LOS ANGELES - Hollywood has decided to change its strategy to disenfranchise America's younger population. A current trend in movies, as many casual and critical film goers know, has been live action reboots and reinterpretations of familiar and well loved pop culture icons such as The Transformers and GI:Joe. Though monetary gain from these franchises has been great, Hollywood producers and studio executives feel "unfulfilled" as one source, a producer who has demanded to remain anonymous, has claimed. The source went on to say, "The problem with the 21-30 demographic, the kids who remember and care about these franchises, is by the time the average American is eighteen or twenty, he or she has most likely graduated High School and/or college and is already jaded and disenfranchised with the world. As businessmen, we need to start the process at a younger age, we need to start showing younger kids that the world is a harsh place but there is nothing they can do about it. That early complacency is key to future economic stability."
The most recent film to capitalize on this idea has been M. Night Shyamalan's
The Last Airbender a live action remake of the now famous cartoon
Avatar:The Last Airbender which aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008. With its balance of dense narrative, darker themes, rich character development, martial arts action, and comedy, the cartoon has received high praise from critics, parents, and children alike and quickly became one of Nickelodeon, and it's parent company Viacom's, most successful franchises to date.
"[
Avatar]has made us a ton of money in merchandise and viewership." said a representative from Viacom, "The problem was the show was too good. It blurred the lines of good and evil, black and white, and just made kids think too much. We received calls and emails from teachers and parents complaining that their children and students started asking too many questions. Take this scenario for instance. A third grade teacher in Arkansas wrote us an email in 2006 complaining that her student, an avid fan of
Avatar:The Last Airbender, started questioning Columbus's discovery of America. He equated the idea of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Marina landing in the West Indes to an early episode of the show where Prince Zuko and a Fire Nation ship land on the shores of the Southern Water Tribe demanding the tribe bring him the Avatar. In that first season Zuko is the main bad guy! We can't have our children thinking Columbus was a bad guy. That would undermine the very fabric of this country. Imagine what that student thought, a couple years later, when he saw Zuko become a good guy. He must have been so confused. The gray areas in this series are catastrophic to the fragile psyche of the American Youth. That's where M. Night came in."
M. Night Shyamalan has admitted in interviews to be a fan of
Avatar: The Last Airbender because his children, also avid fans, watched the show religiously. Though Shyamalan has seen success with his movies and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for his 1999 film
The Sixth Sense his later and most recent works have often been ridiculed by movie goers and critics. The Viacom representative said this "When we heard Shemelon was a fan of the show, it was like a gigantic weight lifted off our shoulders. "Let's have HIM make a movie out of it! Surely if anyone can screw this franchise up it's him." I heard one of the execs say at one of quarterly meetings. On a slightly related note, that same exec just watched
Lady in the Water the night prior. So we pushed Bryan [Konietzko] and Michael [DiMartino], the creators, to let Shamalama make the movie and the rest is history. We didn't need to do anything, we just let M. Night have full control and we knew it would be just what the doctor ordered.
Four years later
The Last Airbender has hit theaters with much criticism. Critics such as Robert Ebert are already calling it "an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented." While still others say "it is a new low for Shyamalan."
"We know its crap, plain and simple, but we also know that these kids we're trying to set right are going to make their parents buy tickets and give us money so it's a win-win situation no matter how poor the movie is." said the Viacom representative.
How does it fit into Hollywood's new plan though? To find out just how effective this new direction is in creating apathy and complacency in younger children, Paramount Pictures, the studio who released this movie and another subsidiary of Viacom interviewed parents and children after a surprise, early screening of
The Last Airbender at the Bridge Theater in Shyamalan's home city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A parent who took her child to the screening was quoted in saying "I don't understand it, my seven year old son was so energetic and happy to see this movie, now he's just confused and sad. It's like he's a whole other person." Another parent said "My ten year old daughter just loves the character of Katara [one of the protagonists in the show and movie], she thinks she is such a strong and motherly character, always looking after Aang [the main protagonist]and the other down and out characters. She liked Katara so much that after the episode when Katara learns she has healing abilities, my girl went up to me and said "Mommy, I want to be a doctor, so I can heal and help people just like Katara does." but after the movie, her eyes were glossed over and glassy and she just stared in the middle darkness. When I asked if she wanted her doll to play doctor with, she just snatched the doll out of my hand and threw it into the street.I've never seen anything like it." One of our own reporters, also at the screening, was able to get permission to ask one of the children what they thought of the movie but all the child said was "Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter."
"Mission Accomplished!" said the anonymous producer from Hollywood,"This is fantastic news. We have many more movies in the works. 80s nostalgia is old hat, those kids are lost causes. It's time we set our sights to the 90s and the Aughts. I overheard a guy from Time-Warner talking about a gritty
Freakazoid reboot at a Starbucks but I didn't think it would fly. "Too recent" I thought. Jokes on me, hell,
Avatar:The Last Airbender is just two years old. New episodes were being made when the movie script was being written. This is a great day for all of us."
