Korra Book 4 Blu-ray Commentary Highlights

The Book 4 Blu-ray features commentary tracks on all 13 episodes; check out the highlights here!

This consists of any quotes or facts I thought were notablewhen watching the commentaries for all the episodes in Book 4. Things in quotesare exact quotes (or very close to) from the attributed speaker. Things not in quotes are paraphrased, and are very close to what they said.

Also here are the previous commentary highlights: Book 1. Book 2. Book 3.

Episode 1: Mike, Bryan, Josh Hamilton, Tim Hedrick

- Mike says they imagined Wu as having studied at Republic City University, or sent off to boarding school. He was not in Ba Sing Se when the Queen was assassinated.

- Bryan: “My Kainora was strong” after confusing Opal with Jinora in Kai and Opal’s intro scene.

- Mike and the writers thought of the state as being pronounced “Yee” but Robert Morse came in and pronounced it as “Yai”, so they went with that.

- Bryan says he loves introducing characters in seeing their personality through how they fight, like they did with Kuvira here.

- Bryan says his and Mike’s original idea with the metal clan after the original series was for them to be bad guys.

- Bryan: “You know how weird rich people live in hotels, especially in the 20s and 30s?” (about Wu).

- Bryan says the background idea with Wu and Mako was that Wu saw Mako in the newspaper as a “hero cop” and said “I want that guy!”.

- Mike says it was important that they present Kuvira in such a way that it’s believable why Bolin is so taken with her.

- Bryan says Skyler’s (Kai’s VA) voice changed so much between the original recording of this episode and ADR, that they had to redo all his lines in ADR.

- Bryan says these are Varrick’s version of Hiroshi’s mechasuits using his new magnet technology.

Episode 2: Mike, Bryan, Janet Varney

- Bryan says the network was worried about time jumps without on-screen indicators of what time it is, but Bryan was confident it would work without them.

- Bryan says he thinks the time jumps reflect Korra’s emotional state, she’s still living with stuff from the past.

- Mike and Bryan say Korra was already apprehensive about returning to Republic City, even before seeing Dark Avatar Korra.

- Mike says the motivation for Dark Avatar Korra was to depict Korra’s internal struggle in an external way.

- Mike says he was aware of the similarities to Star Wars (especially Toph and Yoda), but it wasn’t intentional.

Episode 3: Mike, Bryan, Josh, Tim

- Shiro’s recaps are recorded during ADR (after animation).

- Bryan about the Desna sleeps in the tub joke: “you think it’s going somewhere really weird and then it gets even weirder but in a different way.”

- Josh says an idea was to have Mako be romantically involved with Izumi’s daughter, but there were too many characters and Bryan says they wanted to focus more on friendships. They encourage us to write fanfiction about Mako and Izumi’s daughter. Mike says it’s canon that she exists. Bryan: “That photo that Nickelodeon tweeted of Izumi without glasses. She probably looked like that.” (Background info from me: that picture was a fan edit that Nick tweeted by mistake.)

- Mike: “When the DVD comes out you check tumblr and they quote you, and then they do drawings and it’s like ‘oh yeah I did ask them to do that’.” :)

- Bryan: “Now that we’re talking about shipping.. all 4 of us in this room, we’re too old for that. Not that we’re better than it, it just doesn’t relate to us. People have to explain it to us. When I watch TV shows, that’s not how I interact with them. I’m not saying it’s wrong; I don’t think about these characters getting together if the story’s not going that way. But, I found myself shipping Mako with the operator woman that he’s sitting next to during the evacuation. He’s like totally bombing, but I kinda think she’s like ‘that’s kinda cute.’ He’s like oblivious. He probably went back and he just called the operator.” Mike: “He’s always pretending he needs to be patched through. Man now we’re writing our own fanfiction.” … Bryan: “After 12 years of being exposed to this it finally wore onto me.. so it’s time to get out.”

- In the script there was a “super-council meeting” where Su talked to the world leaders, but it got cut.

- Bryan says all the shots of Su are down-shots and all the shots of Kuvira are up-shots. It gives her more authority.

- Mike says he imagined that Toph as a kid ran away to the swamp sometimes. Bryan says she went there with the badgermoles and for someone to draw a fancomic of that.

- They say the bear in the Little Ba Sing Se Palace was taxidermy, or more likely just plastic. Tim: “The queen ate the real one.” Bryan: “She even ate the fur.”

- Bryan agrees with Toph that Korra might be subconsciously not wanting to heal.

Episode 4: Mike, Bryan, Katie Mattila, Colin Heck

- Bryan says they toned down Meelo from how the episode was originally. “There’s a fine line between being funny jerk and being jerky” and he was being just jerky.

- The infinite looping spirits were added in storyboarding. Lauren made the looping infinite.

