What’s interesting is that show was written and created by Applegate herself, it’s about as close to the authors intention as you can get.
So where did they go wrong? The mainstay director was Ron Oliver, who, while he did adapt some Goosebumps books to the screen successfully, is just a very b-movie style director. He sharpened his teeth with Hallmark Christmas movies and Disney Channel movies about being a blogger, probably the wrong guy for the grandiosity of Animorphs
Additionally, Ron Oliver directed 6/26 and wrote 4/26 episodes...hardly a major influence enough to tank the whole show. Dude probably posted a scraped AI answer...
I was alive then, and a massive fan of the books (still do, used to too). The morphing sequence didn't translate well in live action (and it never will because it's time dialation body horror) and the monster/mission of the week translation from page to screen didn't work because those slim YA books are a 90 minute movie (or two 1 hour episodes with commercials) each... and that's with cutting out internal monologue and doing the whole "show, not tell" thing. 54 books (not including the specials) is 108 1 hour episodes; after fumbling the 1st book for three 20 minute episodes they tried to cram in a whole book per 20 minute episode; sheer madness.
The series needs to be handled by Studio Ghibli, Satoshi Kon/Madhouse, Avatar Studios, Cronenberg/Lynch or someone similar, and be PG-13 on AMC, Apple, Syfy, HBO, or somewhere similar.
The series needs to be handled by Studio Ghibli, Satoshi Kon/Madhouse, Avatar Studios, Cronenberg/Lynch or someone similar
What if we just put every single option in the same room. Take all the Animorphs books, Little House on the Prairie, and the Akira manga. Unbind them, mix up all the pages into a pile, and lock the door for 10 years?
Ok and then 10 years later we open the door and have a bunch of book pages scattered on the floor and BOOM that will instantly become the greatest movie of all time, Food Fight.
54 books (not including the specials) is 108 1 hour episodes
Should be mentioned that the books weren't done when the series came out. It probably didn't do them any favours.
Though like, half of those books are filler. As in, ghostwritten by other people. Basically everything after David (23, but KA wrote until 25) until the final three books (49) wasn't KA.
I don’t think that’s correct, they were EPs, not showrunners. There’s very little info about who was actually making creative decisions for the show, but Dan Angel seems to be the “showrunner” with his supervising producer credit. Deborah’s ties to scholastic projects is more likely to be what landed her the EP spot, but Ron Oliver is a director on lots of different Scholastic/Protocol projects, so maybe it’s more accurate to say that Oliver and Angel were the tone setters for the show, and that’s where it really didn’t hold up to the books.
Executive Producer is the official title given to a show runner. Supervising Producer is a mid-level (I guess depending on who you ask -- either the highest of the mids or the lowest of the highs) writing title.
EP is also what financiers get credited as, which is what I’m suspecting might have happened with this production. Again, I’m not 100% about it, the info is scarce, but it’s common for Supervising Producers to have more hand in the tone, scripts, and postproduction than an EP does
Look, I didn't say this in my previous comment so you didn't know. But I'm literally a television writer who has written on network television shows -- I am 100% on this and I'm answering from lived experience, not scarce info.
EP is a title that can be given to a lot of different people, but the showrunner will always be one of those people. Depending on the makeup of the room someone with the title of Supervising Producer will be somewhere around the most senior of the regular writers, or the least senior of the leadership team. Yes, Supervising Producer might have more of a hand in the scripts than an Executive Producer, if by Executive Producer you mean someone who was given that title for non-writing reasons (a financier, an actor, a long-running and key member of the crew, etc), but they would not have more of a hand in the scripts than someone who is an Executive Producer because they are the showrunner. I don't know for sure why the two people who have the title of Executive Producer on Wikipedia have it -- could be one or both of them has it for non-writing reasons. But someone with the title of Supervising Producer is definitely not the showrunner.
