#anitv

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Relating to this post, if animorphs was greenlit for an 8 episode PJO style series, and you weren’t sure if more seasons would come up, what books would you adapt? Would Ax even be there? I would probably introduce him in episode 2 but I know less about animorphs.

To answer the second question: Ax would indeed be hard to solve. I think all undersea adventures would be off the table for budgetary reasons, even today, but you wouldn't want it to look like AniTV's thing where Ax just stands around in the woods yelling "Help!" until Cassie wanders by.

I'd solve this by simply having Ax be on the fighter with Elfangor when he crash-lands. Two issues I foresee here:

It makes the fact that Elfangor should morph to escape glaringly obvious.

It begs the question of how Jake ends up leader if Ax has more yeerk-fighting expertise.

For #1, I think the most interesting resolution would be if Elfangor's shot dead by a yeerk sniper midway through explaining the invasion. The scene would have to engineer a reason for him to be apart from the kids at the time — maybe he steps back into his fighter to return the morphing cube, and then a Bug Fighter shoots it from overhead? — but any exposition he doesn't cover could be taken up by Ax.

For #2, I think you could do a little humor and characterization with Jake and Ax playing hot-potato over responsibility for the team. Maybe Jake speaks for everyone when it's just the humans, but once Elfangor dies he starts asking Ax what to do, and they go back and forth for a while with "I thought YOU knew what to do!" "No, I thought YOU knew!" before Marco or Tobias suggests a vote and Jake gets elected to lead.

To answer the first question: I'd make the following 8 episodes:

Roughly the events of #1 (AKA Jake's story): Elfangor lands, the kids learn to morph, they infiltrate The Sharing, they fail to rescue Tom, Tobias gets stuck.

Parts of #7, MM1, and #17 (AKA Rachel's story): The kids learn about the ground-based kandrona and destroy it, but there are all kinds of downstream consequences. Rachel gets injured during the battle and wanders off with no memory, Ax recruits disgruntled yeerks to help him contact his dad, Jake gets his hopes up about Tom, and a whole bunch of yeerks end up dead or addicted to oatmeal.

Combo of #13 and #23 (AKA Tobias's story) (AKA all of AniTV's good ideas): Tobias stumbles on a group of escaped former human-controllers, who help him plan a mission to break into the yeerk pool and free some hork-bajir. While going through their files, Tobias finds intel about Elfangor's hirac dilest. He saves Jara and Ket, retrieves Elfangor's CD, and discovers it has some kind of baked-in genetic override that restores his morphing power. With Ax, he reads Elfangor's life story.

Some of #19 with most of #29 (AKA Cassie's story): The team falls ill with an alien virus, forcing Cassie to venture into the yeerk pool alone in search of a cure. She ends up trapped in (the woods? a back room? a quicksand pit?) with Aftran and Karen for a few days, long enough for them to become friends and reconcile their differences. Aftran helps Cassie escape with intel that will save Ax before she herself returns to the pool sans host.

Mostly #30 and #45 (AKA Marco's story): Marco is out in public when he spots his dead mom, and follows her as a bug long enough to realize she's controlled by Visser One who is plotting an attack on the hork-bajir valley. Through letting Visser Three in on her plot, Marco discredits her and gets her charged with treason. As Visser One is about to be executed, the Animorphs grab Eva and drag her off to starve out the yeerk. The last scene is Eva and Marco telling a very surprised Peter that they need to talk.

Parts of #37, #46, and #51 (AKA Ax's story): Eva, Peter, and Ax build a radio that will let them talk to the Andalite Navy. Ax learns that a mission is already on Earth — he finds Gonrod et al. and offers to help them, with most of that plot playing out. Ax prevents Estrid from using the quantum virus by threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on the yeerk pool with her crew inside. Estrid reveals that the virus was a last-ditch attempt to save humanity, and that after this the andalites are writing off Earth entirely.

Combo of #49, #50, and #51 (AKA The End): The Animorphs' human DNA gets discovered, probably matching Jake to Tom for simplicity's sake. They evacuate Cassie's and Rachel's families, and start to notify the authorities. At a key moment, Ax reveals that he stole a morphing cube from Gonrod. Jake suggests making more Animorphs, but is acting reckless about it in the aftermath of losing his family — sure enough, after recruiting James et al., Jake walks into a trap and Tom's yeerk gets the morphing cube. The episode ends with Tom's yeerk popping up in the hork-bajir valley, offering to make a deal.

