#such as the original Anitv did

[please-help-this-little-lesbian]

Animorphs literally made me like filler again. Please god give us the filler books

I think the way Animorphs would work really well as a TV show is only if it's with:

The acknowledgement that the original series of books itself included "filler episodes" and to use those. It won't work if you skip the Atlantis episode or the oatmeal episode to get to the David arc. The fact that the characters can find out Atlantis exists and has nothing to do with the aliens they're fighting and is actually a doomed misanthropic population of humans horrifically mutated into fishmen by radiation and then just open the next book like that never happened is critical to the tone of the series.

Following that, an understanding of how to write with A, B, and C plots. You don't need to skip books to cut down on the series length. Since the POVs alternate between books, most of the books are heavily focused on a single character's emotional story or development. So other than the books where all six of the main characters are sent to a remote location for a while (like the Arctic or space or yesterday or Atlantis), you could really easily adapt multiple books per episode. Have Rachel allergic reacting to alligator DNA while Tobias discovers his parentage. Hell, consolidate 37 and 31! The only reason those didn't take place at the same time is because Animorphs is a book series and not a TV series!

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

anitv Jake did WHAT

OP refers to these tags #4d chess psychological warfare#like that time in anitv jake acquires tom and successfully talks a bunch of controllers into shooting the real tom

The episode "Face/Off Pt. 3" is a classic combination of AniTV having some plot ideas with fascinating potential... and then executing those ideas so badly the show is nigh-unwatchable.

Various Animorphs are running around the yeerk pool in the season finale. (Rachel is in Tobias's brain as a yeerk to defeat the Gleet Biofilter, speaking of cool ideas that got wasted.) Jake drags Tom into a back room, and when the controllers break down the door, there are two identical copies of Tom standing there. It's kinda cool that the audience also doesn't know which one's Tom and which is Jake, because both of them immediately start shouting about how the other one is an imposter and the controllers should shoot that guy.

For the rest of the episode — which switches to focus on how Marco collapses the entire yeerk pool cavern by pulling down a single ceiling tile and throwing it against a pillar — there are two copies of Tom running around. There's some dramatic tension when we see one of the Toms get crushed to death by falling rubble and don't know if Jake just died, as well as in a later scene where one of the Toms walks in on Cassie mid-morph. That Tom demorphs into Jake, with the honestly funny line "Phew! My parents were about thirty seconds away from having a set of identical twins." Original flavor Tom is dead in the basement, but that's fine, because the Animorphs are off to a dance party. Also, Tom's back two episodes later with no explanation because Melissa Chapman needs a boyfriend. Sigh. So much potential, so badly wasted.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Anitv is bad but the casting for Tobias was like, spot on. I love him, he conveys the Tobias energy quite well. (most of the casting was pretty good tbh)

I’m kind of ambivalent about most of the AniTV casting, to be honest.  I do agree with PopArena’s take that:

“[Christopher] Ralph’s Tobias is very different from the book counterpart, more restrained and quiet.  But while it might not be the same character, it’s still a pretty good one, and Ralph does a great job in it.  It’s the little things, like how he holds his shoulders or how his voice might suddenly snap.  The books’ Tobias took the war against the yeerks as a chance to finally vent the frustrations he’s been building up from life shitting on him all the time.  But look at TV Tobias.  I doubt anyone’s dunking his head in the toilet.  He’s so detached from his surroundings, I doubt any high school bully would even notice him.  This conflict with the yeerks has forced him to reattach himself: to the world, to this conflict, and to this group of strangers he shares this conflict with...” (Opinionated Animorphs Episode Guide)

Book-Tobias, especially in the first few books, has a sort of Luna Lovegood energy: he’s so odd because he knows that reality is shit, and he chooses to respond to reality being shit by looking up at the stars and imagining nargles.  But that doesn’t stop him (or Luna) from being almost painfully attached to the first group of friends, the first cause, to come along.

