Nickelodeon has released the previously unaired pilot for Avatar: The Last Airbender via its Twitch channel. The broadcast is currently available to watch for free in Nick's archived broadcasts on Twitch, and features an early, different take on what would become the award-winning Avatar series.
The pilot was broadcast as part of Creating the Legend, a special on Twitch that detailed the creation of the series. Running for roughly 70 minutes including the pilot, Creating the Legend also features interviews, development art, shorts, and other behind-the-scenes details, narrated by series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino.
Avatar's pilot was made on a shoestring budget in order to pitch the production to TV executives, and as such, is a sort of rough draft version of the actual show. Before now, the pilot was reportedly available on some DVD collections of Avatar and was available for purchase on iTunes at one point, but the only chance many fans had to see it was probably to find a DVD bootleg on a convention table somewhere. ("Conventions" were these annual events where lots of people would come together in big rooms in major cities, in person, to sell each other fan swag and meet celebrities. Ask an expert on the Before Times, like a parent or teacher, to find out more.)
While a lot of shows' pilots also serve as their introductory episode, Avatar's pilot starts in the middle, with a defrosted Aang already adventuring alongside Sokka, Momo, and "Kya," an early version of Katara. Aang has a different voice actor and it's a bit more explicitly violent, but the biggest overall change is in the relationship between Aang and Kya; he's smug and self-assured, and she's... well, she's basically a doormat, particularly in comparison to Katara. Both Zuko and Sokka, on the other hand, are recognizably themselves even in this early version, and despite the lower budget, a lot of effort has been put into making the element-bending look good. It's a portrait of a show that hadn't quite found its feet yet, but the foundations were very much already in place.
The original Avatar: The Last Airbender ran for 3 seasons on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, for a total of sixty-one episodes. It racked up multiple awards, including multiple Annies and a Primetime Emmy, as well as an assortment of comic books, novels, a trilogy of video games, and an animated sequel, The Legend of Korra, set 70 years later in the same universe. There was also a 2010 live-action adaptation, The Last Airbender, by M. Night Shyamalan that nobody wants to think about very much.
Hype over the original Avatar was reignited earlier this year by the debut of the full series on Netflix in May, at just the right time for some quarantine nostalgia-binging. Netflix's live-action remake, however, has proven controversial recently, in the wake of DiMartino and Konietzko's announcement that they were leaving the project.
Source: Entertainment Weekly