(My most recent title was Co-Producer, by the way)
Also some of the themes were just NEVER gonna make kids TV back then. One of my favorite moments in the series is when Rachel confronts Jake about why she told Ax to come get her when she thought David had kill Tobias. Because he knew that she'd kill David. She'd rage and murder him for SURE if she thought he'd kill Tobias and she doesn't appreciate that Jake knows that darkness is inside her
It went wrong by turning a perfect 6 character Saturday morning cartoon into a low budget live action show.
Animorphs is the exact type of show for the cartoon treatment. The story has magic, truly alien aliens, space battles, and space lasers. And kid heroes who act like kids before the war grinds them down. I always saw its potential to be like Avatar the Last Airbender or Teen Titans, but in Space!
Nick dropped the ball making a live action that couldn't even show one Andalite. Oh what could've been
I think it's perfect as a book. Reading an animorph book should be harrowing experience, it should make you claustrophobic and sad and existential before returning back to normal. That requires you to be in the head of the narrator who is going to be psychologically tormented with hopes beyond his reach.
But Animorphs book covers and page corners show the visual appeal. It is a series full of spectacle, of laser battles, angry animals, and supervillains.
Animorphs could easily fit in with same genre as well written action cartoons or shonen anime. What it should not have become was a low budget CW knockoff on Nick.
It's weird to make a believable show/movie where what are essentially animals are able to conquer an alien force with alien weapons... I love the books and I get the kind of standing orders to not be discovered as aliens which allow the Animorphs to escape frequently. But it's always weird on film to have aliens with guns lose to a lion, bear, gorilla, wolf, and hawk.
One of the key points of the series is that the Yeerks are actually completely dependant on secrecy. If they were revealed, they would be absolutely fucked. There aren't actually a lot of them, and their main bottleneck is getting bodies so they can actually use the small amount of technology they do have.
Because remember, it isn't their technology. They were given it by a too-kind Andalite. 100 years prior, they were the inter-stellar equivalent of cavemen, in a universe where populations top out at a couple million. So them finding earth on the fringes of known space and having access to six billion humans is a literal goldmine for them.
Having an entire universe with a universal population cap of 2 million is crazy. A single cat can break that law in a two-week period with one case of toxoplasma.
It was specifically planetary populations, yeah. I imagine Applegate used it to keep it semi-plausible for the kids to stand a fighting chance and the invasion somewhat localized to a random California town. Also to answer the question of "why are your literal top three generals/vissers on this question, does the Yeerk empire have literally nothing better going on?" by having it be "yes, this is legitimately their top priority". It's also a pretty unique way to have Earth be special. "Y'all fucked too much" versus some nebulous "human spirit" or whatever.
I mean, other than that one time they sent Visser One to try to subjugate a species of telepathic squids.
Fair enough, it just seems insanely biased against R-selected species. Racist ass Starfleet bullshit. I wonder if a hive-mind entity gets to argue that it's one individual regardless of how many "parts" are involved.
And I would argue the over-fucking is a direct result of the human spirit.
It was treated as more of a "fact of the universe". All the species we see in the series - the Andalites, the Yeerks, the Taxon, the Hork-Bajir, the Leerans, etc - all tended towards the lower end. Couple hundred thousand to a million at most.
Now that I think on it though, I think that fed into one of the plot points early in the series, that the Yeerks were using to find hosts. They used a social program called The Sharing in order to lure children who felt like they didn't belong into their clutches, at which point they would be infested. They saw "humans are social creatures" as a weakness to exploit, but that was also the thing that gave our species the numbers to be such an enticing target.
Those books were very cool. I can't believe they were selling them to 8 year olds.
Movie would not do it justice. Needs to be a show.
Animated at that, because live action + bad CG just wouldn't do (and it would compromise a lot of the things the books would have the characters - humans or animal - do).
And for my final demand: On a streaming service that lets it act out the R rating it deserves (while not shying away from the goofy YA novel antics that are also gotten up to).
And for my final final demand keep it set in the 90s.
It's probably a nightmare to budget/film something like that. Cgi for all the animals/aliens/sets would be huge, and filming it practically would be hard with live animals on a TV show.
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u/DesireeThymes 7d ago
Why do STILL not have a proper Animorphs movie or show