TV-Tobias starts out a lot more hardened and aloof, closer to the version of himself that book-Tobias becomes later in the series.  And it’s a different character, but it’s still an interesting character.  I’m a fan of Ralph’s portrayal in that regard.  I find it irksome that he’s 22 while filming the series, and looks 22 (especially given that there’s a line in s1e17 that establishes Tobias as being 14) but that’s not Christopher Ralph’s fault.  If I was the director, I’d be giving Tobias’s morphing power back ASAP so that Ralph can play him instead of having to rely on That Fucking Hawk so much of the time, but that’s just me.  Among other things, human-Tobias’s absence means that there’s waaay more chemistry between Rachel and Marco than there is between Rachel and Tobias, to the point where I find myself wondering what they seen in each other.

Again, TV-Tobias is different, but not necessarily in a bad way.  One of the few genuinely clever plots in AniTV involves the yeerks getting ahold of Elfangor’s MacGuffin Disk, only to discover that it’s coded so that only a member of Elfangor’s family can open it because [handwave about andalite tech being genetics-based].  Even watching it for the first time as an adult, I thought “okay, this is going to launch a plot with controllers trying to capture Ax” and genuinely did not see where they were going beyond that... until Tobias picks up the disk and instantly gets Elfangor’s life story downloaded into his brain.  At which point I was like “okay, that was actually a clever way to handle that reveal” and also “damn that was a good twist.”  Between that and the late-series plot with Tobias discovering the underground group of ex-hosts, Tobias had about 99% of the dramatic potential of the entire team.

No one else really translates well — Rachel’s badassery is simply nonexistent on a show that can’t portray violence, Ax’s characterization is just generic “alien acts weird” thanks to a lack of andalite props, Marco’s sense of humor doesn’t survive the bad writing, Cassie’s morphing skill also falls victim to budget concerns, and Jake’s hints of good characterization get overwritten by bad voiceover.  Jake and Marco remain closest to their book selves, but flattened out to the point that I don’t feel a strong desire to watch an entire show about either one of them.

That said, the only actor who stands out to me is Richard Sali, who plays Chapman.  The character isn’t that well-written, but IMHO the actor does a brilliant job of being unnerving and Stepfordian.  Any time he’s supposed to be acting human, he’ll do these long two-second pauses in between something happening and his genuine-looking reaction.  You can practically see Iniss 226 mentally cycling through a “standard human expressions” playbook during the delay.  Little Things like that help to show that AniTV really did have a lot of potential, and fell victim to some combination of super-austere budgeting and Nickelodeon’s bowdlerizing the original text.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Considering there's now a Power Rangers movie, do you think it is possible that someone will go out there and make a live-action (or fully animated idk) series/movie out of Animorphs? Would you think it wise? We have the know-how to animate morphing and aliens, and there are probably many people out there who started reading Animorphs 20 years ago who are now working in the animation or film industry so the adaptation probably wouldn't stray too far from the original.

You know, I’m not sure Animorphs ever will get its own show or movie again.  I love the current format of turning books or series into entire freaking TV shows (American Gods, Handmaid’s Tale, etc.) and it might be cool to get a second crack at an Animorphs show, but… But I’m conflicted. 

Reasons I’d love to see an Animorphs movie or show:

There would be a whole younger generation that we could bring into the fandom!  They could share in our hilarity and pain, which would be awesome.

It’s pretty much inevitable that the books would get re-released, which means we’d be able to stop relying on crappy PDFs any time we wanted to reread the series. 

Visual media = greater internet fandom. 

Seriously, though, TV shows > video games > movies > comics > novels when it comes to online fandoms, and I think a big part of that is the fact that Tumblr, Livejournal, and Reddit are so image-heavy. 

And I really WANT this series to be so mainstream there are fandom wars and remixes and hipster-effects.  It’s so frustrating right now when people ask what I’m writing and I usually end up telling the truth but telling it slant (ex: “There aren’t enough stories about stereotypically masculine young men working as administrative assistants, so I decided to…” or “Have you ever thought about how demonic possession would affect neurological processes?  Because I have.”)  And it would be so nice to be able to say “I’m writing about Animorphs,” and have other people go “Oh, that super-disturbing series with the oatmeal jokes?” 

