The main characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender are written in stone for viewers across the world. Aang. Katara. Sokka. Toph. Zuko. Iroh. We traveled with them for three seasons (and beyond), and whole websites are filled by fans chronicling their development, personalities, and their most quotable lines. With a series like ATLA though, it isn’t just the main characters that have passionate fans, even the most minor of minor side characters have been embraced with a zeal usually reserved for the marquee names with their own one-sheets.

How did these bit players step into the spotlight with so little screen time? What captured the imagination of fans that make these characters the object of so much love 20 years later? We spoke with the cast and crew that brought these characters to life and uncovered the origins of how they came to be.

CABBAGE MERCHANT

John O’Bryan (Staff Writer)

He was incidental in the script [“The King of Omashu”]. I just needed something in the environment that [Aang, Sokka, and Katara] were affecting as they ran by, and that’s where that guy came from. Honestly, I have no idea why I chose cabbages. It seemed like a plausible thing someone would be selling. It was just a throwaway, and then it became something endearing. Everybody has bad days where nothing seems to be going your way, and the universe is aligned against you.

Aaron Alexovich (Character Designer)

That’s life, isn’t it? There is a lot of suffering, and you have to laugh through it. You have to find the humor in all this weird ugliness.

John O’Bryan

I can’t imagine selling cabbages out of a cart is super lucrative. I’m sure if we’d gone on for a couple more seasons, he would have had his own episode.

Aaron Alexovich

I didn’t know he was going to be such a big deal. There were a million people like [Cabbage Merchant] that I drew for the show. So many merchants on that show. If I had known that guy was going to be so huge, I probably would have overthought it. I would have made him some wild-looking, zany character instead of the basic-looking guy that he is.

FOAMING MOUTH GUY

Ki Hyun Ryu (Character Designer/Animator)

At the time, the animation director was a close friend of mine. I was busy with other work, but he asked me to help animate a few scenes. One was a young man foaming at the mouth. Bryan [Konietzko] had sent me an acting reference video—it was fun, but I wanted to push it even further to make it truly hilarious and unforgettable. Nickelodeon’s team loved the result.

Bryan Konietzko (Creator)

The animation came back, and we were dying laughing. I did the ADR for that character and I somehow summoned that voice.

Ki Hyun Ryu

Later when the same character reappeared in a new season, Bryan personally called me to animate him again. I jokingly told him I would do it if he bought me a Fender Telecaster guitar—since American guitars were expensive in Korea! [Fun fact: Bryan is a professional-level guitarist!] It helped my career a lot. When I moved to the U.S. and started working in the industry, just mentioning that I animated Foaming Mouth Guy instantly made people smile and want to work with me.

JUNE

Bryan Konietzko

Lisa Yang [post-production supervisor on ATLA and the basis of June’s design] is one of my best friends still. She’s a very striking person. She’s tall but then would wear these big goth boots, so she was even taller. She had really cool hair and tattoos. She’s a total sweetheart but also a badass. Nerdy guys like myself at Nickelodeon were probably pretty scared of her. We needed a cool character, so I looked at a reference of a real person, a close friend, who’s actually tough and cool. We ended up basing Mai more on Lisa’s personality, but June has more of a physical resemblance of her.

JET

Ki Hyun Ryu

Bryan asked me to design a group of rough-and-tumble street kids. My initial color sketches were more about exploring moods rather than finalized designs. [In early sketches, Jet has red hair.] The final character color choices were determined by the directors and art directors after deeper story considerations. Growing up in Asia, I wasn’t particularly sensitive about hair and skin colors in animation—not in the way American audiences are. Later while working in the U.S., I realized that fans are very passionate about those details! As for Jet, I imagine Bryan wanted him to look more distinctly Asian, which led to the change from pale skin and red hair to darker features.

When designing Jet’s gang, I tried to make sure every member had distinctive features so they would all stand out individually. I often collect references of ordinary people and caricature them.

For each character, I wanted a truly unique face. I would go through my sketches and pick one that matched the character’s spirit, then refine it to fit the show’s style.

Joo Dee

Angela Song Mueller (Character Designer)

[Line producer] Miken Wong was known for having these incredibly long paper schedules tacked to her wall. Her job was to keep our production on track; she was our person of authority on the show. [Basing Joo Dee’s likeness on Miken] was a playful little nudge at her.

Bryan Konietzko 

I still, to this day, don’t know if she was happy about that. It does really look like her, though, in the animation.

Angela Song Mueller

It wasn’t too mean; I think it was pretty tame. It was all in good fun. That unnerving part of the character was played up for the show. Miken was not unnerving. She was very sweet! We were always sneaking people in as a little inside joke.

Chong (Secret Tunnel Guy)

Dee Bradley Baker (Chong)

They just threw that character to me. I’ve got a pretty good range, so they’ll just throw incidental characters to take a swing at. They said, “Well, this one’s got a little song.” I can sing, great! They sent me the demo of the song. I listened through it, and I thought, “Oh, this is awful. This song sounds terrible!” It didn’t sound right to me. I came into this thinking, “Ah geez, this is not gonna work. I don’t know how to make this work!”

You take your best swing, and you don’t go negative on it, but I really didn’t have any confidence in my ability to make anything from it. We recorded this kind of loopy, kind of halfway out of it, really sweet, spiritual, creative, nonpragmatic fellow. It’s one of my favorite things that I did in that whole show.

Recently, they were traveling around doing the ATLA [soundtrack] in concert. They finished the show with the “Secret Tunnel” song as the encore! I got to perform it a few times on stage, and people just all sang along with it. They all know that song, which is a wonderful thing. It’s fun to occasionally just take a little casual swing and doggone it, you knock it out of the park.