This is the best way this question has been phrased, and it poses some interesting questions itself. I seem to remember the order from Nick on A:TLA was a bigger, Lord of the Rings style epic with an anime style. It seemed like a chance Nickelodeon took, since nothing else they’ve deemed a success has been remotely like Avatar.
I’d guess it was a way to compete with other channels like Cartoon Network that was porting over Anime in programming blocks.
Then, Avatar got big and budgets increased to the point where the Sozin’s Comet conclusion is, in essence, a film and was aired as such.
A few years later, Korra is announced as a mini-series, then later gets extended into Book Two.
I’d guess that Nickelodeon got a few episodes of Korra back (maybe up to The Spirit of Competition? But that’s a total shot-in-the-dark guess. At least the first two since Nick had those ready-to-release as soon as Korra got a certain number of social networking likes) and realized the quality could be extended.
And to a certain extent, this has paid off. Korra has been beating Primetime shows in it’s target demographic and I’m pretty sure that makes it the best thing Nick has going. Nickelodeon is under tons of pressure this year for not pulling it’s weight in the Viacom family.
I don’t mean to call Emily out or anything, but Korra can totally kill a character. You can’t blow someone’s brains out the back of their head, but of course kids can deal with death, as a matter of fact, some of the most memorable family entertainment of all time has been about death, namely Disney entertainment. Bambi? The Lion King? The natural inclination to kill the bad guy at the end of the movie? They stab Ursula in the stomach with a wooden shiv in the end of The Little Mermaid!
The argument that a character might die is based more in the kind of story Matt, Devindra and I think that we’re seeing. It would have to be a really sloppily handled death for Nickelodeon to pull it for censorship reasons.
And I think the show is written well enough that someone could die. Aang never had killing in him, but Aang was younger than Korra when we were spending time with him.
I dunno – taking people’s bending away is a death equivalent for sure and they’re making that look super-frightening in the series thus far.
I keep thinking back to Leaves From The Vine. That song is about reacting to death, it’s about loss, it’s from the first series.
And it’s beautiful, regardless of how old some marketing executive thinks the target audience is.
This would be a good point to re-iterate that, yes, I do work for Viacom, but all this information came from public sources and I do not speak for Viacom or any of it’s subsidiaries when I’m talkin’ ‘bout Korra. : )