- Bryan was surprised by avatarparallel posts showing Toph’s poses being so similar to her ones from ATLA. Colin says he had nothing to do with it. They say (storyboard artist) Natasha is a huge fan and she might have done it.

- Mike says the animal Ikki finds is a sugarglider and the idea was it would be her animal companion but she’s not in the show that much after, so he only shows up in one later shot.

- Bryan: “I worked on that map a really long time.”

Episode 5: Mike, Bryan, Janet, John Michael Higgins

- Bryan says they designed gaunt Hiroshi and he happened to look similar to Miyazaki, so they went with it.

- Mike says this season had the most CG by far and it was hard for Studio Mir.

- Bryan says seeing Princess Mononoke really changed his career.

(this commentary had a lot of John Michael Higgins being funny but not much super notable)

Episode 6: Mike, Bryan, Janet, Zelda Williams

- Korra was Zelda’s second voiceover audition and first role.

- The Zaofu domes are based on a real lotus-shaped building in India.

- Bryan says hair of a character is important because they want the silhouette of each character to be unique.

- Zelda says Varrick’s “head voices are liars” last episode was improved by John Michael Higgins.

- Ryu designed Jinora (and I think Ikki’s) new hairstyles.

- Bryan says Kuvira’s army’s haircut is based on his.

- Mike says Kuvira covered up the Toph statue in Zaofu.

Episode 7: Mike, Bryan, Aran Tanchum (Foley), Ben Wynn (Sound Design)

- Bryan says the magazine Asami is reading was changed by him from a fashion magazine to an engineering one and the image we see is a Future Industries ad that she put out calling for women in engineering.

- Interesting foleys sound they talk about: celery and cabbage for the sound of spirit vines; corn starch for snow.

- Mike says at the end of Book 3 they cut an idea for a scene where Asami invites Yin to stay at her mansion.

- Mike says he imagines Kuvira cut down the roots of the trees but not the trees themselves.

Episode 8: Mike, Bryan, Janet, PJ Byrne, David Faustino, Seychelle Gabriel

- Bryan says the structure of this clips episode was based on Samurai Champloo

- Bryan says at the end of the Mako segment, Mako has matured and doesn’t see Korra as a love interest anymore, but as a person.

- Seychelle: “Originally the way I remembered Asami’s name was because it sounded like salami.”

- When Bryan showed Janet the first trailer for Korra she cried.

- Janet asked when they decided to make Mako’s eyebrows so distinctive. Bryan says Ryu designed them.

- Bryan: “I know people like to hate on Book 2…and yeah the first half of the season was a little rough… but the color!”

- Mike says Henry Rollins was confused at first coming into record for this episode and even when he understood he still asked about Zaheer’s motivations in the joke sequences: “so like he’s messing with him” Mike recounts.

- PJ: “I have beautiful eyes. So does Opal! Our kids are going to have great eyes.” Janet: “Your Bopals are going to be adorable.” Bryan: “I like that. The offspring from a ship being just plural: ‘We made a few Bopals.’”

Episode 9: Mike, Bryan, Janet, David

- Bryan says the guy who talks here with the yellow and orange top is named Steve. He was a frequent background character in Book 1. John Michael Higgins voiced him here.

- Mike says they really wanted to bring back Zaheer this season as one of the few villains who didn’t die. Mike says at one point he wanted Zaheer to get away at the end of Book 3. He likes the idea here of Korra going to see the cause of all her pain after she’s been through so much.

- Bryan says Zaheer’s prison was a preexisting temple that they retrofitted to be a prison.

- Mike says Korra can talk to Raava both because she overcame her block and she’s in the Spirit World. He also suggests Korra was able to so freely talk to Raava during Book 2 because it was during Harmonic Convergence.

- Bryan says this episode marks where Korra is much more whole, even though she got the poison out before.

Episode 10: Mike, Bryan, Jeremy Zuckerman

- Bryan says they frequently reference AvatarWikia and other online sources for quick reference.

- Bryan says Baatar’s canon was completely based on a Nazi canon during WW2, nicknamed “Dora”.

- Mike says they didn’t want it to be so simple that everyone from the old series hooked up with each other. They met other love interests. Bryan about Toph: “She doesn’t need a guy to complete her storyline.” He didn’t see Toph, Su, or Lin’s storylines as incomplete because we know so little about Lin’s dad.

Episode 11: Mike, Bryan, Josh, Tim

- Bryan says they designed female troops for Kuvira’s army but they never got used.

- Josh: “Baatar Jr. is one of the most sniveling, unlikable characters on the show.” Bryan also dislikes him despite Baatar looking like him.

- The operator here next to Mako is the one Bryan ships Mako with. Voiced by Maria Bamford.

- Josh pitched a Bolin and Zhu Li romance a lot during Book 2.

- Bryan confirms Kuvira repurposed the platinum domes into the colossus.