Mostly #54 (AKA The Beginning): Rachel dies, the Blade ship escapes, Cassie becomes the alien-human ambassador, Marco gets famous, Tobias lives in a tree, Jake teaches the next generation how to morph, and Ax hunts the Blade ship. To give a little more resolution than we get in canon, maybe Ax himself comes back to Earth and recruits the boys to help him battle The One in the outer reaches of space.

A lot would need to get cut, for the sake of taking 63 stories down to 8 — no Ellimist, no David, no Loren, no Crayak, no Toby, probably no taxxons or chee. But I think that my version preserves most of the overall story, while still being (hopefully) easy enough to follow for people who haven't read the books.

[lexi-the-twilight-dragon]

Question for the Animorphs community

So I have recently begun (consensually) dragging my partner down into Animorphs hell with me.

Originally, this was just a watch/roast of AniTV, as I’d never seen it and they wanted to share my passion, but after enough instances of me going “yeah so in the books it’s more like this but they couldn’t fit that in the budget”, they later asked to borrow my books and read it for themselves. So they’re experiencing both simultaneously.

However, this raises a problem. The books and the show are not in the same order after The Message. The next book is #5 The Predator, or Ep. 15/16 The Leader. The next episode is Ep. 7 The Escape, or #17 The Underground.

I want them to have the best experience with this series possible. I also want to watch the whole show with them. Yes I realise that is contradictory.

Is is better to get the authentic version first, and the derivative after? Or wash down the low-budget cringiness with the original’s authentic flavour. Which version of “depiction of a mental health facility in the 90s” do I subject them to first?

(We’ve also played Shattered Reality but my commentary was largely “so the intro gave us the plot of Animorphs but SIKE this is the plot of the game” and “those are meant to be Howlers, in the books they’re not nearly this much of a pushover”)

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Someone might want to save this in case it disappears.

[andalitean]

when I say I got that dog in me this is what I’m referring to

[booktomoviebrawl]

We are not judging how bad the movie is, we are judging which adapted the book the worst. There are good movies that are bad adaptions.

Propaganda below the cut (spoilers may apply)

The Hunger Games:

This goes for all of them but mainly the last two. The movies are good, great even. But they lose a lot of plot points and details. They don't do the books justice and leave out the most important details and mesaages. Theyre movies so they can't run forever. But the books have all the time in the world to describe every excruciating detail.

The movie is the exact thing the book cautions against, and it's not aware of that

fuck everyone who decided to get white actors & actresses to play people on the Seam. bestie they’re indigenous. also the amount of cut scenes & important plot threads, from Haymitch’s backstory to Peeta’s disability in favour of amping up the ~love triangle/romance~ instead of treating it like the sidecar survival strategy/overarching metaphor it really was are so disrespectful to the intentions of the book. they did thg so fucking dirty and i’m forever going to be disappointed that’s all we got

Animorphs:

Didn't have the budget to do literally anything the books were doing, and it shows. Also the central theme of the books wasn't even touched on.

A low-budget kids' show was absolutely the worst and most embarrassing way to adapt a semi-serialized, somewhat serious (but, y'know, in a YA way) drama about war and how it changes those who participate in it. It never goes into the ethical questions or moral issues that the original book series brings up, and the violence is toned down a lot. They just didn't have the money for the special effects you'd need for a story with so many different alien races (Taxxons, one of the main types of alien employed by the enemy yeerks, are never even mentioned!), nor for the animal training/handling for so many different species that the characters are constantly morphing into. I get that they were doing the best they could for the time and medium, but it ended up being a giant embarrassment. :(

Only one season, poorly written

[i-assign-you-animorphs]

trick or treat from @princeseerow !

(its a sideblog so i cant send asks from it lol)

You get…

Escargot!

[that-yeerk-you-know]

🪱Does anybody know anything about this poster?