There are some REALLY FREAKING COOL images in the series that it would be really freaking cool to see on a screen.  For instance: the huge hellish cavern where the yeerk pool is located, the iskoort and their backward knees, Cassie becoming a whale-osprey-human-andalite hybrid for a hot second in midair, Ax jumping backward over a swimming pool by accident, that freaking veleek, etcetera. 

Reasons the idea of an Animorphs movie or show fills me with trepidation:

Have you SEEN AniTV?  I didn’t think it was possible for writing that good to get turned into scripting that bad, and yet.

Whitewashing.  DragonBall-Z, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Ghost in the Shell, Death Note, and Cloud Atlas all took minority characters from the original works and cast white actors.  AniTV itself whitewashed Eva and Ax.  I’d rather have no screen adaptation at all than one with an all-white cast or one that tokenizes any or all of the characters.

It’d be super-easy for the grey-and-black morality of the books to get lost in translation, which could lead to deeply unfortunate consequences if the kids are shown killing controllers left and right with abandon.  (See: Seasons 5 - 10 of Supernatural and the number of completely innocent humans the “heroes” straight-up MURDER because they happen to be in the way.)

Hollywood is allergic to tragedy.

The movie adaptations of Blood and Chocolate, I Robot, Catching Fire, Ender’s Game, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Series of Unfortunate Events, I Am Legend, The Golden Compass, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Ella Enchanted, and Charlotte’s Web all took ambiguous or unhappy endings and made them fit the Hollywood mold, not only by having everything wrapped up with a nice bow (and no dead characters) at the end, but also by back-fitting genuinely original stories into tired and unoriginal tropes.

Animorphs would not be Animorphs if almost every book didn’t end with the characters not sure what they learned this week, outside of “war sucks, and then you die.” It definitely wouldn’t be Animorphs if the last two books weren’t all about how sometimes you have to make terrible sacrifices to stop evil.  I have a sneaking suspicion Hollywood would try to sweep all of that under the rug, especially if the screen adaptation was geared for the same audience as the books.

I’d be worried about the portrayal of the hosts.

As it is, AniTV already has some super fridge-horrifying moments that come from the writers’ failure to distinguish between yeerks and yeerk hosts.  Tom and Melissa make out and possibly sleep together while he’s definitely a controller and she might be as well, and the way that the series plays it for laughs suggests that no one did the math that 33 - 50% of the individuals in that relationship are physically incapable of giving consent.  The series also plays Chapman getting spattered with oatmeal and Iniss 226 going insane for laughs, even though the implications for poor ol’ Henrick are pretty horrifying. The books take the time to have the characters debate whether harming the hosts is worth it to harm the yeerks; the show genuinely doesn’t have the time to do that in its 25-minute run and so leaves those problematic questions out. 

Similarly, it is super-easy to slide into victim-blaming where the controllers are concerned.  The books can give us moments like Naomi saying “You were Visser One,” and Eva coming back with “I beg your fucking pardon?” (I paraphrase).  They can have the heartbreaking scenes with Jake imagining what Tom thinks or feels while some alien acts uses him to try to kill their dad.  Visual media can’t necessarily convey that information, and would necessarily have to cast actors as Visser One, Visser Three, etc. who almost never stop to play the parts of Eva or Alloran.  As Supernatural demonstrates (sorry to keep picking on this show), it’s really easy to forget there’s an innocent human who doesn’t get a choice about being used as a weapon or being caught in the crossfire.  It could be so freaking easy to make Tom or Eva or Chapman or Alloran themselves into villains by just forgetting that the host exists at all. 

Anyway, that’s all a very long-winded way of me saying that I DON’T KNOW IF I WANT A LIVE-ACTION ADAPTATION OR NOT.  Also that I care too much about the meatsuits, but anyone who follows this blog probably knew that by now.