LOS ANGELES — While co-creating the live-action TV adaptation of the magical children’s book series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” for Disney+, Jon Steinberg looked to several classic films starring plucky young heroes for inspiration.

“There were a lot,” Steinberg said, rattling off titles including 1986’s “Flight of the Navigator,” 1985’s “The Goonies” and 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

“That was a genre that I felt like I was frequently, constantly exposed to as a kid. … It’s not talking down to kids in any way. It’s just talking to everybody. And that was sort of the unmeetable ambition that we set out for the show.”

When asked about live-action TV series that informed his approach to “Percy Jackson,” however, Steinberg drew a blank.

“I don’t know that I’d ever quite seen anything like this” on TV, he said.

“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is among a growing number of epic, coming-of-age stories that are finally getting the live-action TV treatment in the streaming era. For decades, the tween demographic — too old for “Sesame Street” and “Bluey” (rated TV-Y) but not quite old enough for “Stranger Things” and the original “Gossip Girl” (rated TV-14) — has turned to books, animated series and their movie adaptations for larger-than-life storytelling designed specifically for them.

TV was where preteens got their live-action fix of lighthearted, multi-camera sitcoms such as “iCarly” and “Zoey 101” on Nickelodeon or “Lizzie McGuire” and “That’s So Raven” on Disney Channel. Live-action adaptations of world-building, tween-facing intellectual property such as “Percy Jackson,” “Harry Potter” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” were mostly reserved for the big screen.

That’s starting to change.

All three of those properties, which had previously been adapted into live-action feature films — to mixed results — are now getting a second life on the small screen more than a decade later.

Executives and creatives offered some insight as to what has triggered this resurgence.

For starters, the visual technology needed to convincingly translate these grandiose sagas to live action has “become so much more advanced and so much less expensive” in recent years, said Jabbar Raisani, an executive producer and director on Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” He also credits fantasy sensation “Game of Thrones” with awakening studios to TV’s full potential as a storytelling medium.

As TV has evolved, audiences’ viewing habits and tastes have become more voracious and sophisticated. And children are no exception, added Ayo Davis, president of branded television at Disney.

“These streaming platforms are giving everyone the ability to be more expansive and ambitious in the way that these stories are being told,” Davis said.

“Pulling from these epic tales that are filled with these big heroic adventures is something that can touch [kids] in a meaningful way. And having the ability to do it right on a platform that can reach a global audience simultaneously is really key.”

Based on Rick Riordan’s 2005 novel “The Lightning Thief” inspired by Greek mythology, the first season of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” (TV-PG) follows the 12-year-old demigod son of Poseidon on a dangerous quest to return Zeus’ stolen lightning bolt and restore peace to Mount Olympus.

Following its premiere on Dec. 19, the pilot episode amassed 26.2 million views in its first three weeks on Disney+ and Hulu, according to the company. The entire debut season has racked up more than 110 million hours streamed, reflecting a demand among young audiences for big-budget, live-action TV adaptations. (Reports have speculated that “Percy Jackson” cost between $12 million and $15 million per episode. Disney declined to comment on its budgets.)

It appears that companies such as Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery — which recently reaffirmed that it is moving forward with a live-action “Harry Potter” series set to debut on Max in 2026 — are willing to spend big bucks on immersive kids programming despite Wall Street pressure to cut costs in other areas.

That’s because when they work, they have crossover appeal for parents and nostalgic adults eager to reconnect with their childhood heroes.

Research firm Parrot Analytics found that since 2020, the demand for young-adult shows has consistently surpassed supply, suggesting that such a content space is “ripe for further investment,” according to Parrot strategist Brandon Katz.

During its monthlong run, the freshman season of “Percy Jackson” was roughly 19 times more in demand than any other show that aired in that window, landing it in the top 2.7% of series in terms of overall engagement, the research firm found. Disney in February announced it would stream a second season.

“It is arguably Disney+’s biggest hit — and perhaps their most important hit — outside of the Star Wars, Marvel universes,” Katz said. “The fact that they were able to get a live-action series that wasn’t in the Star Wars and Marvel universes to reach such heights bodes well for them moving forward.”

The new “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (TV-PG) has shown early promise as well. The latest live-action take on the acclaimed animated series — created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko for Nickelodeon in the early 2000s — was 11.7 times more in demand than the average TV show in the month leading up to its debut, Parrot Analytics said.

