Korra Book 2 Blu-ray Commentary Highlights

This consists of any quotes or facts I thought were notable when watching the commentaries for all the episodes in Book 2. Things in quotes are exact quotes from the attributed speaker. Things not in quotes are paraphrased, and are very close to what they said.

Episode 1: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Tim Hedrick

- Mike, Bryan, Tim, and Josh sat down for 6 weeks before Book 2 to map out the season. Tim says one of the first things Mike said was he wanted to do “Korra starts a war.”

- Mike says he always thought the most interest aspect of having Aang’s kids in the show would be to explore what it would be like “to have your dad be the Avatar and your mom have saved the world. It might have provded some family drama.”

- Bryan on not addressing the ramifications of Book 1: “In hindsight I wish we had touched on it some more, but then again you have to move the story along. Korra’s entire saga is not about the equalists. That was the Book 1 story”. Mike says they referenced the ramifications with the new council president and the disbanding of the council.

- Mike and Bryan are big fans of Parks and Recreation. Aubrey Plaza didn’t know anything about Avatar or Korra and asked them what the show looked like. Mike and Bryan showed her the design of Eska and Aubrey says that’s exactly what she thought Eska would look like. Bryan says Aubrey Plaza reminds them of writing assistant Katie Mattila.

Episode 2: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Tim Hedrick

- They discuss how collaborative the writing process is and they all contribute to each episode. Planning is especially collaborative. They say storyboarding is also very collaborative with the many rounds of revisions the storyboards go through.

- Bryan says they only focused on getting a few people back when they got picked up for Book 1 of Korra and that many people were busy with doing things like running their own shows. (Note from Dylan: This is the first time I’ve ever gotten the impression they actually tried to get Aaron Ehasz back. They don’t mention him by name and never have since ATLA, but based on some inside info from Jake’s contact I had, I think this might actually be referring to Aaron. Which is interesting).

- Bryan reiterates that Korra was inspired by female MMA fighters like Gina Carano, and that when he learned her dad was an NFL player, that inspired him to make Tonraq big and brawny.

- There were originally 4 spirit portals. “Too many portals” says Mike. Bryan takes credit for cutting down the number of portals. Bryan says he visited the writer’s room every once in a while “as the tie-breaker”.

Episode 3: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim

- “I’m not interested in watching a show where everybody gets along perfectly,” Bryan says of some online criticism of the group drama. Mike says Korra should maybe be viewed on a season-as-a-whole basis rather than episode-by-episode. Bryan says they aren’t trying to “make the most mainstream thing possible”. He says they make the show for themselves and what they would like.

- Bryan was astounded by a fan animating so quickly the shot from color-correction of Eska he posted on tumblr.

- Mike: “To be clear, we were never trying to say that Aang was a horrible, terrible parent! It’s more about how Kya and Bumi interpreted Aang’s absence. Because he was busy, he was busy being the Avatar. It’s this natural thing where he ended up taking Tenzin around the world because he was the second to last airbender at the time and wanted to make sure his culture continued on. It came out of a place of trying to keep his culture going which was very important to him. Maybe he overlooked spending some quality time with the other kids at one time or another, but it doesn’t mean he was a deadbeat dad.”

- Bryan says they’re never interested in presenting any of their characters perfectly. He points to Aang being “unreasonable” when he lost Appa. Bryan: “Aang just had a hard time dealing with all his responsibilities”.

Episode 4: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim

- Bryan says they used reference photos Ben Wynn took of Antarctica for a lot of the South Pole scenes.

- Mike says Josh came up with all the baby sky bison names because he has a daughter who is into princesses.

- Mike about the Korra confronting the judge scene: “I do admit that this scene is a bit inspired by 24”.

Episode 5: Mike, Bryan, Tim Hedrick, Josh Hamilton

- Bryan says he auditioned for Shiro Shinobi but he didn’t cast himself (I think we’ve heard this before).

- Bryan says the Poki training was “the most filler-ish B-story we ever had”. He says it came together for him when Mike told him Tenzin had a plot with each kid.

- Bryan says Katie Mattila wrote “a few Korra scripts later”. So this means we get more Katie written episodes beyond Book 3 Episode 6!

