people can forgive you again. It's very clear that there was just a lot going on and a lot of shuffling and a lot of things to be focused on. To the fact that you guys had to oversee everything and be looking for the smallest to the biggest stuff is mind blowing to me. The storytelling, the introduction of Tough and This is sort of a broad it's more of a statement of appreciation. But I like the way there's conflict in the characters. It's not deep abiding dark tension between characters, but just the sort of way it would be if you were sort of thrown together with people you didn't know. Katara and Socca obviously have their brother sister tension. It's attention that is really well written because it feels like it comes out of having grown up together. But then you have the tension of say, Tough and Qatara, you know, as we first meet tof and I just love and the same with Zuko. That the show really gives a place for all of that stuff to go and grow and develop. It's not like hi, and now we're best friends. Great to meet you, Like, I guess I'm just part of this now. You know. You do have conversations about that, about how to shape the dynamic of introducing Tough to the other characters and what that was gonna look like, you know, and I think back, I do remember broadly it was like Ang Soccer and qatar if now Benny in it for a while. Yeah, they got their stuff or whatever, but you know, they've kind of figured out their dynamic and they're getting along and whatnot. And then yeah, you throw this like not just another person, but someone who's like really has no manners, is just gonna say whatever they want. Like it throws the whole dynamic off in a fun way. And then yeah, she has her interpersonal conflicts with Qatara, and then you know with Ang, especially when she's training him, and then there you know, there's a little crush going on with the soccer later. So it definitely helped like make that group dynamic feel kind of fresh and new moving forward in the series, it's great. I love with all the bending. You know, you kind of take it past, just like firebanding water bending, like with the earth bending, you took it past and started just the idea of metal bending started coming into play. How only that vision come with you guys were crafting top and how she's this person cannot just bend earth but also takes it to like the next level of bending as you push all the elements and you actually ask the question I think the fans asked as they're watching the show. They try to like outsmart the riders and stuff. You guys are constantly doing that to yourselves as you're kind of developing the show, and when did that happen from metal bending? I don't remember the exact timing on that, but we always would try to think of like kung fu movie stuff. Yeah, like shell chamber, like what's that inners circle, locked door technique, like what's likes the technique. So a lot of people would say, oh, what about metal Because in Buddhism or you know, or like different kind of more Eastern philosophies, it's not just the four elements, but it's not just metal and would like that's in certain kinds of philosophies, but there are ones in Eastern philosophy that are four And actually I think it based the tops of the earthbenders helmets. It was it's a sort of spike that's on the top of it. It's like a cube, and then a circle and then a like a cone. And I think I found some architecturaling where it was referencing like the four elements or something, But anyways, I digress. That's to share me the detail. I think we knew, you know, pretty early on that we were going to aim towards that, so we wanted to set it up as a limitation and fire nation being firebenders, they smelt, they make a lot of metal, and if earth venders can't bend metal and fire vendors big technological advantage in the war is all of their metal steam stuff. That's usually how wars happened, right or invasions. It's like someone has some better technology, military technology that no one else has. So it was just kind of like, oh, but then you could have a character like ultimately figure out how to break through that barrier. So great, She's Magna it's so great. Let's talk about Michaela. She played Maan in Book one. Did that stay with you or was it just you know, oh, we remember Michaela. She did a great job. We're auditioning a bunch of people and and it end up working out. Yeah. My recollection is she was great as man. Once we all were like, yes, tough girl, she's gonna be this cute, tiny girl, but she just kind of trash talks people and whatever. We're like, I think our idea was like, oh, it would be so cool to take that cute voice that Michaela did on this totally different kind of character. I mean, I think there were auditions because we had to see like she pulled that off, and she did, and we couldn't imagine tough any other way or as we knew her back then, you guys Jesse Flowers, Yes, for sure. I think we're on studio, like, Jesse, what's your real name? Mikaela Murphy were like, I didn't learn that until years later. I thought her name was Jesse Flowers. I didn't know that was a stage name. I just thought that was her name and I never thought about it. Yeah, we loved her as man that character was so memorable, and we certainly had voice actors. You know, you need people to do multiple