Avatar and an Oral History of the Blind Bandit

This article is presented in partnership with Nickelodeon and appears in the Den of Geek x Avatar: The Last Airbender special edition releasing in mid-July.

As Avatar: The Last Airbender’s second season kicked off, fans were excited to see the further adventures of Aang, Sokka, and Katara. The safe choice would have been to keep that core group the same throughout the run of the series, but Aang needed an earthbending teacher as part of his journey to master all four elements and save the world. He’d find one in the most unlikely of places.

Season two, episode six, “The Blind Bandit,” introduced the brash, sarcastic, and soon-to-be earthbending teacher, Toph: a young character who shrugged off her noble upbringing and ran away from her family to embrace the little “chaos gremlin” she really was.

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Produced near the halfway point of ATLA’s run, “The Blind Bandit” offers valuable insight into the production process of a show that was at the top of its creative output yet still subject to the intense challenges that come with producing animation. Introducing a new lead character, a task that needed special attention, had to be undertaken in addition to the demanding work that went into every other episode of ATLA. How did the team accomplish it? What challenges did they face along the way? 

With insights and recollections from the ATLA cast and crew, we look back on the production of the episode that introduced the young fighter who quickly cemented herself as an irreplaceable and beloved core member of the “GAang.”

Part 1: PLANNING THE EPISODE

Michael Dante DiMartino (Creator, Writer)

Very early on, we knew Aang was going to need an earthbending teacher, and there would be a new character joining the group.

Bryan Konietzko (Creator)

We knew it was going to be a blind Earthbender, and we had the name.

Michael Dante DiMartino

We had a little writing retreat for Book Two, and I remember talking about Toph.

Bryan Konietzko

I might have brought some scribbles of Toph back from that. I remember being inspired by Range Murata and starting Toph’s design quite early on. We had gone through the debate on whether or not to keep her a boy or make her a girl; writer Aaron Ehasz made really good arguments about how there were already two boys in the group, and if we added a third, it really put Katara in a different position.

Michael Dante DiMartino

Having a cute girl saying these tough-guy lines made it funnier.

Bryan Konietzko

But then we had some resistance from the network.

Michael Dante DiMartino

There is always a little bit of the toy side of things pushing back on stuff. 

Ethan Spaulding (Director)

Bryan wanted to show the powers-that-be that it doesn’t always have to be a guy. In relation to the toys, they’d say, “No one’s gonna buy a Katara figure.” I know this not to be true because of Star Wars. You want Princess Leia; you want all the characters because of the storytelling.

Michael Dante DiMartino

Sometimes, we’d say we could change that; it’s not a big deal. Other times, in a case like this, we had all debated it, we all decided this is the best path forward. We decided that we weren’t going to go back. Usually, if we were like, “This is really important to us and the choice we’re making,” somebody somewhere would back down, and then we’d just continue on our way.

Angela Song Mueller (Character Designer)

We’d all known about Toph for a while. By the end of season one, we knew she was coming. It was just a matter of when. We all knew this big personality was going to be part of Team Avatar soon. As a crew, we were really looking forward to being able to include a lot of that stuff with her. 

PART 2: WRITING THE EPISODE

Michael Dante DiMartino

I staked my claim on writing that episode early on. “I want to do the Toph one!” 

Zach Tyler Eisen (Aang)

Toph gets such a great character introduction. She takes on this ring full of professional wrestlers, excuse me, professional benders. She’s the most powerful Earthbender in the world.

Michael Dante DiMartino

My love affair with wrestling goes back to my childhood with the Hulk Hogan days. In college, I didn’t watch it at all, but I got back into it in my twenties. It was The Rock Era.

Bryan Konietzko

The Attitude Era. I came over to Mike’s, and we had this novel fascination with it. The ridiculous melodramatic theater of it all.

Michael Dante DiMartino

You meet Toph in the ring, and you think she’s one way, and they show up to find her at the mansion, and she’s in this dress and acting all properly. In the same way that wrestlers put on personas, she was putting on this persona for her parents, but that wasn’t really her. 

John O’Bryan (Staff Writer)

I wrote the Fire Nation Man anthem. His Russian accent was a thing they’d do in professional wrestling. “I’m going to rile these people up by bringing out this foreign guy from a country no one likes.”

