Hello, friends, benders and non benders alike. I'm Janet Varney and I'm Dante Bosco and this is Braving the Elements, Nickelodeon's podcast about all things Avatar Verse. And we were so excited, weren't we, Buddy to have the awesome Jason man Zukas on board to talk about the Northern Air Temple with us last week. He was amazing, great conversation. However, we realized we were talking so much about the big themes of the episode in the series in general, which Jason had so many great thoughts about, that we didn't really spend that much time on the things that make that episode and Avatar in general so special, all the machines and the gadgets and stuff like Jason mentioned that tips its hand towards where we go in the core era. That's right. We really steered clear of that stuff because we were getting into some heavy, deep emotional themes, which as you know, is always a thrill for me. We kind of skimmed over that stuff, so we thought, why not have a conversation that does celebrate some of the marvelous gadgetry and inventions of not just the Mechanist, but maybe even some of the other aspects of other episodes of Book one of Avatar. Then it became like, if you want to talk about stuff like that, who do you even ask? Is there such a person that it would even be worth talking to? And then we were like, oh, yes there is, and his name is one of my favorite people, Adam Savage. Hello, welcome. It's actually no one better in the world to talk to about these things than Adam Savage. I am so excited to see. We were describing your workshop in the background, and it really is one of those things that everything is just far away enough that anything could be anything. There's slots of things and stacks and piles. It's will deal you guys. Yeah, Adam Right now, we're looking at his background and it looks like the background of a mad science is genius. A lot of tools. I feel like I would lose a finger on every device. Actually, early on in COVID, I almost lost a finger here in the shop. Oh, I can't believe you just did that. And in the episode that we just recapped with Jason, the mechanist actually has lost three of the fingers on one of his hands. The glee with which the mechanist pops those fingers off and hurls them at soccer. Really tells you that sometimes you're not wrong when you think that a scientist isn't The mechanists for sure would have been a part of the MythBusters crew easily, absolutely, And also I feel like King Boomy, he would have been the guy who created a bunch of stuff to try to fool the MythBusters. He would be like, they're playful Nemesis. The playful thing is a real specific aspect of him that I really dug because there's a way in which Avatar always has so many different games in each episode, but one that they never lose sight of is what would two nine year olds think of this world? Place forest? There's just so much freaking joy of Like you see all these slides, Someone's going to ride them by the end of the episode. Yes, if I were a kid watching that show, I would be like, oh, please put me inside there, Put me inside there, because I want to get on those slides and just scoot all over town. Right. Every time and exercises any of his power, there's a joy to it that is like if you gave a nine year old superpowers, that would be the look on their face. Yes, absolutely, you've got to open your brain to the possibilities a package sending system the world's greatest super slide to me, you're a mad genius. Yeah. I do love that point you said at him, because we've always discuss these heavy themes that go on in the episod, including this episode, whether it be genocide or abuse. But like you said, they never forget that they're also looking at it. If the nine year old watching this cartoon is that nine year old? Are they enjoying it? And sometimes we get swept up in that, like in a recent episode that we watched and call someone master poop head, And sometimes the moment's really stand out to you where you're like, oh, that's right. I can easily analyze this as if it were career guard. Yet at the end of the day, I may hear a little farting sound or someone might be called master poop head. You can't keep us here, let us sleep, let us leave. We're in serious trouble. This guy is nuts. Speaking of how many ways it can be analyzed, I wanted to let you know, and I'm not sure if you did know that at wet a workshop down in Welling To New Zealand, which is an extended part of my family. There is a weekly meet up to discuss Avatar the Las Airbender. I didn't want that. I love that. I will say that rings true for me because I was at Hobbiton and UH person came up to me and sort of like tapped me lightly on the shoulder and then shyly lifted up their leg and there was this amazing Earthbender symbol on their leg and they were like, I just wanted you to know that an earth Bender works at Hobbiton, and I was like, of course. It's always crazy when the tattoos come out, because you know you're part of one of those projects that have impacted somebody so much that they were going to put ink on their body for the rest of their life to represent that. One of the things that I love, and I think a really good reason to have you on the show is that you, as we talk about these things that stretch across these age spans that appeal to both kids and adults, you are one of those people who in life have a grown up job that kid kids are like, if that's what growing up looks like, I'm good. So many kids are like, you just get to do those voices and that's your job, and we're like, yeah, I believe it or not, we kind of get to do that. And you are a sterling in the flesh example of somebody that what you do appeals to so many different age groups. Do you have a lot of young people who come up and go, I want to be like you when I grow up, But do I have to grow up? Because it feels like I wouldn't have to. I said this in the book that I wrote a couple of years ago, that I consider myself a human permission slip to do the weird stuff you want to do. Uh. And you guys both know that the different projects that you work on have different people that are activated by those, So there's all these different demographics that come to you based on the project. That's one of the reasons I think we all like doing cons too, is that one on one engagement where you really feel like you see, like when I come back from a con, I feel that the world is in good hands for later on. Right at any day i'm doing a CON, I usually don't get to sleep until two or three in the morning because I'm just so wired from that conversation. It's very different than someone tweeting at you than for them to be standing right in front of you explaining why this meant so much to them. Totally. I love that you invited me to talk about the mechanics and the mechanicals of Avatar. I grew up on the Super Friends, right. I think that was animated on six is right, like four frames per second. It was super low as animation and the physics were barely there, and still we were like, oh every Saturday morning. You know. One of the things I like to point out about my favorite filmmakers is that they never leave you confused by what's happening. For instance, nobody's better than Spielberg at an action sequence because you never are in doubt about where you are in physical space. And Felony is mind blowing about doing that, about making the physics of the fights feel really even the way air wraps around an opponent when he's fighting jet. They don't have to be as right as they are, but boy is it build like a much more cohesive and deep world because they do actually cohere. Those physics feel right when they happen. I love that you said that because that is something that anybody who has been kind of keeping up with a podcast along