voices, like, oh, can you be guard number two? And oh, d can do different sounding voices, you know, like no one will notice if he plays another character. But to my knowledge, that was the first time we took someone who was a kid who just does one voice and just said like, we're just gonna do that over again, like that was a one time character, but we just I want more of that, you know, And we were just such fans. Mag was such a fun character, is just so much personality. So yeah, and Jesse was so young that she by the time we got around to doing Tough, I mean maybe she was a year older, but she actually sounded a little different so or she could just play a little She was like aging into that voice a little bit. So yeah, it was fun. Well you did that with another voice actor later character that came back to a very similar voice that was like not just like he's aging, sounds different, He's aging so good. It's perfect. How has it been for you to get feedback from fans about Tough being blind about inspiring people and having people who are differently able to feel recognized and represented in some way. You know, we always get like great feedback when we're at cons and stuff of like what the characters mean to people, And Tough has meant a lot to everyone, like a lot of different people, not just people who are differently able, like some of the more memorable ones. Was like guys who look really tough to be like Toss my favorite character. Yeah, that was great. You just get that. Like she it kind of transcends like just one type of person. She's very inspiring in different ways to different people. I think in part because she is who she is. She's not making any apologies for it and take it or leave it. You know, I'm so glad you reminded me of that. Like, like you know, we would fight our battles, like when they were making the toys, they wouldn't make a Qatara toy and then the fans like drowned out that toy panel at Comic Con, like where's guitar? Where's It was just always so validating, and like I said, we had quite a battle to convince the network to let us make Tough a girl, And you know, it's just I think they were still clinging onto this idea that they wanted like a boy audience. But Mike and I've always been like when I was a kid, I watched shows with girls all the time, and I was never like it wasn't a problem if it was a good show. I was into the show. And I think I remember those tough looking like muscular teenage kid and we were like, so, who's your favorite character, and he's like tough. We got so many of those, but that one was really memorable, and it's just vindicated. You know. You're just like you could just get the suits to understand, you know, let go. I don't want to tell them I told you so, but yeah, but we told you so. She's so great. She just represents a different type of kiddo too. I mean that's something that she I relate war to her as scrappy and barefoot, and that's me. I'm not this this or this, but I am that, you know. Yeah. I was at an art fair in l A. It was right before the pandemic, and I was with my partner and she was looking at books and stuff, and so I was just kind of like killing some time and then all of a sudden, there was like a zine I don't know if people know what zines are anymore, but it was kind of a zine. It was like a self printed zine and it was on green paper, you know, and you're just there's like you're tired. You've seen a ton of art and all these little booths and there's people wandering around and I just noticed Tough on the cover and I picked it up and it was this whole zine about how tough was like a queer icon for this author of the zine and for people, and it was so cool. I was just like sitting there again that feedback loo. You and a group of people put your heads together and come up with something, you can put it out. You do your best, you put it out there. You think it's something that needs to be brought into existence, and then it takes on a life of its own and it weaves into people's lives and arts and brains in a way you can't predict. And and then I'm standing there reading this zine in like two thousand nineteen. It's just wild. That's wonderful. I'm good. Do you got any more questions before we let our dads get back to her? Amazing? I just love this story of the name talk. I think there's like another episode we again to just like breakdown where you came up with these names, because they're all interesting names, from Top to Zuko to Zula to Qatara, So like where do they come from? How did you muster them up? But that's for another conversation. Should we talk about the design? Please? Yeah? Please? You know, by this point we're into season two, we had Angela song Mueller doing character designs. Aaron Alexevitch had done a bunch of character designs on season one. I would still either do, like sometimes a concept for a character, or I would like, if there was a special character like this, I would like I want to design it, you know, like the Top is like part of the group, like I want to do it. So yeah, I remember being as always insanely behind in my work, behind schedule, everybody's waiting for my designs, deadlines whizzing past my head every hour. But I always ask some artists at Avatar Studios how to pronounce this artist's name as Japanese artist. They've tried to teach