Michaela Jill Murphy (Toph)

I was absolutely not aware of the wrestling references. I did not have cable. I did not have a lot of pop culture references available to me. I watched a lot of G-rated Winnie the Pooh-esque things. I liked Cats, the musical. I was lying in the sunshine, which was very Toph of me.

Part 3: VOICE ACTING

Michael Dante DiMartino

We tried to get The Rock to play The Boulder, but he was already too famous at that point. 

Bryan Konietzko

The response we got was, “The Rock does not do TV.”

Michael Dante DiMartino

Actually, I think it was, “He does not do animation.” Obviously, he went on to do a lot of animation. It’s alright, Mick Foley’s awesome.

Bryan Konietzko

It all worked out. No hard feelings.

Jack De Sena (Sokka)

Sokka’s love of wrestling comes from a very real place. I was a huge wrestling fan growing up, so it was very easy for me to channel that unbridled raw emotion. Had I known that Mick Foley was playing the role, I would have lost my mind even more. I would have somehow insisted upon arranging schedules so I could be there.

Michaela Jill Murphy

I got the audition for Toph while I was visiting my grandparents in Indiana. I was 11-ish. We had an old Snowball USB mic, but we did not have a great audio setup. Thank goodness my mom realized it was an important audition, so we ended up going to a music shop with a studio in the back. It was that first scene in “The Blind Bandit” where Toph says, “Sounds to me like you’re scared, Boulder!” My grandma came with us and said, “Who reads the other lines?” And I go, “No one, you’re just supposed to read your character’s lines,” and she said, “Well, that’s silly. Why don’t I read The Boulder?” So she came into the studio with me. She was pretty great and, I mean, I booked the job!

Zach Tyler Eisen

I was concerned that my voice and Michaela’s voice were very similar. We both had this high-pitched quality to it. But they play into that in the episode. She says, “Do people really wanna see two little girls fighting out here?”

Michaela Jill Murphy

It was all very relatable. I moved around a lot as a kid. There are lots of different schools, lots of new friend groups. As an actor kid, your schedules are weird, so you have to miss birthday parties or the school dance. I was used to not fitting it. So, I was a little late to the Avatar party. They already had this group, and I’m like, “I’m here now. Let me in! I’m going to help you save the world!” 

Jack De Sena

Michaela was such a joy to work with. She was quite young. Very precocious, there were some real Toph similarities. I loved that they were building another comedic voice into the group; that was really fun to play off of.

Andrea Romano (Voice Director)

Because she was such a terrific actress and such a together person, she was embraced by the cast right on because she was just so darn good as this character. She had that sarcastic Toph tomboy edge that was required. What happened in the storyline, that they wanted Toph to be a part of the group, is exactly what happened with the cast.

Jennie Kwan (Suki)

Michaela basically came up to my waist, and she was a little chatterbox. At the time, she went by Jessie Flower, and she really did wear jeans that had flowers. She would carry a little bouquet. It was quite cute. She was like a little caricature of herself. 

Michaela Jill Murphy

I had lots of different fun moods. Sometimes, outfits or accessories would change accordingly. I’ve had lots of eras of Michaela fashion and vibes. I don’t particularly remember that moment, but it absolutely checks out.

Andrea Romano

I was always a big proponent of ensemble records. I always wanted all the actors in the room at the same time, if at all possible, because half of acting is reacting.

Dee Bradley Baker (Appa, Momo)

I did the voices of the badgermoles clearing the arena. I am not a sound effects guy. They don’t hire me for sound effects. That you get from a library. Those are generic, and you might be able to craft them into the performance that you want, but it’s going to take a lot of time. There’s the efficiency of hiring an actor to just bring it to you right now, and that’s what I do. With the badgermoles, you could see the effort, so I, as the actor, layer in the intent. The movement of effort that’s implied within the sound. Even with Appa, he may just make a grunt, but there’s generally an opinion behind that grunt, so I try to layer that in there. It’s part of why people are still so fond of these characters. They have a humanity to them.

Michaela Jill Murphy

So many people love that scene between Toph and The Boulder. At conventions, I get lots of wrestling fans, wrestlers, martial artists, and also lots of frat bros who love doing The Boulder lines with me.