the way knows that was such a huge thing for Mike and Brian. Like, we had an episode with Cfukisu and with Brian Kinnetsko, one of the creators. Cfukisu is the fight choreographer and the martial arts expert for both series, and they really talked about the physics. I think they come from that same background of creating a world that has rules, establishing that and then not breaking them. And you're right, that grounds us all into, ironically, the suspension of disbelief. What allows us to suspend our disbelief is the specific, if magical rules so you don't get lost, so you're not like, well wait a minute, I just thought, but I didn't know you come on, you know. And they really paid attention to that, and they wanted it the breath to come from the body and the movements to be very physical. They're great at that. Actually, there's one thing that I get guilty of all the time, which a lot of Avatar fans tell me, like, don't science Avatar. And guess what we're doing today, you guys, We're gonna science Avatar. Just a little bit Harry Potter start with none of it's real, but it's based on these real elements that we are aware of, and whoever can do it in a way that doesn't distract us from the storytelling is really doing it. Really great. We're not supposed to science Avatar, but then we get an episode like the Northern Air Temple. Well, I mean, if they want to start talking about the smell of rotten eggs and natural gas, we are going to science that, thank you very much. It files yes, Oh, don't worry. That experiments old and that egg was just part of last week's lunch. A weak old egg. Smell quick find that egg. The other thing is like often when people say don't science something, they mean don't yuck my yum, don't harsh my mellow. I couldn't do that. But I've noticed as I watch Airbender, it doesn't seem like they're holding any specific type of kung fu movie style either. There are scenes that are like Luscia type scenes. There are scenes that are much more knocked down, drag out, and there's also within each action sequence of like multiple steps. I mean, so many episodes are like Rube Goldberg machines in terms of how the final thing ends up happening. Oh, absolutely, And my friend, I'm going to send you the app with Brian and Si Fukis that has all the details on martial arts styles. But also in all that the emotion still comes across, right, There's still within that lots of beats of emotionality that I'm always surprised by, Like when Ang is rolling his back over the stone and his battle with his old friend the earth Bender. The slow motion and Ang's fear at that moment, it just feels so narratively robust. I'm all the way and involved with the characters every time I turn on an episode like that. Well, you mentioned Spielberg. Where there other fictional worlds that you felt like as a younger person, you were really transfixed by the kind of mechanics of the world. I knew you have a relationship to Germo del Toro, and I will say that's another person where you feel the time and care they feel the time and care of Peter Jackson? Were there people like that that you were idolizing as a young person. Alien came out when I was fourteen, and I was too afraid to go see it in the theater. And I was right. I would have run screaming from the theater. But my dad was an artist and my sister was an artist, and they had seen it, and I asked them both to draw the alien for me, and they both drew totally different pictures, which I was like, what is this movie that two artists can come up with competing views? And then I read the David Allen Foster novelization and I obsessed over the blue color aesthetic of alien that really lived in. These are spacesuits that aren't romantic at all. They're like mud boots, and the characters are just like working class astronautics. Back, we're just doing this thing. Yeah, plumbers, pause for one second. One of the listeners out there, don't miss the fact that when Adam watched Aliens is the time where you can't go on the internet go does that alien look like? He asked someone to people to draw the picture that just doesn't go on the day. Did you see that thing? Can you draw me a picture of it? That would not enter anyone's mind today. They would just go straight to the Internet and Google and hit images. So you're reminding me. I built my first lightsaber from going to the Magic of the Myth exhibition at your Winding Arts Center here in three and I did sketches of a lightsaber, and I came back to Jamie's shop and I lathed myself a lightsaber based on those sketches, and I still have the lightsaber. But then you go to a con right and you see someone cosplaying a bender, for example. They are doing that even in the era of super sophisticated gaming and sophisticated effects that you see in films. At the end of the day, someone comes up and they've made their own Qatara dress and outfit, and then they've got attached to their wrists fishing line with blue fabric, and then you turn on a fan and Katara's water bending and that is super analog. And those are just as wonderful of costumes as the person who looks exactly like a stormtrooper or the person who has all kinds of beeps and boops coming out of them because they've got like a whole system wired inside their outfit. We still feel so much joy when we see people handcraft things to symbolize magic in some way. Right. The other part of that janet is that when you ask them to bend, they'll hit a pose. I haven't encountered anyone who couldn't nail it, and they nail it because the creatives of the show are thinking air and water. These are weapons just as much as something they might hold in their hand, and we feel that as the audience, we feel like we can know how to what we're gonna do to bend water or air. We under stand the physical motion that's been designed and baked in. I don't know how the creatives make it so detailed that we understand that it's real. It feels like it's tapping right into a nine year old brain. So story about tree houses. Speaking of the episode of Jet, because I love the hideout. I love all that stuff, this stuff back to the hideout. You guys have a hideout. You want to see it? Yes, we want to see it. We're here where there's nothing here? Hold this? Why? What's this too? I'll get up on my own. What do you think about Jet? Real quick, Adam. Just like the actual character of Jet, the actual character, he's a jerk. There have been a lot of conversations about people trying to change the bad boy, polarizing character and all of Avatar airbender. Don't get me wrong, I understand why he's dreamy, but he's also a jerk. Then that's what I want. Platforms, all the deeply ingrained in a lot of us, just that's the ideal way to live. What if we're like, oh, a safe, perfect eden where we're safe from predators, they might make a little bit of sense that somewhere in our body we're like, yes, treehouse, Yes, I think you unlocked it. I think you unlocked our inner tribal animal instinct to live in trees. And seeing Jet with his hooks and stuff, we see two different modes of getting through treetops, as you would see a monkey do with ang and his air bending and his ability to do it that way, and then Jet, who doesn't even have bending powers, but who can still move in a completely sophisticated, totally effortless way through the treetops. It is so enviable. I almost envy that more than certain other types of bending or other moments in bending. It Just give me Jets hooks. They're pretty powerful. Since I was a young can I question those hook swords? Most swords have no hooks, So if they were that powerful, more swords to be made with hooks right, So a sword is differentially heated, so it's got a softer middle and harder edges, and that's so that it holds its sharp edge. But