me like and I still can't do it. So I'm gonna just butcher it. I'm sorry this is the wrong way to say it, but that is how all of my like American animation friends, there are a lot of them say it WRONGA Murada it's r A N G E. But toss design was inspired by Ronny Murata's work did like Blue Submarine six designs just absolutely incredible. So yeah, it was really fun. And I had gone to the Brand Library in Glendale has an incredible art book collection. You can't check the stuff out, but you can go research stuff there. And I had done a lot of research into different traditional clothing around the different ethnic groups in China, and that's where I came up with toughs like the costume that you think of, the one with like pom poms in her hair and stuff, not the kind of fancier garb that her parents make her wear. So yeah, it was really fun to do that design. And yeah, I was thinking about the hair in the eyes Janet, I was trying to think of ways to this might sound maybe you've never thought of it, but like I was trying to think of ways to make her seem blind in animation. It's so hard. I mean those kind of subtleties you know, an actor on screen could study blind people or do to the Hollywood version, which is probably not very realistic, but in the animation that like it's hard to get that kind of thing. So we did stuff like I gave her eyes a kind of soft like her iris is. Her pupils aren't black, they're like a soft, kind of cloudy look, and she doesn't have highlights on her eyes. And we made rules that she never blinks. They might have had her blink a couple of times slips through, but we tried to never have her blink. And I had a rule that her irises don't look quotes around, look, they don't look left or right, or up or down. They just stay fixed forward as much as possible. And then we made notes for the storyboard artists and the animators that try not to have her face people when she talks to them. She's not trying to make eye contact. She sees them, she knows where they are, and if anything, we would have her turn her ear towards them. And so that stuff kind of helps because it was not only were we trying to like make this character seem blind, but we wanted to make her seem blind, yet she could see, she knew where everything was. Probably better than people relying on the site. So that's an extra challenge, like an extra layer of subtlety. But those things I think they kind of helped. It helped. They do give her a different body language and you kind of get the idea. Yeah, I grew up around a wonderful blind woman who was kind of a parental figure to me, and all of the things you just described I recognized immediately, Like she absolutely would turn her ear to interact and her eyes looked just like that. So it's different for different folks and the way that they have or don't have the abilities that they have. But I thought you nailed it. It's wonderful and all of that place. I love the way she fights. I'm a big Daredevil fan comics before all the live action, the way he kind of fights and how he can so nearly navigate a room, and how you depicted that with top I was totally geeking out, Oh man, coming up with like visualizing tough vision in two D animation, Like that's tough vision if you were doing CG. Like if you're doing three D animation, I'm not saying to be easy, it would be pretty easy. You can just have like a shock wave like ripple through like ambient lit models, because that was the whole idea is there's what we were trying to show. There's no lighting, it's just forms. It's just like an ambient lit thing, and then there's these chock waves going through it. What I liked was it, even though that's her specific way of seeing, it showed what Mike and I we're trying to do with bending in that it's not magic in a sense that like, oh, you could just magic wand something over there across a river. Your che has to radiate from you and it gets weaker as it goes out, like a sort of sound wave, like a shock wave. So it was kind of cool to visualize that, but boy was it a pain in the book. You really gave yourself another thing just put on top of the list of challenges of making the show. Well, we are going to let our dads get back to work working on I didn't even leave space for you to feel like you had to feel anything in that time. I just made Yeah, very cool feature film and feature films really hard, fabulous. That's a beautiful tidbit. And thank you so much for talking with us about tough and getting us really in the Tough zone for the remainder of book two. It's been great and I've learned so much about her inception that i didn't know about, So this has been fantags stick. Thank you both again, Thank you guys, Thanks thanks for having us. She's so good and we love Michaela. Thanks for listening to Avatar Brave New Elements and make sure to subscribe and please leave us a review. It really helps the podcast so much and me and Janet really appreciate it. Next week, we are so excited to finally be talking to the voice and wonderful human being behind Tough herself, MICHAELA. Joe Murphy, you might also know as Jesse Flowers. You can follow me on social media at the j V Club on Instagram and at Janet Varney on Twitter, and I'm at Dante Bosco on both of those. Well, see you next Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.