Since it arrived Feb. 22 on Netflix, the show — which centers on a powerful 12-year-old who must master the elements of fire, water, earth and air in order to save the world — has racked up more than 21.2 million views and claimed the No. 1 spot on Netflix’s Global Top 10 English TV list, the streamer reported.

Despite their substantial built-in fan bases, costly live-action re-imaginings of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “Percy Jackson” were still a bit of a gamble for the studios — if the previous film attempts are any indication.

Elizabeth Yu as Azula in Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” (Robert Falconer/Netflix/TNS)

M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender” (2010) was poorly received by fans and critics. And though Chris Columbus’ “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” (also 2010) got a sequel and didn’t provoke the same level of vitriol, it came nowhere close to reaching the status of Columbus’ first “Harry Potter” film.

Adapting the stories into a different live-action medium gave the “Percy Jackson” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” showrunners a chance to make different choices than the filmmakers did. This time around, for instance, the child actors who play the main trio in “Percy Jackson” actually match the ages of the kids in the books — unlike the movie, which aged the characters up a few years.

Steinberg said that while it’s easy to understand the instinct to avoid certain production complications that come with casting younger actors, “everything changes the moment you’re in a teen story instead of a preteen, adolescent story.”

“It just didn’t feel like it was gonna be honest if it wasn’t coming out of the voice of a kid,” Steinberg said.

Raisani also pointed out that streaming platforms permit creatives to take the time they need to finish and fine-tune all the episodes before the season is released. In linear TV, a season of a show typically begins airing before all of the episodes are filmed and completed.

Because the series was made for streaming, Raisani explained, the “Avatar” team had the “luxury” of being able to go back and tweak earlier episodes — a key advantage when working on an ambitious project with a complex story and heavy visual effects.

For example, Raisaini said that a digital double of the high-flying protagonist, Aang, wasn’t ready by the time “Avatar” started filming. So they blocked out certain scenes during production and inserted the digital replica after the fact.

“That’s the benefit of working in a nonlinear delivery platform,” Raisani said.

Like linear TV, movies have their limitations too.

The makers of Paramount Pictures’ “The Last Airbender” and 20th Century Fox’s “The Lightning Thief” were tasked with condensing several hours and hundreds of pages worth of content respectively into feature-length films.

The eight-episode seasons of the new “Percy Jackson” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” enabled the creators to cover significantly more ground and potentially deliver more faithful interpretations of the source material.

“There were so many episodes, and there was that depth of character exploration from the original animation,” said Peter Friedlander, head of scripted series at Netflix. “To match that to a live-action [TV series] feels really organic.”

Steinberg speculated that a tender moment in which Percy and his friend Annabeth bond over their blessing-and-curse predicament as demigods while falling asleep on a train would have been the first scene to get cut had “Percy Jackson” been adapted into another film instead.

“There just would have been so much stuff that wouldn’t have fit,” Steinberg said. “The chance to really spend a minute and indulge the emotional story as much as the adventure comes with the format.”

Both Disney’s Davis and Netflix’s Friedlander said their companies are constantly looking for fresh tween-facing IP to adapt and are committed to providing a variety of live-action viewing options for that demographic — from feel-good sitcoms to captivating odysseys.

“It’s not an either-or,” Davis said. “We are doing both.”

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In our age of information overload, remembering things can be a daunting task. But as a memory researcher and college professor, I’ve found some hope in that challenge.

In January 2021, like millions of educators and having watched my own daughter struggle with online learning, I worried about teaching through a screen. I had spent two decades basing grades primarily on midterms and finals, but it’s tough to prevent cheating during online tests. So I had to let go of traditional methods of testing to measure learning. Then I realized I could use a different testing system — to drive learning.

In my lab, we were doing brain imaging studies based on decades-old research showing that testing people on recently viewed material dramatically increases their retention over time. Following the model in our experiments, I gave my students a three-day window to take an open-book quiz online every week, after which they could see the correct answers and either learn from their mistakes or reinforce what they got right.

The point of these quizzes wasn’t to torture my students but prompt them to think critically about the material regularly, with my feedback and support. The student response to this approach exceeded my wildest expectations; 85% strongly agreed that weekly quizzes, with feedback, helped them learn. (If you are not a teacher, let me assure you that students almost never say anything positive about any kind of test.)

Testing works as a learning tool because it exploits a simple principle of human brain function. We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges, a phenomenon called error-driven learning.

