The early concept for Avatar: The Last Airbender was partly inspired by a real-life shipwreck that happened in the early 1900s in Antarctica.
Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were inspired by a real-life historic event while they were in the early stages of developing the beloved animated series. Konietzko and DiMartino, who met at school and shared a dream of creating an animated television show, decided to collaborate and come up with a pitch for Nickelodeon. They knew they needed an idea that appealed to and was appropriate for children – either a show about children or non-human creatures that children could relate to.
Konietzko and DiMartino started sketching. As DiMartino recalls in Avatar Spirits, a short documentary on the making of Avatar, “we spread out all of our ideas on the table … and one of the drawings was something Bryan had done.” Among the first sketches by Bryan Konietzko was one of a young, bald boy with two companions: a cyclops robot monkey with an arrow on its head and a polar bear dog who walked upright on its hind legs. The polar bear dog became Appa (though the idea was later repurposed for Naga in Avatar: The Legend of Korra) and the robot monkey became Momo. The creators decided to take the arrow from the monkey’s head and put it on the boy – and thus the boy became Aang, the Avatar.
But these characters needed a world and a story, so DiMartino thought of Antarctica. Specifically, he thought of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition on the Endurance. Ernest Shackleton led several British expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s, but the part of Shackleton’s story that DiMartino seemed most taken with was the element of survival. In 1915, the Endurance sank in Antarctica, stranding its 28-man crew. Shackleton and his crew journeyed by foot and boat for months until they were rescued – all of them. No one from the Endurance died on that expedition. “I had been watching documentaries about Shackleton’s crazy Antarctic expedition,” DiMartino says in Avatar Spirits, “and the ship getting caught in the ice and all these guys surviving against all odds.”
DiMartino and Konietzko were intrigued by the idea that humans could manage to survive the harshest climates on Earth. Konietzko was brainstorming when he was at yoga “drenched in sweat,” as he recalls in Avatar Spirits, “and I thought of combining his Shackleton idea with this kid.” The connection between Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic voyage and Avatar is most prominently reflected in the inciting event of the series. In Avatar’s pilot, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” Katara and Sokka discover Aang, who had – against all odds – survived being trapped in an iceberg for a hundred years, not unlike Shackleton’s men who survived the cold and unforgiving Antarctic.
Avatar’s characters, story, world, and concept resonate as much with audiences today as they did when Avatar: The Legend of Aang first aired, but imagining the idea of Avatar: The Last Airbender coming from an actual historical event seems strange – especially an event that likely wouldn’t interest children. And Konietzko’s original concept for Aang, Appa, and Momo is very different from the finalized versions. But once the two ideas melded together and gave Konietzko and DiMartino a solid starting point, the rest of the award-winning show came together in a masterfully created and produced work of children’s animation.
The pilot of Avatar: The Last Airbender can be watched here.
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