Part 4: STORYBOARDING AND DESIGN

Ethan Spaulding

We got a CD audio track; they’d call it a radio play. It’s everything cut together, all the takes they liked, so we had that to listen to. That’s always been a guide. You can just focus on telling the story in pictures. You just listen to the track and get ideas from the voice performance. I knew this episode was going to be fun. Mike’s scripts were always the best because he comes from an animation background, so he wrote visually. When you read it, you could see it in your head. You’d cast the artists on your team like you would a live-action. Some are better at action, some are better at comedy, some can do both. Each artist would basically get an act. I did the opening scene where Sokka’s trying to get a “man bag.” I had never heard that term before.

Michael Dante DiMartino

The stuff Bryan boarded in Act One was my favorite because it introduced Toph’s “seeing” ability. We’d written in the script [that] she can see with her feet, but Bryan really had the idea of how to visualize that.

Angela Song Mueller

Little things would come up about Toph’s outfit. Bryan would remind us she’d be walking around barefoot all the time. We’d have to make sure that we were designing her around her abilities. What makes her stand out is, for a female character, she has that wide, confident stance. She’s firmly planted. She’s a very grounded character. Even the silhouette of her costuming that Bryan had designed for her is very boxy; it’s very squared out. It alludes to her kung-fu style. On top of that, you can’t not say her little hair tassel puffs do a lot for the shape of her hair.

Ethan Spaulding

We did too many shots in that episode because of the action and the fights. Usually, you want to get around 300 shots per episode. We had 600. In hindsight? That’s irresponsible. We killed the animation studio. They did basically two episodes worth of work for one.

Bryan Konietzko

Sometimes, the higher shot count is more efficient if you’re cutting around action. There’s a lot of limited anime where they cut around a lot, but there’s not a lot of motion. It depends on what action you’re covering and how much movement you have.

Ethan Spaulding

Mike and Bryan would put revision post-its over drawings. You’d look around the room, and it’s almost all yellow post-its. They redid the whole show, but then you have a great guidepost [for the rest of production.] Some of it was so good I was like, “I’m just going to use these and not clean them up. The animators will understand these drawings.” I got in trouble with Bryan because when it was time for animatic or shipping, he said, “These are too rough, man.”

Bryan Konietzko

On the first pass of the Act Three fight, I remember Mike and I were like, “It’s not quite there yet.” You don’t make any friends on those days when you have to give those big notes.

Ethan Spaulding

So Bryan, Justin Ridge—a board artist—and I came in on a Saturday, and we went through all the shots. 

Bryan Konietzko

They did a great job, and it all came together really well.

Angela Song Mueller

By the time I came on (the episode), I’m there to be like, “What can I do for you?” Bryan already had a solid pre-design set for most of those wrestlers, and he says, “I have these sketches. Can you take them to final? Can you go ahead and clean them up?” I’d be helping him clean up what he’s got down already. Then there’s going to be a lot of ancillary characters and incidentals. I’d just get lost in the rabbit holes of online reference. I was one of the lucky few to have a computer actually at my desk. It was hard to find some of that research sometimes. You would tap into something, and it would just take you down a whole rabbit hole of gorgeous historical outfits and designs. I’m just like, “How far can I go with this, and is Bryan gonna get mad if I put too many flowers in Toph’s mom’s hair?” I’d happily tack on more, but gotta think about our poor animators and save them from dying.

Part 5: LEGACY

Ethan Spaulding

We got the VHS with the raw animation back, and it came out looking stellar. Everyone had fun working on this because of the subject matter. The writers had fun; the board team had fun; and then the animators, you could tell they had fun with all these characters.

Bryan Konietzko

This was a really special episode. Mike and I both had the opportunity to personally put even more care into this one than we had with other episodes. I’m usually the one that picks on our old work the hardest, but this one? It came out pretty good.

Michael Dante DiMartino

The character animation in this one is definitely one of the best. Among the top episodes for character animation.

Michaela Jill Murphy

A lot of people, myself included, were so grateful to have a character like Toph. They were used to seeing a more feminine display of strength or communication, being collected and cordial. Toph was not any of that. She got to be a little gremlin. Sometimes, you just want to wake up and make hairy pits jokes. So many people, especially girls growing up, would say, “I was the tomboy. I was always making fart jokes. I always loved being more messy and dirty and wrestling with neighbors and brothers. I never felt like I saw a female character who was as grounded and tough as I was.” Toph was so fiercely against all the control. Any time she gets to wake up and just be who she is and not have to worry about judgment from anyone else? There’s no better feeling than that: just being 100% authentically you without having to adhere to any weird standards.

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