Neuroscience has shown that error-driven learning is key to learning new motor skills: We learn to make skilled movements by observing the difference between what we intend to do and what we actually do. For instance, when musicians practice a song they already know fairly well, some parts will be relatively simple, but others a struggle. Rather than recording a new memory of every part of the song each time it is played, the better solution for the brain is to tweak existing memories to better handle challenging parts.

Error-driven learning can also explain the benefits of actively learning by doing, rather than passively learning by memorizing. When you drive around a new neighborhood, you are going to learn much more about the layout of the area than if you go through the same neighborhood as a passenger in a taxi. Actively navigating a new environment gives you the opportunity to learn in real time from the outcomes of your actions.

A huge number of academic studies show something similar. Comparing test results for students who read material over and over again against those who read it fewer times but repeatedly test their knowledge, it’s the latter who retain the most long-term.

Scientists don’t fully agree on the reasons why testing has such a powerful effect on memory. The simplest explanation is that testing exposes your weaknesses. In general, we tend to be overconfident about our ability to retain information. Those who are tested have the humbling, yet productive, experience of sometimes failing to recall information they thought they had learned well.

Beyond its ability to open our eyes to our weaknesses, the struggle itself may make us better learners. Computers and AI systems learn through trial and error, tweaking the connections between their artificial neurons to get better and better at pulling up the right answer. Cognitive psychologists Mark Carrier and Harold Pashler theorized that humans can learn through a similar struggle.

My lab found evidence to support this in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, where we found that testing increases activity in the hippocampus, a memory center in the brain. In our study, we used our “hippocampus in a box” computer model that simulates how this brain structure supports learning and memory. We saw that the benefits of testing don’t come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you’ve learned.

When you test yourself, you try to generate the right answer, but the result may not be quite perfect. Your brain will come up with a blurry approximation, creating a struggle to get it right that provides opportunities to learn more.

Stress testing your memory like this exposes the weaknesses in connections between neurons so the memory can be updated, strengthening useful connections and pruning the ones getting in the way. Rather than relearning the same thing over and over, it’s much more efficient to tune up the right neural connections and fix just those parts that we are struggling with. Our brains save space and learn quickly by focusing on what we didn’t already know.

Although we usually benefit from error-driven learning, there is one important condition: It works if you eventually get close to the right answer, or at least if you can rule out wrong answers. You don’t benefit from mistakes if you have no idea what you did wrong.

Another influential factor is the timing of your learning. Virtually all students, my past self included, have crammed for exams. While my all-nighters worked in the short run, most of what I had learned would slip away just days after the end of the semester. I’m not alone; a mountain of findings in psychology show that you can generally get much more bang for your buck by putting gaps between learning sessions rather than by spending the same amount of time cramming.

To understand why that might be, suppose you read my latest article on episodic memory while sitting on the couch in your living room, then the next day you reread it at the beach. At first, the hippocampus can pull out the memory of the last time you read the article, but it will struggle a little because you’re seeing the same information in a different context. As a result, coalitions of neurons in the hippocampus reorganize to place more emphasis on the content of what you read, so the information is less tied to where and when you first read it.

Computer modeling helps show how, if you keep returning to the same information periodically, the hippocampus can continually update those memories until they have no discernible context, making it easier to access them in any place at any time.

Error-driven learning tells us that whether you are trying to learn surfing, Spanish or sociology, if it comes effortlessly, you aren’t getting the most out of your experience. Even if it’s not pleasant, struggling with information can be a good thing. It often means you’re really learning.

Charan Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis. This essay was adapted for the Los Angeles Times from the author’s forthcoming book, “Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters.”

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After being ignored for a quarter-century, monopoly power, and how it can harm both customers who buy products or workers who sell their labor, is drawing the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

Groceries are a case in the news. The FTC is challenging Kroger’s proposed purchase of Albertsons. These are “the No. 1 and No. 2 traditional supermarket chains in the United States” according to the FTC challenge.

Some of the issues would not have popped up 50 years ago. For example, in assessing competition, the FTC had to include the phrase “traditional” because Target, Walmart, Costco and Sam’s Club all sell a lot of groceries, as do stores with a narrower range of products like Aldi.

All of that will get ironed out in legal challenges and an eventual case in federal court. The important thing is that the federal government is once again challenging monopoly power — and that is easier to do before the fact than after.

