Secrets of Cartoons [Transferred from Facebook]

Avatar: The Last Airbender

· · Avatar: The Last Airbender - Nightmares and Daydreams

Today is February the 25th, 2010.
It's exactly five years to the day.

Five years since the first two episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon. My first impression of the series was that "oh, another Japanese anime show that was adapted for America." And I had no interest in watching any episodes.

In fact, I expected the show to totally bomb and be cancelled after five episodes. I was wrong. It turned out to be this HUGE success and some people were calling Avatar "the greatest cartoon of all time" (At that time I thought absolutely NO cartoon was better than The Fairly Odd Parents.)

But I didn't get into the series until about the fourth to last episode of the first season aired. And I becoming a fan of Avatar was all thanks to by best friend Jamie. He was an avid cartoon buff even though he wasn't nerdy at all. One day while we were hanging out. He said "Bro, You HAVE to watch this new show Avatar The Last Airbender, It's SO good!" So I decided "fuck it" and watched an episode.

It was the "Kings of Omashu" episode. And from that day onward, I was absolutely HOOKED on Avatar. It was like Japanese anime, but was American made. The characters were so interesting, and the plot was just....so fantastic I can't even describe it. Toph Beifong eventually became my absolute favorite character, followed by Aang. In the four years that Avatar:

The Last Airbender was in production, I had watched every episode from its awesome series premiere (The Boy in the Iceberg) to its absolutely epic series finale (Sozin's Comet PT4 Avatar Aang) I had all of the Avatar video games, and of course, all of the DVDs so I can watch them all the time when I want, where I want. So, yeah, I was a pretty big Avatar fan.

Not anymore though......

Something happened...I experienced something that killed the way I viewed any episode and the series as a whole. And to this day I will NEVER watch another Avatar episode ever again. Not even Avatar: the Legend of Korra when it eventually comes out. As much as it pains me to write this, I will tell what happened. My home was robbed over the summer while I was on vacation and they burglars stole almost all of my DVDs, including my entire Avatar the Last Airbender collection.

I was crushed, but I knew something had to be done. I got a new security system for my house, which cost a fortune to put in and I planned to buy replacement DVDs. Only problem was that I was flat out broke. That security system almost cost me my house itself. So now because I didn't even have enough money for Netflix, I was without Avatar except when they occasionally aired reruns on Nick. But then, I found something very surprising. When my house was robbed, my entire bed was pulled apart for some reason. And in-between the box spring and the mattress, I found a DVD with magic marker written on it reading ATLA 308.

ATLA obviously stands for Avatar: The Last Airbender. And 308 was the production code for probably the strangest, scariest and funniest episode of Avatar. Nightmares and Daydreams when Aang becomes a neurotic mess when he realizes the invasion of the Fire Nation is in four days, causing him to have two embarrassing dreams where he forgets his pants AND his math test when he goes to defeat Fire Lord Ozai. Then he has a nightmare that was downright creepy, and that scene always freaked me out since I first watched that episode air in 2008. It's very strange how the DVD supposedly has only one episode.

I had NO idea where it came from and I assumed it was a discarded disk when I burned some copies of some Avatar DVDs. But when I put into my DVD player which surprisingly was not stolen, I found it was something totally different. It was a menu with a black screen and only one option in white, blank text. "Nightmares and Daydreams ORIGINAL NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN VERSION" And, with no other choice (literally, the menu was only one button) I pressed the "play" button on my remote.