So last night I was on Facebook, as per usual and one of the pages that I follow, Growing Up in the 90s, posted the link to an article from The Hollywood Reporter. I tend to believe this website more than others because they're the ones that tend to break the news when a movie has been announced as being in the works. Especially when it comes franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, and things like that. So I clicked on the link because it had me curious since it's about Animorphs. I read the article and according to this article, which I will link at the end of this post, Scholastic Entertainment is teaming up with Picturestart, which is a production company that just started last year, to produce the first film in a series of Animorphs movies. And honestly, I don't know how I feel about that.
I was a huge fan of Animorphs when I was a kid. I had most of the books, though there was a good chunk of them from the latter portion of the series that I ended up not getting for whatever reason. I was late to the party when it comes to Animorphs though. So the first book The Invasion, was published in June, 1996, however I didn't get into the series until somewhere between November 1998 and February 1999, when I was in the sixth grade.
The first Animorphs book I ever read was Book #23 The Pretender as that was the only one available from the school library at the time. I borrowed it one week because our assignment was to pick a book we wouldn't normally read for our reading time. At that point I'd been borrowing the Star Wars novels from my best friend Garrett since the beginning of the school year and I'd burned through all the ones he owned at the time and was looking for something to read. Despite 22 books, plus two Megamorphs books having been out prior to this one, I jumped right into the series, not even caring that there were books that came before it. By the time I finished the book and took it back to the library the following week, the first three books were there so I borrowed those ones and I was hooked. There were like three or four of us in my class who got into Animorphs at that time. I'd never heard of the series, until a friend of mine at the time, Jessica mentioned it at recess one day.
Around the same time Scholastic Productions had teamed up with Protocol Entertainment to produce a half hour, live action Television series for YTV here in Canada, and Nickelodeon in the U.S. I think Jessica told me about the show as well, but I don't remember because this was almost 22 years ago now that this happened. I do remember that the first episode I ever saw was actually "My Name is Jake Part 2" the second episode of the series, though I think it was a repeat of that episode, because I didn't see part 1 until after I'd seen pretty much the rest of the series. I thought it was pretty cool. Go check out my overview style review of the series that I did back in April to see my thoughts on the TV series from an adult in 2020 perspective.
Not long after I started watching the show, I got the first volume of the Animorphs: The Invasion Series VHS series for my birthday or Christmas and that's how I saw the pilot episode "My Name is Jake Part 1". I watched this tape all the time. Particularly during the summer when the show was on hiatus between seasons and there weren't any new episodes airing. Then I watched it even more when I was in high school after I got a TV/VCR combo set from my uncle for my 16th birthday.
I mentioned all this because when I read this article from The Hollywood Reporter about an Animorphs movie being in development, I was immediately excited and cautious all at the same time. I'd love to see the Animorphs series get re-adapted into a live-action property. However, I think a movie or a series of movies would be the wrong way to go about it.
In addition to the 54 books in the main series, there are three different companion series. The first is the Animorphs: Megamorphs series which chronicle side adventures the Animorphs have that wouldn't necessarily fit well into the main series. Most of these adventures are time travel or universe altering events that wouldn't fit into a singular book in the main series.
The second series of companion books is the Chronicles series, which are all prequels to the main series, expanding upon concepts and elements introduced in the books themselves. One of them is how Elfangor came to be the warrior he was when he crashed on Earth and met Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco and Tobias in the first book. Another is how the war between the Yeerks and the Andalites began, based on elements introduced in the eighth book. The other two are about the Yeerk who became Visser Three and the Ellimist.
The third companion series is a Choose Your Own Adventure series called Alternamorphs. These two books are just sort of there and don't add anything new to the universe created by K.A. Applegate. Even leaving out the two Alternamorphs books and the four Chronicles books, you still have 58 books worth of material to pull from for an adaptation. Which would work better if it was adapted into a TV series. Say what you will about the '90s live action show, but whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit that they adapted it pretty well considering they had no budget and had to change things around in order to fit into the TV medium.
Scholastic Entertainment co-produced the two movies based on Goosebumps by R.L. Stine and instead of directly adapting a book from the series, they took the spirit of Goosebumps and made that into a movie. Which was a good move on their part since Goosebumps is an anthology series and you can tell any kind of story you want without adapting a single book. Animorphs has a singular continuity with an entire universe to work with. But, with 54 books plus eight companion books (including Chronicles), it's much harder to adapt the series into a movie franchise the way Harry Potter and other Young Adult series have been in the past.
Animorphs also has a lot of mature themes in the books. For example in Book #33 The Illusion, Tobias, in Andalite morph, is captured by a Yeerk named Taylor and tortured because the Yeerks' Anti-Morphing Ray didn't work since the Yeerks didn't know that Tobias's Hawk form is his actual body since he was stuck as a Hawk back in the first book. Would you have that in a movie later on down the line? You could, but the movie could be considered to be R-rated depending on how extremely they take Taylor torturing Tobias. Whereas you could do that in a Netflix series without a problem.
As the article says, this upcoming movie will be the first film based on the books. So from that we know that they're not just going to make an Animorphs movie and that's it. Which I'm happy about because I don't think you can do Animorphs in a singular movie without taking out a lot of the elements that make the series what it is. I also think it would just be preferrable to make a film series rather than a single film since you stay with the characters for however many movies you want to make. Plus, how cool would it be to have an Animorphs movie come out every year or two for ten years or more and instead of adapting a particular book for each movie, you could just tell stories about Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Marco and Ax and maybe throw in David, the evil Animorph at some point too?
All in all I think this is pretty exciting news. It's been 20 years since the TV show ended and 19 years since the book series ended. In that time, nobody has done anything with this franchise. Scholastic attempted to re-release the books back in 2011, but stopped with the eighth book, The Alien because sales weren't great, probably because the people who originally read the books in the '90s and early 2000s didn't like the way they'd tried to update the books and the kids of the early 2010s probably didn't care for the books the way my generation did. But the first Goosebumps movie did really well back in 2015 so I'd say that an Animorphs movie would probably do business somewhere between Power Rangers and Goosebumps since it's more of a niche franchise like Power Rangers, but it's also a popular book series from the '90s like Goosebumps is, so it could go either way.
What do you guys think of this announcement? Are you excited? Are you upset about it? Do you not care either way? Please let me know in the comments below. Also please tell me if you read Animorphs when you were a kid. I'll be back tomorrow with this week's movie review. Later.
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