if you had this come around forging, it could likely be difficult enough to render them complete fiction, because trying to get a forged thing to bend around and hold that bend and also to hold an edge within that, I don't I don't know. It does seem like a lot of snapping could happen, like I broke my hook sword again. How about those tanks that reverse in the Northern Air Temple one when they're coming up the hill? I mean, I don't even know what to call it. They just flip upside down. When they hit the tank, the tank would flip over, but they can ride upside down right side up. It's always like a water balanced inside the tank, which they end up breaking in order to stop these tanks. Oh, tank drives that turned upside down totally a reasonable design feature of a tank. So you have kids, I was going to ask you this earlier. You have two boys, how do they reconcile their normal life being with a dad who, to other kids couldn't even possibly be a dad because he's just too cool and up in his own stuff, with making things and collecting stuff and having like the hook from this and the sword from that. And they grew up with a full size rt D two in their bedroom every night. I'd recite Jabberwalkee with lightsabers. But their suspension of disbelief is just as strong as anybody else's. It has been very funny over there twenty two now, raising them and showing them my favorite movies. Like. They were super dismissive of the special effects for a boat cop. They were like, that end to A nine looks terrible. I'm like, it does not look terrible. Work, okay? Would avatar questions now that I have you, I have like the MythBuster here. I even talked about this with Varne yet. But this is exciting I have done. You can call them bending things. Amounts things have had happened that I can't even explain that we're bender esque. Right. So I was moving doors in my house one time for some reason, I don't know how it happened. I could feel the door from a far away, and the door would move with my hand. I'm across the room. It's a small hallway. So maybe the air was thick in there or something, but literally like the door was moving with my hand in unison. Is that possible? It is certainly possible. The causality is the question causality. I'm sure Janet can do the trick where she can say everything you're saying as you're saying it. That thing. It certainly could be that you're doing something in conjunction with the door. But the causalities reversing in your head. Okay, that's an interesting way of putting that, actually, because I didn't even know what you meant until the very end when you said you reverse it. So your brain is actually thinking. Your brain is just moving in unison with your brain is switching the two. Yeah. And then another weird thing that happened. I had these batteries. I don't know why it occurred to me, but I knocked the batteries together and then turned the TV off, and I knocked him back together again to turn the TV on. What is that? I'm not glad that you've been sitting on these I don't know what kind of banding that is, But Adam, what is that? I have no idea, but I do want to tell you. There's a build I want to do here in the cave. My grandfather was a maker. He was a surgeon, and he had a remote control volume on his television. In that was back when it was a knob you pulled to turn the television on, and then that was also the volume. Not so what my grandfather did was he took a tin canned lid and he screwed it to that knob, so you pulled on the lid, and then he wrapped a string around that lid and ran it through two eye hooks, so you basically had like a rope that went through a thing around the volume knob and then back out another eye hook, so you could turn you could adjust the volume with these reins on the television. That is man will do to not give up from his TV couch. That is like Marty McFly waking up in the morning. I love that. And again, we are so used to very sophisticated technology, but we're all still totally delighted by causality in the physical world. If you take someone into a room and there's a little ball bearing machine that does all these cool things, or you set up an amazing array of dominoes and then you knock them down. We've are filled with the same level of wonder, if not more so, as we are from something that is done through c G. I think it has to do with a similar reason we love so sets is because it feels like this remarkable thing that the world has a line for our pleasure at this moment. And actually this brings up another Avatar thing, which is I've watched the whole first season a couple of years ago and rewatching them this time, I was really stricken by if you pause at any point, the frame is almost always really beautiful, so beautiful, and then there's that shot where Jet is taking her up the tree the first time, and that look on her face, that joy, and it's like all of that having a fresh crush when you're ten eleven years old, all that feeling, that the exhilaration, and you know, now we know because we understand brains better, that like at that age everything is so much more heightened emotionally and physically that you literally are never going to feel that good again in your whole life, as you did singing along with the eagles in your friend's car at nineteen, and you see all that on her face I feel like every time I watched that show, I'm seeing someone who's paying attention to all the stages of our development as people and kind of celebrating each one of them. Yes, you're right. As they're going up into the tree layer, there's some beautiful effects that you're like, I'm so glad that they save this for these moments, right right, and rising, I'm rising, I'm in love. All the metaphors are extant. It's so lovely. Also, the other thing that occurred to me that you're talking was how much deeply hilarious physical comedy there is. Absolutely. We had Benjamin Wynne, who does all of the sound on the show, and we gave him a hard time because we said that he must have blown his whole budget on the slide whistle. Because the slide whistle, it's an old classic and it works for comedic effect every time. It's easy to always refer to cartoons and think of them as a lesser art. I think culturally we naturally accree towards doing that. I knew somebody who got themselves to Japan about twenty years ago to meet Yo Miyazaki. And just a quick note for the listeners, we've talked about Miyazaki several times on the podcast, but just in case you keep hearing a say that name and you don't know who we're talking about, check out some of his films. You could see Spirited Away, hugely famous, a beautiful movie, Princess Mononoke. Anyway, sorry, Adam, I digress. Yeah, one of my all time great favorite filmmakers, of course. And they asked him why he didn't make live action movies, and he said, why would I. I have everything I need in this room to make any universe I want. And I also feel like there's that amount of filmmaking celebration in making of Airbender, like we're just gonna make something that's cinematically magnificent. Yeah. Absolutely, I think that's the balance of what avatars and Avatar became the gateway drug to anime. It has the elements of American animation, which the legacy is looney Tunes and slapstick comedy and having those elements of the fun American animation, but then what the Japanese anime broaden was really these heavier themes, this more cinematic way of telling stories in animation that America wasn't really doing. Avatar has a really great way of just weaving the two together, and the characters change over the course of the show the way more than ever did. Hey, you know, I don't think they were thinking about that over the years. Yogi Bear Episode one is Yogi Bear episode It's Yogi beart. That's