If only it were so with the pharmaceutical industry. Monopoly power in this exemplifies the difficulties of dealing with an empty stall after the horse disappears. For decades, U.S. administrations were both complacent and complicit as mergers and buyouts sharply reduced the number of drug manufacturers and assorted distribution industries.

There always were collusive acts in the industry, such as fixing the price of the antibiotic Tetracycline in the 1950s, but these were parried by FTC actions. Worldwide, the industry was distributed across several countries with large sectors in Switzerland, Germany, France and Japan in addition to the U.S. There were not great differences between countries in terms of patent and licensing laws.

All this began to change in the 1980s. The Reagan administration had little interest in antitrust. A new thought in jurisprudence attacked government regulation. And pharma lobbies persuaded Congress to change patent laws and enforcement to favor existing firms.

Thus, between 1995 and 2015, the number of major pharma firms shrank from 60 to 10. With the U.S. indifferent to anti-competitive practices, our patent laws more favorable than anywhere else and our government willing to carry water for pharma companies in international trade negotiations, the consolidation often meant U.S. companies absorbing ones from elsewhere. U.S. global market share grew; that of Europe generally declined.

Conservative donors such as the Koch brothers funded organizations supporting a new generation of legal conservatives, such as Supreme court justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brent Kavanaugh. With GOP administrations naming judges over 20 of the 28 years from 1980 to 2008, federal courts grew more conservative and lost interest in supporting government-enforced competition when challenged.

Democratic President Barack Obama wanted the Affordable Care Act but could only secure passage by giving in to GOP demands for a ban on Medicare bargaining with suppliers over drug prices.

Over the same years, the sharp reduction in health care competition generally included the emergence of “pharmacy benefit managers,” often soon absorbed by insurance firms such as United Healthcare and Cigna. There was a matching consolidation in drug retailing with CVS and Walgreens emerging dominant.

All of this contributed to the high cost of health care in our country with its percentage of GDP well above that in other industrialized market economies. This is an implicit tax on the economy as a whole.

Moreover, the system is mindlessly complex with, for example, Medicare beneficiaries having to choose between a bewildering array of drug plans. Some people, like me, pay almost nothing for the large numbers of meds I take, while others, often poorer than me, are out of pocket hundreds of dollars.

To use a Biblical phrase, “this ought not so to be.”

But once we get ourselves in a mess, it isn’t easy to get back out. Early antitrust actions broke up both Standard Oil and International Harvester. However, doing something similar today in health care would be difficult.

Reform would be easier if Congress understood the economics of drug issues better. Leftist independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is an impassioned critic of pharma companies and loves to grill its executives in hearings. On YouTube and other sites one can find multiple video clips of him and other members of Congress doing this.

Their attacks usually start with the same questions: “What do you charge in the U.S. for one patient’s course of drug X? What does it cost you to manufacture that quantity of drug X? What do you get for that same quantity of drug X in Canada or Argentina or South Africa?”

The executive always answers with a high sale price in the U.S., a much lower manufacturing cost and a lower price in other countries than here. This is not irrelevant information, but it is incomplete and misleading.

First, Sanders or other questioners don’t specify what they mean by “cost to manufacture.” Is this just the variable costs of ingredient chemicals, labor and utilities? Is it just the marginal cost, the increase in total costs from turning out one more unit? Or does it include amortizing the fixed costs of the buildings and machines needed for production? What about the labor and research costs that went into developing the products and getting them approved? Drug companies can always argue that if costs are artificially lowered, R&D would suffer, and, by extension, so would sick people.

Those questions would be addressed in an Econ 101 class. But drugs are a industry in which labor, raw materials and utilities often are a small fraction of the company’s total costs. It is, in fact, the research and development of new drugs and all the trials needed to get regulatory approval that dominate costs. And these are largely ”fixed costs” in the economic sense — they don’t change if 10,000 doses are sold each year or 10 million.

Over anything but the very short run, fixed costs must be paid for any firm to stay in business. But pharma is complex. Sen. Sanders could ask, “What did it cost you to develop drug X and get it approved?” But that would only get us a little farther. Only a small minority of new experimental drugs ever get approved or sold. So the discrete number of market successes have to pay the “sunk costs” of all the failures.