Episode 6: Mike, Bryan, Tim Hedrick, Josh Hamilton

- Bryan says it was harder to get the network to be on board with not too much of the main character in this and the next two episodes.

- Bryan was heavily expecting more Mako hatred from the fans this season and was surprised when Korra got most of the hate instead.

- Tim and Josh loved writing the Nuktuk song. They also wrote Secret Tunnel in ATLA.

- The photograph Mako is looking at of him and Korra is from the Glacial Spirits Festival in the beginning of the season.

- Black Beauty is the name of the short cop’s mustache.

- Bolin’s line about acting being his instrument came from the Michael Jackson trial.

- They talk about a lot of the backstories they had to make up for Nick.com for ATLA and Korra. Bryan says he made up that Republic City had 3 different newspapers, two of which might have been “The Elemental Times” and “The Republic Reporter”.

- Varrick is the director of the Nuktuk movies, but he also has Assistant Directors for when he’s not there. Bryan didn’t know this.

- Josh says Asami kissing Mako was Mike’s idea. “Mawkward” says Mike.

Episode 7: Mike, Bryan, Jeremy Zuckerman, Ben Wynn

- They made Beginnings first production-wise in Book 2. Studio Mir spent a long time animating them.

- Jeremy says there are a lot more of developing existing tracks and less completely new tracks for Korra rather than Avatar, which he likes.

- Ben says the comedic sound design in Korra is more realistic and less synthetic like it was in Avatar.

- Wan was somewhat made to look like Bryan since Aang happened to look like Mike. Also Mako looks like Ben.

- Wan is 18 when we first meet him and 20 for Harmonic Convergence.

Episode 8: Mike, Bryan, Jeremy Zuckerman, Ben Wynn

- Mike says this episode is one of his top episodes of Avatar ever.

- Bryan says he changed Raava and Vaatu’s designs when they get bigger and smaller. They don’t just scale down, they get more or less intricate in design.

- Vaatu’s beam sound is a lot of layers with a lot of ship horns. Ben says it’s his most recognizable/famous sound from either series

- Bryan says the idea with the sky bison here is that they found a new species of bison like they how they are constantly finding new species in our world.

Episode 9: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Lauren Montgomery

- Joaqium brought on Lauren in ATLA when he became a director.

- Lauren storyboarded the Korra and Asami racing scene in Book 1 as freelance work. She also storyboarded the Asami joins the united forces alternate ending scene in Book 1 that never aired.

- Lauren had a big hand in designing Varrick and Kya.

- The voice actor who played the short cop said “Maiko” when he went to record the voice and Mike thought that’d be something those two would say.

- Bryan on Books 3 and 4: “Hugs galore!”

Episode 10: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Ian Graham

- Ian worked with Bryan on Invader Zim. Ian was a storyboard artist on the entirety of Avatar and was a storyboard superviser for Book 1 of Korra.

- This is one of Bryan’s favorite episodes of the season.

- Ian says this is one of his favorites of all time and loved being apart of it.

- The creepy spirits were designed by background painter Fred Stewart.

- Mike says young Korra is Korra’s inner child coming out in this scary place because she’s still spiritually immature.

- Bryan says when furry-foot turns dark he becomes closer to a dragon-fly, more insect-like. He is a “dragon-fly bunny spirit”.

- Bryan: “Iroh passed away, passed on; his physical life in Korra’s world ended. But the Spirit World is not just some catchall afterworld for humans. As we’ve seen with the Painted Lady…there are some spirits that started as humans…The idea is that very special people who are just already imbued with a lot of spiritual energy and/or cultivated it throughout their lives and developed a strong connection to the Spirit World can sort of transfer their personality to the spirit world and embody some energy there. But I like the idea, kinda like the Painted Lady, she was much more ghost like and she had been around a lot longer in the Spirit World than Iroh, but I like the idea if you check in in another 100, 500, 1000 years, he’s not just going to stay frozen in time in this afterlife, he’s becoming more and more like a spirit, and evolving away from the human… The further away he is from the memory of his corporeal self, he’s becoming more and more like an essence.”

- Bryan used pitbulls as reference for the dog spirits.

Episode 11: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Colin Heck

- Mike and Bryan met Colin while working on Mission Hill. Colin helped with revisions on Book 1 of Korra.