🪱 Me and my host have been watching through the, well, poorly adapted television show of Ms. Applegate's work, and this prop appears in the third episode of the show (8m30s in if you're curious), and I've been searching all over for a high resolution image of it, and I'm coming to find out that details for even the show itself are completely obscure let alone details on a prop that appears in one shot. 🧠 I mean, yeah Mags, if you're trying to simultaneously normalize and completely cover your tracks, any controller who doesn't want to end up as prosciutto will delete their involvement in this. Also on a more realistic note, it's been almost 30 years, sooooo.. 🪱Your human internet is such a useful tool until someone goes on a scrubbing spree 🧠Listen, if someone posted any details about your race, the poster, or anything, a copy is out there, it's not our fault it's buried in some wiki buried in an archive buried in a forum.

🪱Which is why we need your help! Please send us details if you know anything about this. Even if you can decipher the first line of the poster, that'd be leagues above anything we've figured out.

[princeseerow]

some of the changes that the animorphs tv show makes are so weird it makes me wonder what the thought process even was. like, jason john mccole? was jeremy jason mccole too outlandish of a name or something??

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Due to budgetary restrictions, the Animorphs spend most of S2 fighting controllers by throwing small objects at them and/or calling them names. Luckily for them, these tactics prove surprisingly effective.

the producers said last season didn’t do so good so from now on my magic’s going to be a lot less complex and mostly involve glowing lights and smoke which are easier to cgi in for finance reasons

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@liskantope

@thejakeformerlyknownasprince I remember the MM1 adaptation and that it was pretty good, but I don't remember anything about the #6 adaptation. There are just particular lines of both Richard Sali and "Victor Trent" from the #2-based episode which stuck with me for two decades, though. I would say both exuded their characters really well in that episode. (I did once see it as an adult, twenty years past the original airing, and remember feeling the same way.)

[Starting a new post for an off-topic reply.]

Hard agree. I think the best AniTV episodes are the ones that work within the budget, even (especially) when that means a loose adaptation. And I agree about MM1 and #2's adaptations having good moments as a result.

Like, the adaptation of #6 works because it doesn't have the budget to show Temrash 114 cycling through Jake's morphs in an effort to escape — it instead has to depict psychological warfare. I love everything that ensues: Temrash laughing that "Tom" will "take one look at [Ax] and turn him over to Visser Three." Bringing up Jake's memories of Cassie, and threatening to hurt Jake if she doesn't let him go. Calling Tobias "a scavenger... a pet that sits on Rachel's arm." Calmly assuring Jake that "we break humans the way humans break horses" while showing him an image of Tom crying on the floor. It works, surprisingly well.

The MM1 episode is weakest when it's trying to adapt the book, but it does depart, to its strength — Rachel can't remember morphing, so she has to break out of shoe-lady's house the hard way. Marco points out that she's likely to be a controller, and that's why she's acting so out of character. Rachel sensibly approaches a nonprofit group called The Sharing to ask them for help, and almost gets infested before Jake saves her. Instead of the weird truck thing, she just regains her memory as soon as she morphs the first time.

Same for the #2 adaptation. I love that Rachel's motivation gets changed from "uhh, let's try something?" to a) trying to find out if the yeerks know of any technology that could get Tobias back to human shape, and b) responding to the red flags of child abuse that Melissa is throwing left and right. It helps that the controllers are all better-acted than the Animorphs — I can't tell if it's just easier to convey an alien who doesn't quite know how to human than it is to convey a human, or if it's that the actors are all trained adults. But the eps (like this, or the MM4 one) that lean into controllers being creepy are almost always better than the ones that involve lots of morphing.

[gros-chat-fait]

The CW's Animorphs

I started this back in August to celebrate me finally getting a copy of my favorite MM book and had no idea that once everything comes together it would be the funniest drawing I've ever done.

Anyway, this is the last drawing of 2024, here's hoping I can draw more next year. Take care and happy new year, everyone.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

This doesn't have the same impact as "Happy meal with extra happy", but I understand they couldn't go with that for Copytradepatentmarkright reasons. I think I had a cheeseburger (with cheese) at a place like this in Kentucky once.

[emeraldmew]

It's fascinating how much more cautious Rachel is without her memories. She's careful to avoid being seen by the drivers on the road and doesn't try to knock on any doors because the only thing she knows about herself is that she has an enemy.

She's ready to fight at a moment's notice. She immediately seeks power and finds the bear when she's trapped in a burning shack. She morphs elephant to be ready for the cops when they find her in the empty house - in part because it's about the only morph other than ant she remembers since she doesn't realize morphing will heal the bear and ant is a hard no, in part because she, again, wants size and power to defend herself.