one of the things that we've seen happen in animation through the years as we continue to adapt comic books. Right, because comic books do allow for a lot of evolution. Somebody comes in and has a new voice. How is Kelly Sue Deconic who? In case folks don't know, it's just an amazing artist and storyteller who had a huge impact on the world of Captain Marvel. What is she going to bring to this And if you are one of those minds that is able to crack something new open out of a character, a beloved franchise, what have you, then you can build the world all over again. And now we're seeing more and more those places that we can really make the animation thematical sophisticated but still appeal to younger people, that there is this whole, rich, multilayered world that you can create with each project. Okay, I want to go back to some avatar science for a second. In this episode of the Northern Air Temple, Socca is going down this tunnel with the mechanist and he's holding a lantern. The lantern he discovers as he opens it up, is full of fireflies, and the mechanist reveals that it's because he can't have open flame around this room that he has because the room is full of natural gas. But the gas doesn't have an odor or anything like that, so he has no way of knowing where it is. But Socca, the mechanist, and an old rotten egg create a solution. How gets something that's so small you can't even see it makes such a big stink. That's the solution to our problem. Yeah, if we put a whole mess of rotten eggs in the cellar where the gas seeps up, the gas will mix with the smell of rotten eggs that if there's a leak, you smell rotten eggs. Then you just follow your nose to the place where the smell is coming from and plug up the hole where the gas is escaping. You're a genius, and they call each other genius. In the context of the show, You're like, oh, wouldn't it be funny if that were true. We gave natural gas a bad smell, so that's how we knew where it was or whatever. That is what happened right at the best science teachers I had. And I submit that if you had a great science teacher, it was because they told the stories of science really well. And a bad science teacher leads you to believe that science is a whole bunch of facts to memorize by Tuesday's quiz, and a good science teacher teaches you that it's a set of stories that we build to tell ourselves about the universe. And this picture of the universe is not a picture of the universe. It's a picture of our best guestimate of what the universe looks like today, and then everything's going to change tomorrow. But it's a story rather than a pinpoint. Probably an easier to memorize the stuff I knew that story instead of all of us stories, or how we remember stories, or how we build narratives to be like, you know what, if I turn around and I don't have my sharpened stick when the saber tooth tiger comes out there, I'm going to be lunch. It's a set of actions, not just one thing to know Adam before we let you go, we definitely would love to hear from you, based on your own experience of watching the show, if you would be a certain type of bend, or if the sort of physics of one type of bending appeals more, or if you can't decide, tell us why you can't decide, and tell us some elements of each of those bending powers that you admire about them that makes it so hard to choose. It would be a real toss up for me between water and earth. If you could do a Myers Briggs for people and what their bending power would be, I would absolutely be an Earth vendor. Okay, I love that you brought a real life psychological questionnaire into this, but it makes sense. My hands have to be on things in order for me to understand them. I ground myself with the things around me. But I was also a real fish in the water when I was a kid and my mom was a bit overprotective, and one of the ways that I dealt with that was by becoming really competent. And I I could hold my breath for two or three minutes and swim really well, and my ears are messed up now, so I can't put my head underwater, and I haven't really been in the water in ten years, and it's a sad loss, like I missed the water. I feel it whenever water is being bent on the show that my heart just broke for you, because I want you back in the water. And we all have things that we can't do anymore, or many of us do. I certainly do, But what a special treasure for you to also have, if anything, to be able to go. I relate even harder to having been able to do that and to loving this water bending because I'm not going to have a bad experience in the water where my head's underwater now, because I'm probably not going to put myself in that situation. So everything is sort of preserved as it was when you could do all of those things, and I think there's something kind of beautiful about that. So I just got inspired by that that we can maybe pitch a story to Mike and Brian about a great water better since he was a child, but there are things that happened in their life they can no longer water bend. They can actually no longer even go back into the water, but somehow magically in the world through things that happen. His water bending gets transferred into Earth bending and he becomes an Earth bender. It how about that as a spin off series, not the Avatar, but his bending powers transferred from water to Earth. The character's name is Savage. You were asking me about what I would be bending, and when I thought about water, when I thought about being in the water as a kid, and the way it felt. I think that the creators of the show are have built in an idea of the bender themselves needs to literally be with what they're bending on this molecular level, right that there is a consciousness that you are matching of wars to the material that you're moving. And they didn't have to go that far in terms of their own internal knowledge about it, and yet they did. And it's not even text, but we all understand and that's part of Agg's journey, watching him and watching them learn how to do the bending that they do. Obviously, it's a metaphor for creativity, for being able to find your true self and figure out what you want to do. That's so perfect. You are a bender, Adam. You're one of those people that take things apart but can put them back together. And also, if you're an Earthbender in your case, you would be an Earthbender as a metal bender. So I know people are gonna be like, wait a minute. Even more so, wouldn't Addam being a metal bender? And I would say the answer is yes, he definitively would be an Earthbender who had metal bending power, actually a metal bender in real life. He's bending all kinds of materials every day. I think on MythBusters, I have bent fire, air, that's water and metal. I know this is a very strong argument for an Avatar. You are an Avatar for sure. Absolutely. This has been such a treat. It's exactly what we would have hoped this conversation would be. Thank you so much for doing this with us, friend, This was so much fun. Thank you so much, Absolutely pleasure. I love this show. I love that the world has this show in it to celebrate it and everyone I've ever met who loves Avatar. It's just a very wonderful group of open, loving people because it's an open and loving show, and I'm just so grateful it exists. Thanks you guys for having me on. Next week we'll be recapping episode eighteen, The Water Bending Master and as a special treat. We'll be talking to Johanna Brady, who played Princess. You a follow us on social media. I'm at Janet Varney on Twitter, at the j V Club on Instagram. You are at Dante Bosco basically everywhere everywhere except on TikTok at Dante. We'll see everybody next Tuesday on Apple podcast, Spotify, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcast

Hello, friends, benders and non benders alike. I'm Janet Varney and I'm Dante Bosco and this is Braving the Elements, Nickelodeon's podcast about all things Avatar Verse. And we were so excited, weren't we, Buddy to have the awesome Jason man Zukas on board to talk about the Northern Air Temple with us last week. He was amazing, great conversation. However, we realized we were talking so much about the big themes of the episode in the series in general, which Jason had so many great thoughts about, that we didn't really spend that much time on the things that make that episode and Avatar in general so special, all the machines and the gadgets and stuff like Jason mentioned that tips its hand towards where we go in the core era. That's right. We really steered clear of that stuff because we were getting into some heavy, deep emotional themes, which as you know, is always a thrill for me. We kind of skimmed over that stuff, so we thought, why not have a conversation that does celebrate some of the marvelous gadgetry and inventions of not just the Mechanist, but maybe even some of the other aspects of other episodes of Book one of Avatar. Then it became like, if you want to talk about stuff like that, who do you even ask? Is there such a person that it would even be worth talking to? And then we were like, oh, yes there is, and his name is one of my favorite people, Adam Savage. Hello, welcome. It's actually no one better in the world to talk to about these things than Adam Savage. I am so excited to see. We were describing your workshop in the background, and it really is one of those things that everything is just far away enough that anything could be anything. There's slots of things and stacks and piles. It's will deal you guys. Yeah, Adam Right now, we're looking at his background and it looks like the background of a mad science is genius. A lot of tools. I feel like I would lose a finger on every device. Actually, early on in COVID, I almost lost a finger here in the shop. Oh, I can't believe you just did that. And in the episode that we just recapped with Jason, the mechanist actually has lost three of the fingers on one of his hands. The glee with which the mechanist pops those fingers off and hurls them at soccer. Really tells you that sometimes you're not wrong when you think that a scientist isn't The mechanists for sure would have been a part of the MythBusters crew easily, absolutely, And also I feel like King Boomy, he would have been the guy who created a bunch of stuff to try to fool the MythBusters. He would be like, they're playful Nemesis. The playful thing is a real specific aspect of him that I really dug because there's a way in which Avatar always has so many different games in each episode, but one that they never lose sight of is what would two nine year olds think of this world? Place forest? There's just so much freaking joy of Like you see all these slides, Someone's going to ride them by the end of the episode. Yes, if I were a kid watching that show, I would be like, oh, please put me inside there, Put me inside there, because I want to get on those slides and just scoot all over town. Right. Every time and exercises any of his power, there's a joy to it that is like if you gave a nine year old superpowers, that would be the look on their face. Yes, absolutely, you've got to open your brain to the possibilities a package sending system the world's greatest super slide to me, you're a mad genius. Yeah. I do love that point you said at him, because we've always discuss these heavy themes that go on in the episod, including this episode, whether it be genocide or abuse. But like you said, they never forget that they're also looking at it. If the nine year old watching this cartoon is that nine year old? Are they enjoying it? And sometimes we get swept up in that, like in a recent episode that we watched and call someone master poop head, And sometimes the moment's really stand out to you where you're like, oh, that's right. I can easily analyze this as if it were career guard. Yet at the end of the day, I may hear a little farting sound or someone might be called master poop head. You can't keep us here, let us sleep, let us leave. We're in serious trouble. This guy is nuts. Speaking of how many ways it can be analyzed, I wanted to let you know, and I'm not sure if you did know that at wet a workshop down in Welling To New Zealand, which is an extended part of my family. There is a weekly meet up to discuss Avatar the Las Airbender. I didn't want that. I love that. I will say that rings true for me because I was at Hobbiton and UH person came up to me and sort of like tapped me lightly on the shoulder and then shyly lifted up their leg and there was this amazing Earthbender symbol on their leg and they were like, I just wanted you to know that an earth Bender works at Hobbiton, and I was like, of course. It's always crazy when the tattoos come out, because you know you're part of one of those projects that have impacted somebody so much that they were going to put ink on their body for the rest of their life to represent that. One of the things that I love, and I think a really good reason to have you on the show is that you, as we talk about these things that stretch across these age spans that appeal to both kids and adults, you are one of those people who in life have a grown up job that kid kids are like, if that's what growing up looks like, I'm good. So many kids are like, you just get to do those voices and that's your job, and we're like, yeah, I believe it or not, we kind of get to do that. And you are a sterling in the flesh example of somebody that what you do appeals to so many different age groups. Do you have a lot of young people who come up and go, I want to be like you when I grow up, But do I have to grow up? Because it feels like I wouldn't have to. I said this in the book that I wrote a couple of years ago, that I consider myself a human permission slip to do the weird stuff you want to do. Uh. And you guys both know that the different projects that you work on have different people that are activated by those, So there's all these different demographics that come to you based on the project. That's one of the reasons I think we all like doing cons too, is that one on one engagement where you really feel like you see, like when I come back from a con, I feel that the world is in good hands for later on. Right at any day i'm doing a CON, I usually don't get to sleep until two or three in the morning because I'm just so wired from that conversation. It's very different than someone tweeting at you than for them to be standing right in front of you explaining why this meant so much to them. Totally. I love that you invited me to talk about the mechanics and the mechanicals of Avatar. I grew up on the Super Friends, right. I think that was animated on six is right, like four frames per second. It was super low as animation and the physics were barely there, and still we were like, oh every Saturday morning. You know. One of the things I like to point out about my favorite filmmakers is that they never leave you confused by what's happening. For instance, nobody's better than Spielberg at an action sequence because you never are in doubt about where you are in physical space. And Felony is mind blowing about doing that, about making the physics of the fights feel really even the way air wraps around an opponent when he's fighting jet. They don't have to be as right as they are, but boy is it build like a much more cohesive and deep world because they do actually cohere. Those physics feel right when they happen. I love that you said that because that is something that anybody who has been kind of keeping up with a podcast along