- This is Colin’s favorite episode of Book 2.

- President Raiko’s first name is unknown.

- Varrick’s ship having stripes is based on Dazzle ships from World War 1.

Episode 12: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Ki Hyun Ryu

- Bryan met Ryu when in South Korea working on the ATLA pilot. Ryu did key animation on the first two episodes of ATLA. He also created Foamy. He tweaked Aang’s main model in the beginning of the series that stuck.

- Bumi solo battling the spirit is Bryan’s favorite sequence in the season. Ryu did a lot of the storyboarding.

- Mike about Asami not being part of the finale fight: “Whenever we get to the finales, especially this book and then with Book 3, we just keep adding more and more character, you want to give everyone their big moment and their hero moment, but you sometimes just have to say, ‘Asami, you’re out of this one.’”

- Mike said Tim wrote in the script about Vaatu at the end: “The most evil laugh ever to have crossed Vaatu’s lips”.

Episode 13: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Lauren

- Mike: “I was worried the emotional impact of [Korra] losing her connection [to the past Avatars] wouldn’t have been as strong because she hadn’t been connecting with them a lot.” But Bryan says he shouldn’t have gotten worried because everyone got mad at them for that.

- Bryan: “Unalaq has prepared his body, and he is ready for the feels”. (About when Unalaq is about to fuse with Vaatu).

- Johane Matte was excited about Zhao.

- Originally, Eska was going to lick Bolin, not kiss him, or lick and then kiss him.

- Mike about the people being left in the Fog of Lost Souls: “Not to be to dark, but those people, their physical bodies are no longer with us.”

Episode 14: Mike, Bryan, Joaquim, Jeremy

- Mike on the episode: “You can sit around and like, nit-pick it. And maybe there’s stuff that doesn’t make sense on the physical plane, but on the spirit plane it totally makes sense.”

- Mike about Tahno: “He’s in Korra’s memory. Just remember that.” (Referring to the Spirit Tree memories thing)

- Bryan about “The Guru” in ATLA: “I thought everyone would think it would be boring, but I thought it was a story that needed to be told.”

- Bryan about the Unavaatu fight: “I just love this stuff. I’m a big Furi Kuri fan and the creator of that, he didn’t want the series to make sense, he just wanted people to watch it like MTV. You should experience and feel it on an emotional and intuitive and spiritual level. To me that’s what this crazy battle is, it’s symbolic.”

- Bryan: “To me…the emotional content of this conflict is Korra’s relationship, like her searching for Raava. And I feel like that is basing off of the relationship that was established between Wan and Raava. So I feel that, even in this giant, glowing, blue Korra, she’s searching for her and then when she finally rescues her”.

- Mike: “To me, I always thought Jinora, I saw some different theories that people had of what Jinora was doing, and the truth is, I don’t know exactly what she was doing. The idea is that she did gather some sort of spiritual energy that helped trigger the tiny, little sliver of Raava that was left in Unavaatu.”

Bryan: “She was kind of like a vehicle. She delivered it from the Spirit World and it kind of resuscitated Raava as this little heartbeat”.

Mike: “Yeah. But she wasn’t like gathering pieces of Raava and reformed her or something…But it’s open to interpretation…We wanted to tie in, all season Korra and Jinora’s spiritual journeys we paralleled and to have them combine in the end in a cool way was the goal.”

- Bryan on Desna and Eska: “Didn’t we joke in the end that in the end they were dark spirits the whole time and Unalaq was like a puppet master”.

- Mike: “So here we have the sad, definitive, but very clear break-up of Korra and Mako.”

Bryan: “We’ve talked about in a previous commentary that the Asami and Mako break-up was maybe a little too vague, so we thought we’d-”

Mike: “Make sure it’s very clear.”

Bryan: “Put a button on this one.”

Joaqium: “Put a nail in it. The cool thing though is that as sad as it is, it feels very real.”

Jeremy: “Especially with that hand.”

Bryan: “I was very particular about them leaning their foreheads together in the kiss. That was specific.”

Mike: “It’s a pretty mature break-up I would say.”

Bryan: “And then I like the lingering hand holding.”

- Book 2 was tough/rough says Bryan.