But until she's cornered, she's cautious (and basically the exact opposite of the attempt by AniTV to adapt the same premise).

Which is fascinating on so many levels. Without remembering she has to protect anyone she actively avoids her trademark recklessness. Her temper is intact, but she doesn't need to save anyone but herself so she doesn't look for a fight. It's not until she sees the Veleek might damage houses with people sleeping in them that she turns to fight it, aware she can't win.

[andalitean]

sleep paralysis demon

[booktomoviebrawl]

We are not judging how bad the movie is, we are judging which adapted the book the worst. There are good movies that are bad adaptions.

Propaganda below the cut (spoilers may apply)

Persuasion:

They massacred my girl!! That is not Anne Elliot!! The whole point is that she's beaten down and thinks she's missed her chance at happiness and is bullied by her family, not making mean and snarky nods to the camera :( They completely missed the whole point of the dynamic and it's SICKENING! They also cut Mrs Smith who is arguably one of the most important characters as she highlights Anne's lack of focus on title and rank and her family's comparative obsession with it + it's only through her that Anne learns about Mr Elliot's true nasty nature. Also they cut the 'I am half agony, half hope' line from Wentworth's letter at the end so what's even the POINT of adapting it if you don't have that!! Oh my god!! My poor favourite Austen novel :( (I do want to make it very very clear that my issues with the movie come from the writing and adaptation and not in any way from the race blind casting. The casting is superb and I'm genuinely so disappointed that they got such a bad adaptation bc so many of the cast are literally perfect)

Where do I even start? They tried to 'modernize' both the protagonist and the love story and managed to take out everything that made it good in the first place. Anne Elliot in the novel is quiet and good and helpful, full of regret. In the movie, she constantly turns to the audience to mock everyone around her, feeling so much better than everyone, to the point where nobody understands why Captain Wentworth would still be in love with her, or have fallen in love with her in the first place. Eight years before the plot starts, she broker her engagement to him because she was persuaded by a family friend that it was a bad idea. No way would movie!Anne have let herself be persuaded. They just tried to do a Fleabag/Emma type of thing without understanding what made either the novel or those two things work and thereby ruined it completely

Whoever made this didn't understand the point of the novel at all. They completely screwed up the character of Anne Elliot (the protagonist), which in turn screws the rest of the movie, as the original story only works because Anne is the way she is. Also, it's a period piece but the characters are talking in modern slang the entire time. And not in a clever way but in a very cringey one. If Jane Austen knew, she'd probably turn in her grave, and rightfully so.

Maximum Ride:

The storyline makes absolutely no sense, and the movie is nothing like the book. You could've given the movie an entirely different name and and keep the plot I wouldn't bat an eye

the movie's just bad mate

Horrendous low budget netflix movie with effects so bad they make me feel physically ill and acting so wooden the cast is in danger of being attacked by lumberjacks. The story already wasn't the best and the film somehow made it worst. I came in with nostalgia for my dear kids with bird wings and left never to be the same again.

Animorphs:

Didn't have the budget to do literally anything the books were doing, and it shows. Also the central theme of the books wasn't even touched on.

A low-budget kids' show was absolutely the worst and most embarrassing way to adapt a semi-serialized, somewhat serious (but, y'know, in a YA way) drama about war and how it changes those who participate in it. It never goes into the ethical questions or moral issues that the original book series brings up, and the violence is toned down a lot. They just didn't have the money for the special effects you'd need for a story with so many different alien races (Taxxons, one of the main types of alien employed by the enemy yeerks, are never even mentioned!), nor for the animal training/handling for so many different species that the characters are constantly morphing into. I get that they were doing the best they could for the time and medium, but it ended up being a giant embarrassment. :(

Only one season, poorly written

[church-of-crayak]

i wanted to share my updated web layout, since tumblr's trying to move away from the profile sites and onto the boring little blogs in the dashboard :)

i'm still using the same template i was before, but now i have a little floatie of visser three (which i commissioned from a mutual as a birthday present to myself) and i've managed to make it look even more outdated... which is my goal. after all, animorphs takes place in the era of geocities.

eventually i'll update it to something a little more personalized, a little more over the top, but for now? i think it's pretty cute :)