- Bryan confirms Kuvira’s black spheres inside the head of the colossus are Su’s meteorites.

- Bryan says there’s automated movement to make the colossus walk (Kuvira doesn’t need to manually do that).

- Bryan: “That’s my, the fans call it headcanon, but since Mike and I are the keepers of cannon, it’s just canon: Mako met Iroh and said ‘who’s this jerk’ and then he’s like man he has nice hair.” (Mako copied Iroh’s hair)

- Josh originally wrote a much longer capture sequence for Baatar, but Mike and Tim cut it down: Josh says Bumi stayed in the airship and landed the ship on Air Temple Island.

- Mike says he thinks Kuvira really does love Baatar and that this was a tough decision for her.

- Bryan says Josh’s trying to get Zhu Li and Bolin together wasn’t shipping, it was just writing. Bryan sees his MakoxOperatorWoman as shipping though because it was a character who’d already been animated.

Episode 12: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim Dos Santos, Lauren Montgomery

- Joaquim and Bryan love Su and Kuvira’s fight in 410. Joaquim storyboarded that.

- Mike says Tim wrote all the Wu songs.

- Bryan pitched the Wu getting the badgermole plotline and then later in a meeting said “this is so stupid” to which Mike said “it was your idea!” He seems to still be not a fan of it.

- Bryan said Sunil really worked hard to nail Wu’s songs, and practiced all the time.

- Bryan says Asami originally conceived the hummingbird suits for construction projects.

- Joaquim says Will Ruzicka did the majority of the hummingbird sequence and geeked out over the tech aspects of it.

Episode 13: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Lauren

- They emphasize how collaborative the storyboarding process was on Korra. Many passovers for each sequence.

- Mike says this is Mako’s sacrificial moment and Bryan loves that trope.

- Bryan says when they mixed the Mako sacrifice scene, they tried to mimic the Zuko and Azula agni kai with the music dominating.

- Mike says this episode was very difficult to write in that they had to wrap up the season’s plot and end the series.

- Bryan says that he loves that Korra’s final move is bending pure spirit energy. The key achievement in Korra’s spiritual realization.

- Mike and Bryan identify forgiveness and compassion as the key themes ending Korra’s overall arc.

- Bryan was adamant that with a new portal in the Spirit World meant it linking to a new location. It’s based off an underwater location with icebergs in the background and underwater flowers in the foreground.

- Mike says the Korra and Kuvira confrontation in the Spirit World was one of the trickiest scenes to write and went through many writing and storyboarding revisions. He wanted Korra to be more calm towards Kuvira and less aggressive. Bryan says she seems more mature. Joaquim and Lauren even had writing revision notes on the scene.

- Mike says he did storyboard revisions on the wedding, which is rare for him. He had a specific vision for it.

- Bryan says he wishes they added chief Saikhan to the band. (Council Page, the two cops from Book 2, Hasook, and Tahno and the Wolfbats)

- Mike says Wu’s idea of turning over control of the Earth Kingdom to the states came from Bhutan where their King did the same, freely giving up power.

- Bryan on the Mako and Korra scene: “This is kinda the wrap-up of Mako and Korra’s relationship and I think it ties back to the clips episode where at the end of the day Mako is just really inspired by Korra and I think he really respects her and its not like oh that’s my ex-girlfriend or that’s my friend, he really admires Korra for who she is and it doesn’t need to be in the dynamic of a relationship. I think for me he still loves her and he’s always going to carry a torch for her, but he’s gonna move on and be a better person for knowing her and probably have a much better relationship next time.”

- Bryan says they based Korra’s statements in her talk with Tenzin (after already going in this direction) on a war journalist who was shot and he had the same message of going through all this pain and he decided for himself to give meaning to it, so he could understand what all the people in war-torn countries were going through.

- Last scene:

Bryan: “I like to imagine that Asami lied about Varrick wanting that suit just to get Tenzin out of there. She’s got this sly little look on her face. And I think she’s just like, ‘Yeah, that’ll buy me some time.’”

Joaquim: “Right now Tenzin’s going, ‘What? What? What? Where is he?’”

Bryan: “So Asami’s had a pretty rough week or so.”

Mike: “A couple weeks.”

Bryan: “So yeah this was, Mike and I worked on this scene together and I really wanted to have, I just loved their story, their whole how they started, you know kinda fought over Mako but what was cool was they never really took it out on each other and this beautiful relationship developed out of it.”

Mike: “Yeah and we wanted them to start as friends and have that friendship develop into maybe something a little more.”

Bryan: “Into love.”

Mike: “Yes.”

Bryan: “I always remember Asami’s not the bender so sometimes she wouldn’t be in the crazy action scenes so she never got to go to the spirit world. A beautiful way for them to go together and live happily ever after. The end.”