the way knows that was such a huge thing for Mike and Brian. Like, we had an episode with Cfukisu and with Brian Kinnetsko, one of the creators. Cfukisu is the fight choreographer and the martial arts expert for both series, and they really talked about the physics. I think they come from that same background of creating a world that has rules, establishing that and then not breaking them. And you're right, that grounds us all into, ironically, the suspension of disbelief. What allows us to suspend our disbelief is the specific, if magical rules so you don't get lost, so you're not like, well wait a minute, I just thought, but I didn't know you come on, you know. And they really paid attention to that, and they wanted it the breath to come from the body and the movements to be very physical. They're great at that. Actually, there's one thing that I get guilty of all the time, which a lot of Avatar fans tell me, like, don't science Avatar. And guess what we're doing today, you guys, We're gonna science Avatar. Just a little bit Harry Potter start with none of it's real, but it's based on these real elements that we are aware of, and whoever can do it in a way that doesn't distract us from the storytelling is really doing it. Really great. We're not supposed to science Avatar, but then we get an episode like the Northern Air Temple. Well, I mean, if they want to start talking about the smell of rotten eggs and natural gas, we are going to science that, thank you very much. It files yes, Oh, don't worry. That experiments old and that egg was just part of last week's lunch. A weak old egg. Smell quick find that egg. The other thing is like often when people say don't science something, they mean don't yuck my yum, don't harsh my mellow. I couldn't do that. But I've noticed as I watch Airbender, it doesn't seem like they're holding any specific type of kung fu movie style either. There are scenes that are like Luscia type scenes. There are scenes that are much more knocked down, drag out, and there's also within each action sequence of like multiple steps. I mean, so many episodes are like Rube Goldberg machines in terms of how the final thing ends up happening. Oh, absolutely, And my friend, I'm going to send you the app with Brian and Si Fukis that has all the details on martial arts styles. But also in all that the emotion still comes across, right, There's still within that lots of beats of emotionality that I'm always surprised by, Like when Ang is rolling his back over the stone and his battle with his old friend the earth Bender. The slow motion and Ang's fear at that moment, it just feels so narratively robust. I'm all the way and involved with the characters every time I turn on an episode like that. Well, you mentioned Spielberg. Where there other fictional worlds that you felt like as a younger person, you were really transfixed by the kind of mechanics of the world. I knew you have a relationship to Germo del Toro, and I will say that's another person where you feel the time and care they feel the time and care of Peter Jackson? Were there people like that that you were idolizing as a young person. Alien came out when I was fourteen, and I was too afraid to go see it in the theater. And I was right. I would have run screaming from the theater. But my dad was an artist and my sister was an artist, and they had seen it, and I asked them both to draw the alien for me, and they both drew totally different pictures, which I was like, what is this movie that two artists can come up with competing views? And then I read the David Allen Foster novelization and I obsessed over the blue color aesthetic of alien that really lived in. These are spacesuits that aren't romantic at all. They're like mud boots, and the characters are just like working class astronautics. Back, we're just doing this thing. Yeah, plumbers, pause for one second. One of the listeners out there, don't miss the fact that when Adam watched Aliens is the time where you can't go on the internet go does that alien look like? He asked someone to people to draw the picture that just doesn't go on the day. Did you see that thing? Can you draw me a picture of it? That would not enter anyone's mind today. They would just go straight to the Internet and Google and hit images. So you're reminding me. I built my first lightsaber from going to the Magic of the Myth exhibition at your Winding Arts Center here in three and I did sketches of a lightsaber, and I came back to Jamie's shop and I lathed myself a lightsaber based on those sketches, and I still have the lightsaber. But then you go to a con right and you see someone cosplaying a bender, for example. They are doing that even in the era of super sophisticated gaming and sophisticated effects that you see in films. At the end of the day, someone comes up and they've made their own Qatara dress and outfit, and then they've got attached to their wrists fishing line with blue fabric, and then you turn on a fan and Katara's water bending and that is super analog. And those are just as wonderful of costumes as the person who looks exactly like a stormtrooper or the person who has all kinds of beeps and boops coming out of them because they've got like a whole system wired inside their outfit. We still feel so much joy when we see people handcraft things to symbolize magic in some way. Right. The other part of that janet is that when you ask them to bend, they'll hit a pose. I haven't encountered anyone who couldn't nail it, and they nail it because the creatives of the show are thinking air and water. These are weapons just as much as something they might hold in their hand, and we feel that as the audience, we feel like we can know how to what we're gonna do to bend water or air. We under stand the physical motion that's been designed and baked in. I don't know how the creatives make it so detailed that we understand that it's real. It feels like it's tapping right into a nine year old brain. So story about tree houses. Speaking of the episode of Jet, because I love the hideout. I love all that stuff, this stuff back to the hideout. You guys have a hideout. You want to see it? Yes, we want to see it. We're here where there's nothing here? Hold this? Why? What's this too? I'll get up on my own. What do you think about Jet? Real quick, Adam. Just like the actual character of Jet, the actual character, he's a jerk. There have been a lot of conversations about people trying to change the bad boy, polarizing character and all of Avatar airbender. Don't get me wrong, I understand why he's dreamy, but he's also a jerk. Then that's what I want. Platforms, all the deeply ingrained in a lot of us, just that's the ideal way to live. What if we're like, oh, a safe, perfect eden where we're safe from predators, they might make a little bit of sense that somewhere in our body we're like, yes, treehouse, Yes, I think you unlocked it. I think you unlocked our inner tribal animal instinct to live in trees. And seeing Jet with his hooks and stuff, we see two different modes of getting through treetops, as you would see a monkey do with ang and his air bending and his ability to do it that way, and then Jet, who doesn't even have bending powers, but who can still move in a completely sophisticated, totally effortless way through the treetops. It is so enviable. I almost envy that more than certain other types of bending or other moments in bending. It Just give me Jets hooks. They're pretty powerful. Since I was a young can I question those hook swords? Most swords have no hooks, So if they were that powerful, more swords to be made with hooks right, So a sword is differentially heated, so it's got a softer middle and harder edges, and that's so that it holds its sharp edge. But