Moreover, one does not know beforehand how long any drug will sell. A new one may be a cash cow for decades. Another may be eclipsed by a competitor after a few years. Glitches may arise. The non-sedating antihistamine Seldane was a boon for its manufacturer in the late 1980s, with 100 million patients taking it. But it caused heart problems for some and was off the market almost overnight.

So a drug company has to have a floating set of profitable drugs to bear the costs of all, including the many busts. And it has to price discriminate to maximize revenues. That means charging different prices in different markets to groups with different sensitivities of quantity wanted versus price.

Because of our health care system, demand for drugs in the U.S. is “inelastic;” raise price and you do not cut demand much. It is more “elastic” in Canada for a variety of reasons and so prices are lower there. Demand is even more sensitive to price in poorer countries and hence prices are lower.

Forcing U.S. companies to charge exactly the same price in all countries would, in most cases, raise them sharply in the rest of the world more than lowering them here. It would be devastating to patients in poor countries and would probably lead to a revolt that would overturn the international system of patent protection. That would harm the world economy as a whole and ours in particular.

We have let pharma gain abusive market power. There are ways in which we can, over time, unwind this. But lawmakers need to understand the economics of what they want to change.

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RAFAH, Gaza Strip — It took 10 years and three rounds of in vitro fertilization for Rania Abu Anza to become pregnant, and only seconds for her to lose her five-month-old twins, a boy and a girl.

An Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in the southern Gaza city of Rafah late Saturday, killing her children, her husband and 11 other relatives and leaving another nine missing under the rubble, according to survivors and local health officials.

She had woken up at around 10 p.m. to breastfeed Naeim, the boy, and went back to sleep with him in one arm and Wissam, the girl, in the other. Her husband was sleeping beside them.

The explosion came an hour and a half later. The house collapsed.

“I screamed for my children and my husband,” she said Sunday, as she sobbed and cradled a baby’s blanket to her chest. ”They were all dead. Their father took them and left me behind.”

She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the wall and patted the bundle in a calming gesture that, finally, she’d had the chance to give.

Israeli airstrikes have regularly hit crowded family homes since the start of the war in Gaza, even in Rafah, which Israel declared a safe zone in October but is now the next target of its devastating ground offensive.

The strikes often come without warning, usually in the middle of the night.

Israel says it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on the Hamas militant group because it positions fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in dense residential areas. But the military rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.

The military did not immediately comment on this strike.

Of the 14 people killed in the Abu Anza house, six were children and four were women, according to Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the hospital where the bodies were taken. In addition to her husband and children, Rania also lost a sister, a nephew, a pregnant cousin and other relatives.

Farouq Abu Anza, a relative, said about 35 people were staying at the house, some of whom had been displaced from other areas. He said they were all civilians, mostly children, and that there were no militants among them.

Rania and her husband, Wissam, both 29, spent a decade trying to get pregnant. Two rounds of IVF had failed, but after a third, she learned she was pregnant early last year. The twins were born on Oct. 13.

Her husband, a day laborer, was so proud he insisted on naming the girl after himself, she said.

“I didn’t get enough of them,” she said. “I swear I didn’t get enough of them.”

Less than a week earlier, Hamas-led militants had stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack, rampaging through communities, killing some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and taking around 250 hostages, including children and a newborn.

Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history. The war has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, and a quarter of the population faces starvation.

The ministry said last month that more than 12,300 Palestinian children and young teens had been killed in the war, about 43% of the overall toll. Women and children together make up three quarters of those killed. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its tallies.

Israel claims to have killed over 10,000 Hamas fighters but has not provided evidence.

For the children who survive, the war has made life hellish, humanitarian workers say, with some in northern Gaza beyond the reach of care.

“The sense of helplessness and despair among parents and doctors in realizing that lifesaving aid, just a few kilometers away, is being kept out of reach, must be unbearable, but worse still are the anguished cries of those babies slowly perishing under the world’s gaze,” UNICEF regional director Adele Khodr said in a statement Sunday.

Until Saturday, the Abu Anza family had been relatively fortunate. Rafah has been spared the immense destruction of northern Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis, where Israeli tanks and ground troops have fought militants block by block after waves of airstrikes.

Rafah is also in the shrinking area of Gaza where humanitarian aid can still be delivered.

But Israel has said Rafah will be next, and the roughly 1.5 million people who have sought refuge there will be relocated, without saying where.

“We have no rights,” Rania said. “I lost the people who were dearest to me. I don’t want to live here. I want to get out of this country. I’m tired of this war.”

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