It’s safe to say Netflix has a shaky reputation for adaptations.
It’s done wonderfully in the past, with shows like One Piece and The Sandman offering up mildly altered but satisfyingly familiar live-action twists on their animated or comic origins. But then there are others like Shadow and Bones, Cowboy Bebop, and The Witcher. These examples are more frequent, and blatantly display one of Netflix’s biggest issues: Its lack of faith in the source material.
Time and again, the streamer ditches beloved original storylines to clear the way for something new, and almost without fail it falls flat. We’re not looking for carbon copies of the original — we actually enjoy those minor changes — but when the resulting adaptation is unrecognizable, we’ve got beef with the streamer.
That’s causing anxiety around the streamer’s inbound Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation, as fans of the original eye its February 2024 release date with mixed feelings. We want so badly for the show to be good, but its predecessor — M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender — burned us badly. We’d rather nothing at all than a repeat of that mess.
Netflix’s incoming adaptation looks like it’ll vastly improve on the 2010 release (the only film I’ve ever walked out of in my life), and a big part of fans’ mounting confidence is based on the slow reveals Netflix has been putting out. These give us glimpses of the characters and not only do they look great, but some of them are relatively obscure. That’s great news, because it means Netflix is digging deep into Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s original story, and doing a good job of casting to boot.
The result is an incoming wave of lesser-known but vital Avatar: The Last Airbender characters. One of the latest to earn a big reveal was the Mechanist, a vital but oft-overlooked character from the original show’s first and third seasons.
Who is the Mechanist?
The Mechanist, in the original animated series, is a displaced Earth Kingdom inventor who, following the flooding of his home, relocated to the abandoned Northern Air Temple with his son. A wave of other refugees accompanied them, and began to settle the long-abandoned temple, aided massively by his brilliant inventions.
The first of these was an imitation of the very same gliders the Air Nomads used. He copied the design and, in hopes of granting his paraplegic son Teo more mobility, even adapted his wheelchair to likewise take flight. He also created a brand new power source, reliant upon the rampant air flow through the temple, along with various other ingenious inventions.
Not all of them were made with the best of intentions, however. While visiting the displaced Earth Kingdom refugees, Aang and the Gaang discover that the Mechanist was also building something else — a range of deadly war machines intended for the Fire Nation. He was blackmailed into assisting the warmongering nation around a year after setting at the Northern Air Temple, and he’s been supplying the war effort ever since.
Thankfully, Aang and the others manage to talk some sense into the Mechanist, and he ultimately aids them in pushing back an attempted invasion of the Temple. He also helps put Sokka onto invention and strategy, and ultimately lends both aid and several nifty tools to the final fight against the Fire Nation.
Who plays the Mechanist in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender?
Casting for the character of the Mechanist was recently revealed by Netflix, and fans were overjoyed at the streamer’s decision. It tapped the talented Danny Pudi for the role, and released a single image of the beloved Community star all decked out for the part. He certainly pulls off the hair, and we don’t doubt he’ll capture the character’s brilliant eccentricity with the same unmatched appeal he brings to all of his roles.
The revelation of Pudi’s casting is yet another mark in Netflix’s favor, but we won’t know if the streamer actually nailed the adaptation — or screwed the pooch once again — until the series officially debuts on Feb. 22, 2024.