if you had this come around forging, it could likely be difficult enough to render them complete fiction, because trying to get a forged thing to bend around and hold that bend and also to hold an edge within that, I don't I don't know. It does seem like a lot of snapping could happen, like I broke my hook sword again. How about those tanks that reverse in the Northern Air Temple one when they're coming up the hill? I mean, I don't even know what to call it. They just flip upside down. When they hit the tank, the tank would flip over, but they can ride upside down right side up. It's always like a water balanced inside the tank, which they end up breaking in order to stop these tanks. Oh, tank drives that turned upside down totally a reasonable design feature of a tank. So you have kids, I was going to ask you this earlier. You have two boys, how do they reconcile their normal life being with a dad who, to other kids couldn't even possibly be a dad because he's just too cool and up in his own stuff, with making things and collecting stuff and having like the hook from this and the sword from that. And they grew up with a full size rt D two in their bedroom every night. I'd recite Jabberwalkee with lightsabers. But their suspension of disbelief is just as strong as anybody else's. It has been very funny over there twenty two now, raising them and showing them my favorite movies. Like. They were super dismissive of the special effects for a boat cop. They were like, that end to A nine looks terrible. I'm like, it does not look terrible. Work, okay? Would avatar questions now that I have you, I have like the MythBuster here. I even talked about this with Varne yet. But this is exciting I have done. You can call them bending things. Amounts things have had happened that I can't even explain that we're bender esque. Right. So I was moving doors in my house one time for some reason, I don't know how it happened. I could feel the door from a far away, and the door would move with my hand. I'm across the room. It's a small hallway. So maybe the air was thick in there or something, but literally like the door was moving with my hand in unison. Is that possible? It is certainly possible. The causality is the question causality. I'm sure Janet can do the trick where she can say everything you're saying as you're saying it. That thing. It certainly could be that you're doing something in conjunction with the door. But the causalities reversing in your head. Okay, that's an interesting way of putting that, actually, because I didn't even know what you meant until the very end when you said you reverse it. So your brain is actually thinking. Your brain is just moving in unison with your brain is switching the two. Yeah. And then another weird thing that happened. I had these batteries. I don't know why it occurred to me, but I knocked the batteries together and then turned the TV off, and I knocked him back together again to turn the TV on. What is that? I'm not glad that you've been sitting on these I don't know what kind of banding that is, But Adam, what is that? I have no idea, but I do want to tell you. There's a build I want to do here in the cave. My grandfather was a maker. He was a surgeon, and he had a remote control volume on his television. In that was back when it was a knob you pulled to turn the television on, and then that was also the volume. Not so what my grandfather did was he took a tin canned lid and he screwed it to that knob, so you pulled on the lid, and then he wrapped a string around that lid and ran it through two eye hooks, so you basically had like a rope that went through a thing around the volume knob and then back out another eye hook, so you could turn you could adjust the volume with these reins on the television. That is man will do to not give up from his TV couch. That is like Marty McFly waking up in the morning. I love that. And again, we are so used to very sophisticated technology, but we're all still totally delighted by causality in the physical world. If you take someone into a room and there's a little ball bearing machine that does all these cool things, or you set up an amazing array of dominoes and then you knock them down. We've are filled with the same level of wonder, if not more so, as we are from something that is done through c G. I think it has to do with a similar reason we love so sets is because it feels like this remarkable thing that the world has a line for our pleasure at this moment. And actually this brings up another Avatar thing, which is I've watched the whole first season a couple of years ago and rewatching them this time, I was really stricken by if you pause at any point, the frame is almost always really beautiful, so beautiful, and then there's that shot where Jet is taking her up the tree the first time, and that look on her face, that joy, and it's like all of that having a fresh crush when you're ten eleven years old, all that feeling, that the exhilaration, and you know, now we know because we understand brains better, that like at that age everything is so much more heightened emotionally and physically that you literally are never going to feel that good again in your whole life, as you did singing along with the eagles in your friend's car at nineteen, and you see all that on her face I feel like every time I watched that show, I'm seeing someone who's paying attention to all the stages of our development as people and kind of celebrating each one of them. Yes, you're right. As they're going up into the tree layer, there's some beautiful effects that you're like, I'm so glad that they save this for these moments, right right, and rising, I'm rising, I'm in love. All the metaphors are extant. It's so lovely. Also, the other thing that occurred to me that you're talking was how much deeply hilarious physical comedy there is. Absolutely. We had Benjamin Wynne, who does all of the sound on the show, and we gave him a hard time because we said that he must have blown his whole budget on the slide whistle. Because the slide whistle, it's an old classic and it works for comedic effect every time. It's easy to always refer to cartoons and think of them as a lesser art. I think culturally we naturally accree towards doing that. I knew somebody who got themselves to Japan about twenty years ago to meet Yo Miyazaki. And just a quick note for the listeners, we've talked about Miyazaki several times on the podcast, but just in case you keep hearing a say that name and you don't know who we're talking about, check out some of his films. You could see Spirited Away, hugely famous, a beautiful movie, Princess Mononoke. Anyway, sorry, Adam, I digress. Yeah, one of my all time great favorite filmmakers, of course. And they asked him why he didn't make live action movies, and he said, why would I. I have everything I need in this room to make any universe I want. And I also feel like there's that amount of filmmaking celebration in making of Airbender, like we're just gonna make something that's cinematically magnificent. Yeah. Absolutely, I think that's the balance of what avatars and Avatar became the gateway drug to anime. It has the elements of American animation, which the legacy is looney Tunes and slapstick comedy and having those elements of the fun American animation, but then what the Japanese anime broaden was really these heavier themes, this more cinematic way of telling stories in animation that America wasn't really doing. Avatar has a really great way of just weaving the two together, and the characters change over the course of the show the way more than ever did. Hey, you know, I don't think they were thinking about that over the years. Yogi Bear Episode one is Yogi Bear episode It's Yogi beart. That's one of the things that we've seen happen in animation through the years as we continue to adapt comic books. Right, because comic books do allow for a lot of evolution. Somebody comes in and has a new voice. How is Kelly Sue Deconic who? In case folks don't know, it's just an amazing artist and storyteller who had a huge impact on the world of Captain Marvel. What is she going to bring to this And if you are one of those minds that is able to crack something new open out of a character, a beloved franchise, what have you, then you can build the world all over again. And now we're seeing more and more those places that we can really make the animation thematical sophisticated but still appeal to younger people, that there is this whole, rich, multilayered world that you can create with each project. Okay, I want to go back to some avatar science for a second. In this episode of the Northern Air Temple, Socca is going down this tunnel with the mechanist and he's holding a lantern. The lantern he discovers as he opens it up, is full of fireflies, and the mechanist reveals that it's because he can't have open flame around this room that he has because the room is full of natural gas. But the gas doesn't have an odor or anything like that, so he has no way of knowing where it is. But Socca, the mechanist, and an old rotten egg create a solution. How gets something that's so small you can't even see it makes such a big stink. That's the solution to our problem. Yeah, if we put a whole mess of rotten eggs in the cellar where the gas seeps up, the gas will mix with the smell of rotten eggs that if there's a leak, you smell rotten eggs. Then you just follow your nose to the place where the smell is coming from and plug up the hole where the gas is escaping. You're a genius, and they call each other genius. In the context of the show, You're like, oh, wouldn't it be funny if that were true. We gave natural gas a bad smell, so that's how we knew where it was or whatever. That is what happened right at the best science teachers I had. And I submit that if you had a great science teacher, it was because they told the stories of science really well. And a bad science teacher leads you to believe that science is a whole bunch of facts to memorize by Tuesday's quiz, and a good science teacher teaches you that it's a set of stories that we build to tell ourselves about the universe. And this picture of the universe is not a picture of the universe. It's a picture of our best guestimate of what the universe looks like today, and then everything's going to change tomorrow. But it's a story rather than a pinpoint. Probably an easier to memorize the stuff I knew that story instead of all of us stories, or how we remember stories, or how we build narratives to be like, you know what, if I turn around and I don't have my sharpened stick when the saber tooth tiger comes out there, I'm going to be lunch. It's a set of actions, not just one thing to know Adam before we let you go, we definitely would love to hear from you, based on your own experience of watching the show, if you would be a certain type of bend, or if the sort of physics of one type of bending appeals more, or if you can't decide, tell us why you can't decide, and tell us some elements of each of those bending powers that you admire about them that makes it so hard to choose. It would be a real toss up for me between water and earth. If you could do a Myers Briggs for people and what their bending power would be, I would absolutely be an Earth vendor. Okay, I love that you brought a real life psychological questionnaire into this, but it makes sense. My hands have to be on things in order for me to understand them. I ground myself with the things around me. But I was also a real fish in the water when I was a kid and my mom was a bit overprotective, and one of the ways that I dealt with that was by becoming really competent. And I I could hold my breath for two or three minutes and swim really well, and my ears are messed up now, so I can't put my head underwater, and I haven't really been in the water in ten years, and it's a sad loss, like I missed the water. I feel it whenever water is being bent on the show that my heart just broke for you, because I want you back in the water. And we all have things that we can't do anymore, or many of us do. I certainly do, But what a special treasure for you to also have, if anything, to be able to go. I relate even harder to having been able to do that and to loving this water bending because I'm not going to have a bad experience in the water where my head's underwater now, because I'm probably not going to put myself in that situation. So everything is sort of preserved as it was when you could do all of those things, and I think there's something kind of beautiful about that. So I just got inspired by that that we can maybe pitch a story to Mike and Brian about a great water better since he was a child, but there are things that happened in their life they can no longer water bend. They can actually no longer even go back into the water, but somehow magically in the world through things that happen. His water bending gets transferred into Earth bending and he becomes an Earth bender. It how about that as a spin off series, not the Avatar, but his bending powers transferred from water to Earth. The character's name is Savage. You were asking me about what I would be bending, and when I thought about water, when I thought about being in the water as a kid, and the way it felt. I think that the creators of the show are have built in an idea of the bender themselves needs to literally be with what they're bending on this molecular level, right that there is a consciousness that you are matching of wars to the material that you're moving. And they didn't have to go that far in terms of their own internal knowledge about it, and yet they did. And it's not even text, but we all understand and that's part of Agg's journey, watching him and watching them learn how to do the bending that they do. Obviously, it's a metaphor for creativity, for being able to find your true self and figure out what you want to do. That's so perfect. You are a bender, Adam. You're one of those people that take things apart but can put them back together. And also, if you're an Earthbender in your case, you would be an Earthbender as a metal bender. So I know people are gonna be like, wait a minute. Even more so, wouldn't Addam being a metal bender? And I would say the answer is yes, he definitively would be an Earthbender who had metal bending power, actually a metal bender in real life. He's bending all kinds of materials every day. I think on MythBusters, I have bent fire, air, that's water and metal. I know this is a very strong argument for an Avatar. You are an Avatar for sure. Absolutely. This has been such a treat. It's exactly what we would have hoped this conversation would be. Thank you so much for doing this with us, friend, This was so much fun. Thank you so much, Absolutely pleasure. I love this show. I love that the world has this show in it to celebrate it and everyone I've ever met who loves Avatar. It's just a very wonderful group of open, loving people because it's an open and loving show, and I'm just so grateful it exists. Thanks you guys for having me on. Next week we'll be recapping episode eighteen, The Water Bending Master and as a special treat. We'll be talking to Johanna Brady, who played Princess. You a follow us on social media. I'm at Janet Varney on Twitter, at the j V Club on Instagram. You are at Dante Bosco basically everywhere everywhere except on TikTok at Dante. We'll see everybody next Tuesday on Apple podcast, Spotify, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcast