ALIEN: i’m dying
JAKE: oh no
i’m twelve
ALIEN: here is power in a box to become animals
JAKE: we’ll do that
ALIEN: but only be animals for a little while
and use it to fight aliens
TOBIAS: im sad all the time
RACHEL: i’ve always wanted to kill everything, this is good
TOBIAS: im a bird but all the time now
RACHEL: good let’s go out
CASSIE: i dont want to kill anything but im very good at turning into animals
TOBIAS: im always a bird AND im always sad both all the time now
RACHEL: i love you sad bird
you’re my boyfriend but i’ll never stop fighting
JAKE: let’s touch animals and then be animals and then not be animals again
CASSIE: yes lets
TOM: my brain is just full of aliens
JAKE: i hate these aliens
DIFFERENT ALIENS: we love turning into animals all the time
JAKE: i love these aliens
MARCO: im a giraffe and also a teen
CASSIE: i’m ants i’m rhinos i’m school and also i’m war but i don’t want to be
RACHEL: i’m kissing feathers and i love it
TOBIAS: kraw kraw
kraw kraw
Huh. So that’s what Animorphs was about.
AX: i’m gonna eat everything because i’m an alien and that is what we do
EVERYONE ELSE: ok
TOBIAS: hey ax let’s go live in the woods because i’m a bird and people won’t understand us
AX: ok as long as i can still eat everything
(SCENE: HUMAN MALL)
AX: Cinnabons are the best
RACHEL: I love Banana Republic
EVERYONE ELSE: *too much angst for consumerism to happen*
Wasn’t there a doorway to the alien headquarters in the dressing room of Banana Republic? Or was that the Gap?
I thought it was a restaurant, and they had to ask for a cheeseburger, hold the cheese to get to the Yeerk pool or something? Am I misremembering this?
IIRC, it was a McDonalds and the code phrase was to order “a Happy Meal with extra happy.”
I didn’t realize at the time what total dorks the Yeerks were.
I feel like that’s the kind of terrible joke that a thousand well-meaning Dads might make. Did they all end up in alien headquarters? Were they memory-wiped and then sent back to the McDonalds or did they also receive Animorph powers?
Dad Animorphs: something I really want now.
I think I’m remembering it from the TV show where they couldn’t explicitly use McDonald’s due to trademark, but yes, that’s totally it in the books!
pretty sure there was a door to the yeerk pool at both McDonalds and in a dressing room at the mall. I’m sure I remember the mall in one of the Rachel books.
Even as a tiny person who had never kissed anyone in a sexy fashion, I wondered why Ax didn’t also want to make out with everyone, all the time, when he was in his human morph. They brush over it a little bit by having him see kissing on tv and think “weird, they eat with those things,” but it seemed to me like he would’ve figured it out pretty quickly.
If you were in an alien body, wouldn’t “how can I make this body feel awesome?” be a serious question of interest to you? …too young? is this creepy? I was definitely very interested in kissing a full decade before I did it. Kissing, Ax! Kissing!
There was definitely a book in which Ax experimentally makes out with a female Andalite who has morphed into a pretty female human! It was awkward and cute and tasteful. Does anyone remember which book this was?
Animorphs #30, The Arrival
This is pretty much the one middle grade/teen series I never read. I have no idea why, because I did read a really shitty series where the girl finds out she’s a clone and basically has superpowers, but there’s no accounting for my childhood taste.
I don’t remember it at all. As in, I thought it was some kind of cartoon show from, like, 2009, and therefore have been completely confused as to why it’s been a topic of conversation. I see now that I was mistaken!
I believe it was also a short-lived live-action television series, but I never watched it. I was, however, ALL ABOUT the book series.
It totally was, and they had an absolute babe playing Tobias:
Wait wait. The clone with superpowers, she was named Amy or something, right? Then again I was super into middle school sci-fi with clones for a while there, so I might be mixing things up… But there was a scene where she could see some creep watching her through a window at night, and her mom was like “n… no, it shouldn’t be possible for you to see that”??
YES!!! It’s the “Replica” series- I found the first book (Amy, Number Seven) in a bookstore last year and alllll the memories came flooding back.
I think I stopped reading somewhere around #15, but apparently the books took a turn for the cray-cray at the end.
Oh man, I was so into those books! I have most of the series in a box somewhere. I once sent a fan email to the author and she responded, and it was one of the most exciting moments of my little kid life.
Yes! Thanks to those books, I like to predict that everyone is a clone in every sci-fi movie I watch, and I’m right a fair amount of times.
Amy, Number Seven! That’s it! I think I stopped much earlier than book 15 due to the school library not stocking them. Alas.
HOLD UP, EVERYONE. I OWN ALL OF THE BOOKS AND I HAVE BEEN REREADING THEM /BECAUSE/. I’m almost at the point where Eric becomes old news because Amy meets that bad boy who was cloned to be body parts. I’m dreading when I reach…the part where there’s a virus and time-travel and the wtf-ery that bewildered me as a child.
AND REMEMBER, IF YOU GET YOUR EARS PIERCED, YOU’LL LOSE YOUR CLONE POWERS.
YES! Replica books! When I first heard about Orphan Black, I thought of it as the Replica Books, but actually done well/not for tweens. I think I got into them after reading the vastly superior Starsplit. More clone books for teen girls please!
*excited pointing and gibbering* Starsplit! That was the other one! I loved that book!
I still think about that book allllll the time, usually in the problematic designer baby context 🙂 If I could design my kid, what WOULD i pick, yknow? (Also loved that their ruler was a woman constantly giving birth to herself…)
CASSIE: gonna fuck a hork-bajir
EVERYONE ELSE: ok
JAKE: no cassie don’t – ah fuck it who cares
(this is p. much how I pictured the last book anyway, facts/canon be damned)
omg I totally forgot about the hork-bajir
excuse me while i cry about Tobias forever
HE CAME FROM AN ABUSIVE HOME AND WAS BULLIED AT SCHOOL, OF COURSE HE’S SAD ALL THE TIME. 🙁
I still think of him whenever I see or hear mentioned a red-tailed hawk.
Every single time I see a bird of prey floating on a thermal, I think of Tobias saying in his wistful Tobias voice, “Be happy for me, and for all who fly free,” and tear up. Every time.
I only know what a thermal is because of animorphs!!
Oh man. I’d forgotten that quote, but Animorphs legit taught me about thermals and SO MUCH ELSE about animals I never would have known otherwise.
me tooooooooo
SAME
a couple weeks ago John Oliver declared red-tailed hawks the official bird of Last Week Tonight as part of a bit and not only could I pick out that it was a red-tailed hawk, I knew every single bird fact he mentioned, because of Animorphs. (Yay, Tobias found fame!)
I was so happy about that too!!!
Anyone else do a LOT of school projects on red-tailed hawks?
His true parents were Loren and Elfangor, and he still had to grow up in a shitty situation!!
I’m loving the Tobias love in this comments section.
I’D FORGOTTEN THAT OMG.
also I just remembered that one time I had a nightmare that one of my teachers was secretly a Yeerk and TO THIS DAY i do not trust that teacher
I had a huge weird crush on Tobias. Falcon or human form, I didn’t care.
my teenage crushes on sad boys makes so much more sense now!
And he was graphically tortured for 150 pages! Like, poor dude.
This is 100% accurate. I like that Marco’s only line is about being a teenage giraffe.
I loved My Brother, My Brother and Me’s bit on Animorph sex from a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-2tGXEoEc
MARCO: I’m going to drive into trash cans.
Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?
I can’t drive with you screaming in my ear.
You can’t drive at all!
I still can’t think of this scene without cracking up.
I thought Marco was super cool when I was, like, eight. I read so many of these books as they were coming out and then for some reason just stopped after the one that I think was from the POV of Marco’s mom aka Visser One.
I read like a LOT of Animorphs and literally had no memory of aliens being involved. What did those teens do? I know they did… things… BUT WHAT THINGS AND WHY?
so basically, this sadly answered many questions I had.
Like a Garfield Minus Garfield thing?
Rachel/Tobias foreverrrr.
was rachel/marco ever a thing or did I just want rachel/marco to be a thing
why did I want that
They fought in a suspiciously flirty way a LOT.
I’M NOT ALONE (It was never a thing, but I wanted it to be a thing.)
BLESS YOU
YES THANK YOU The second I finished reading the Boxcar children article, I thought, “I hope the Animorphs come next.” These books were my world. I am here for all conversations on the Animorphs.
YESSSS.
This is completely accurate. Completely.
…says the person who joined the Animorphs Fan Club at 11 and still owns every book in both paperback AND kindle format.
BTDubs, the Hork-Bajir Chronicles made my cry like, every time I read it.
Yes. Hork-Bajir Chronicles was the besttttt, I cried too.
They are on Kindle?? Whelp, there goes my weekend.
Wellllll I may have found some slightly illegitimate kindle copies for free, so I don’t really know?
Lol.
Whoops.
CASSIE: i dont want to kill anything but im very good at turning into animals
And also killing things. I remember when you got taken over by T-Rex morph, Cassie!
And when she turned into a polar bear in order to almost bite off that racist guys’ head!
(Man, I am replying all over the place, I must chill and do my actual work soon…)
I will not stand for any mockery of Animorphs. They are my very first fandom and I have written many Deep Thoughts about them and I used to run a website and O, THE FANFICTION.
…but yeah, Tobias primed many of us for boys who are sad and full of angst. We didn’t know what the future would bring!
I think I had a small handful of sad-boy OCs named Tobias because as a pre-teen I was Creative and Original and definitely not Just Plagiarizing Animorphs
Wish I’d written something good, maybe instead of 50 Shades of Grey we would have had Metaphors for Hawk Boyfriend
“We didn’t know what the future would bring!”
Jess on Gilmore Girls.
I somehow managed to not get into Animorphs fanfiction.
This is probably a good thing.
BUT
I did totally roleplay Animorphs with another outcasty friend during recess in the 5th grade.
Animorphs was as instrumental in teaching me about war as The Things They Carried, or, like, Dulce et decorum est. I wish everybody could retroactively have read them as a child, because they are horribly written and not digestible as an adult, but the storyline is so good. Rachel. RACHEL. The ship that is named The Rachel! I’ve cried so many tears.
I thought I didn’t remember too much from these, but then you said the ship named Rachel and OH MAN. “It’s beautiful and deadly” or something right?? And then they all go, gee what else could we ever name it. Oh no, there are feelings now…
“the beautiful and deadly” oh wow it’s coming back to me now. I cried so hard.
because I am always looking for places to share national treasure Tricia Lockwood’s Animorphs poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gU5_AspmaE
every book with erek in it can be summarized as such:
Erek: are you actually shitting me
Erek: you guys need an adult
Erek: EVERY DAY I TRAP A PARASITIC ALIEN INSIDE A METAL CHAMBER IN MY ARTIFICIAL SKULL, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THE CAUSE
the idea that he could not forget, so was haunted by killing in a way the others weren’t, was mind blowing for me.
I still get sad thinking about Erek.
Erek was such a melancholy character for me even though for some reason I have memories of him as cheerful? I just feel like Erek should have been in charge. He was so much more competent than they were. And, in some people’s case, soooo much more moral than they were (*cough* Marco *cough* Rachel)
He always acted very cheerful, IIRC, but had a Tragic Backstory.
I *just* discovered all of my old Animorphs books in a box in the basement, and had lots of feelings about it. I remembered freaking out every time the new set of books was announced for the book fair, and devoured those books as soon as I could get my hands on them. I was tempted to re-read them when I found them, but I’m afraid to ruin the nostalgia, as I’m sure they can’t possibly hold up.
ALSO this book series inspired my undying and excessively nerdy love of peregrine falcons (and raptors of any kind, really), so I guess thanks for that fun quirk, K.A. Applegate!
I found they held up incredibly well.
The writing isn’t great and half of each book is rehashing plot and relationships, but the storylines? The storylines are solid.
Seriously dark shit.
Well that’s encouraging! I’ve got the first 20 or so, except for (unfortunately) the first two. Maybe I’ll give them a shot.
And yeah, I recall the storylines being intense. I used to have the most gnarly nightmares about Yeerks and Taxxons and all kinds of awful alien monsters after reading the books.
She wrote about animals and their different psychologies SO DAMN WELL. I learned so, so much. Yes, raptors are the coolest.
First The Boxcar Children and now The Animorphs?! This is a dream come true. Also now I need to reread both series. Maybe my mom still has my books in her basement.
This post makes me almost as happy as the comments section.
Reading Animorphs was the first time I can remember becoming fully immersed into a world other than my own. When I wasn’t reading the books, I was daydreaming about them pretty much constantly.
Also, the whole David arc legitimately scared the bejeezus out of me. Among many other moments in that series.
YES. Animorphs was my first hardcore obsession too, it meant SO FUCKING MUCH to me. I fantasized a whole self-insert character and made up a whole storyline where I got to marry Aximili (I always said his full name).
David was so terrifying. Animorphs was just really fucking powerful and hardcore for a kids’ series, you know? It addressed genocide, PTSD, torture (fucking HARDCORE psychological torture) and the ethics of using disabled kids in warfare — just giving disabled kids their own voice! Oh my God, I will never be over them.
I still can’t believe this series.
Also, one of the first things I ever read that actually legit horrified me was the scene from Megamorphs 1 (the one where they kept getting pulled through time! Dinosaurs! Tralfagor! Nazis!) where Rachael was killed as an orangutan and that image just wouldn’t leave my head.
Wow. I was super into these books.
(also, rachael in general makes me sad. damn)
YES THAT WAS ALL SUPER ROUGH. I remember, orangutan!Rachel was on Nelson’s ship during Trafalgar and there was THAT CANNONBALL and god that was graphic.
Rachel is worth weeping over, even now.
YES EXACTLY
I mean, there’s enough body horror in Animorphs to squick us out for days, but ugh, that. Death by cannonball.
I only vaguely remember these books but I do remember the intense burning need I had for Rachel and Tobias to get together.
Sucks when your boyfriend is a hawk.
oops I just realized someone said this upthread
I feel like “intense burning need for Rachel and Tobias to get together” was very much a shared experience for many in our age group
Once on a family vacation we went to a library that was having a booksale (lol nerds) and my mom let me buy SO FUCKING MANY 15-cent Animorphs and I don’t remember anything else from that trip except for reading books and being mad that I had to momentarily stop reading books
Also in elementary school we had to do this thing like a book report except we dressed up and talked about the book as one of the characters. I chose Animorphs and dressed up as Jake (clue #24 that I was Probably Queer) , which was great, but I was jealous of two boys who got to do theirs together and for some reason were eating a giant plate Oreos as part the presentation?! Maddening tbh
I started an Animorphs club in grade 4 and we met under the tube slide at recess. I got two iron-on decals with one of those books and made my mom put both of them on the same white shirt and wore that shirt under my school uniform for as long as she let me. This series is also why Jake and Rachel are my favourite names, and I will always have a crush on poor, sad Tobias.
I think I shared this in a comment like a year ago and I apologize but also I don’t
You definitely did, because I then was googling doge pictures a few weeks ago and came across it with a the-toast.net url.
I’m so happy this exists.
Also, this will be the second of many times I’ve posted this picture on the internet and I will never regret it:
This is excellent.
Every time I see this I laugh until I cry. It’s comedy gold..
This is the best thing I have ever seen.
Holy Shit.
They still sound smarter than the Bailey School Kids.
What was I reading in the 80s? Phoenix Force of course. Never got into Mack Bolan though, I like a team! http://grooveshark.com/s/Nancy+Drew/3jwmDU?src=5
Who ends a children’s book series on a cliffhanger? I was mad about the end of Animorphs for YEARS as a kid. My best friend and I planned on writing a strongly-worded letter to K.A. Applegate.
THAT REALLY UPSET ME TOO. Especially because Ax was kinda my favorite character. But I think it did teach me, long-term, the value of in media res, which Lemony Snicket used as well at the end of his series.
AND Jake was tried as a war criminal. Like, OMG. I struggled so much with that.
Yeah… do you remember all of Jake’s existential anti-war monologues? Because that was deep shit as a preteen.
omg yes
Man, I tried reading those books in middle school. But after the first one I was so scared of Yeerks or whatever those slug aliens were called, that I had to stop. These books gave me a minor existential crisis and made me sleep with earmuffs on for like two weeks and I will never forgive them for it.
OH HI YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT MY FIRST FANTASY OBSESSION. I was nine and Animorphs was the first series, the first fictional world that completely obsessed me and saved my sanity because I could just think about them all day and not how awful life with my dad was. It led to my first exploration with fanfic — years before I ever got online — and oh my God, I want to cry now, because thinking about Animorphs and everything they meant to me (I got MAD the first time I talked to another girl who said she also read them, because they were MINE, how dare anyone else even know about them, ONLY I COULD FEEL THESE FEELINGS) will always make me want to cry. I have every book in the series, including the companion books, and I will never give them away.
Fuck.
(Also I had a big dramatic showdown in my head when I discovered Harry Potter and was immediately sucked into that world, but I felt like I was betraying Animorphs. I literally fantasized scenes where one of the kids — usually Marco — stood in the bookstore aisle, looking at me with betrayal. My imagination has always been srs bzns, okay.)
Oh, the mental showdown between old and new obsessions! I am familiar with this! It kind of eases the transition if you like, have someone from the old series be friends with someone from the new, so you start by mentally having conversations with both of them together, and then over time you just talk to Old less and New more, and…
I mean. I definitely don’t still do this at age 25, no way.
Yes! I think I tried to make Harry befriend them, so they’d feel less betrayed, but I don’t think it really worked.
*hugs kindred spirit*
Kindred spirit!! *returns hug*
I’m completely with you, even including the feeling of betrayal of the Animorphs when I discovered another universe, the Tortall series. I personally dealt with it by coming up with an elaborate backstory that linked the universes, letting me pull all of them but especially Rachel and Tobias into a world where people understood turning into animals, and technology/magic getting you stuck, and what it means to have to be a warrior when you’re a child. I so badly wanted Rachel to have a knight-master who could help her.
That is a Deep Secret that I will tell no one in my real life, of course …but yes. The Animorphs are sanity-saving, and deeply personal to me too. I am so sad for you that you needed them to be that, and so happy that you (we) had them.
I APPLAUD YOU SO HARD.
God, Rachel broke my fucking heart, and still does. Especially toward the end of the series, when she was really losing it.
I totally understand it being a Deep Secret. I still can’t talk about what my obsessions mean to me in RL. But I’m so, so glad we found the series.
Let’s be friends and just applaud each other all day.
Alanna would have taken Rachel under her wing so fast, and been wildly proud of her, and had zero patience for sadism or killing for pleasure, and MADE it be okay. They could’ve gone into the desert and done a bunch of kickboxing, and figured out ways to keep fighting while staying in control of the anger and pain. And in the meantime Daine could take Tobias flying.
*weeps*
(I don’t know if you’re a Tortall person, but in Protector of the Small there’s a little skinny blonde boy, Tobe, who comes from an abusive household and has a special affinity with animals. And he gets to be happy! That series was written right after/during the end of Animorphs, and in a corner of my heart I still suspect that Tamora Pierce wrote Tobias into her universe as Tobe, to give him a fighting chance.)
Oh man, I missed out on that series! It sounds like I really missed out. But I’ve found other series where I wanted nothing more to smash their worlds together so certain characters could meet, as they obviously desperately needed to.
RACHEL.
Yes.
That’s all I can express about her right now.
I still have an icon uploaded to my LJ account that only says “I wondered if –“
jesus no I’m at work stop
SORRY BUT ALSO NOT SORRY, I knew it was a sucker punch when I posted it. At least now you’re not the only one at work struggling not to break down sobbing, crawl under her desk, and just rock back and forth moaning Rachel’s name. And for Tobias, Jake, all of them.
OKAY now I have to share all my currently uploaded Animorph icons:
(this one above is a personification of myself from ages 9-12 and the start of my thing for emotionally distant super-intelligent boys. See also Spock and Sherlock Holmes.)
And the brutal one:
Are you me? Seriously? These books may have genuinely saved my life, and they definitely brought me my first friends — like, to this day, I have a group of friends spread out over the country, who I first met when I was 11 and using AOL, who we all met because of Animorphs. And I only just found out a few weeks ago that my parents hadn’t thrown away my Animorphs books like I thought they had, and I am so relieved.
(Also, I remember being SO ANGRY at the people who first started talking about Harry Potter like it was better than Animorphs. I remember refusing to read HP for about a year or so because it was such a betrayal to think of anything being better than Animorphs.)
*hugs* I didn’t get into online-fandom until Harry Potter, but then I had the same experience you describe.
Ugh, it’s not that one series is better than another! They’re just different, and both very worthwhile and so important. But I know it’s hard when you only have room in your brain to devote to one world, so the transition process is painful.
I reread a bunch of these as an adult a few years ago, and was surprised to find they hold up surprisingly well for me. A lot of the humor is still genuinely funny, and they often contain much more nuanced discussions of the gray area between good and evil than you could reasonably expect in a middle grade monthly chapter book series with goofy covers.
Also, the author, Katherine Applegate, went on to win the Newberry award, which is, like, the Academy Award Best Picture of of children’s literature, for a book called The One and Only Ivan. It was about a gorilla. Of course. (I read it. It was really good!)
She also helmed/penned a really fabulous series called Everworld that I LOVED that basically took every form of ancient mythology, put it in a blender, and spit it out. I only have up to book eight – I should see if I can get books 9-12 on Amazon or something, since they’re long out of print.
YES. EVERWORLD. I could not remember the name of that series for the life of me. I still find myself randomly thinking about it and not realizing it at first. Like, I’ll be watching Vikings and some strange memory of a kid singing something to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic will flash through my mind and I won’t know why for ages. Then I’ll remember that it was from those books.
(I really, really, really loved the Norse bits of it.)
my memory is that series going off the rails pretty quickly, and I was not a particularly discerning reader at the time (way too much Piers Anthony).
Now I want to revisit the series.
Ugh, this so much. I want about 90% of my Piers Anthony reading back so I can use it on other books.
The only part of Everworld that stuck with me is when the girl had to sing “Killing Me Softly” for the Vikings (?) and made them all cry. It’s still the only thing I think about when I hear that song.
Also someone had Type O blood and so they McGyvered a blood transfusion with like, a pen? Which even at the time seemed unlikely to work out for either party.
I swear I can almost remember the other party in the blood transfusion was a dwarf maybe possibly? I definitely remember the blood transfusion though. And then I remember desperately hoping that I had type O blood as well so that if I was ever suddenly sucked into a fantasy universe (since it was OBVIOUSLY going to happen one day) I too could save someone’s life the same way.
Nope, the other half of the transfusion was Sir Galahad, and there was a part where he said, “I thought having the blood of a woman would make me weak, but it has only made me more brave,” and everything with Galahad was probably pretty sexy but I didn’t understand it at the time because I was still thinking boys were icky.
I’d completely forgotten that they visited Arthurian land. I only remember bits and pieces and I think the blood transfusion got mixed up with the part where they give the dwarves a cd player and a science textbook or something? I remember that now though, especially the ‘blood of a woman’ bit. I’m pretty sure smaller me must have found it all horribly sexy, but clearly that didn’t help my recalling it twenty+ years later. Probably because middle school me found just about everything sexy.
SIR GALAHAD, yessss, how could I forget. I was definitely into it ngl.
So what you’re saying is that I should read Everworld?
I tried to start when the books came out, but I was still too into my Animorphs love and torment at the time to get very far.
AAAAAAH EVERWORLD. Her description of Hel still gives me nightmares, and it has been well over a decade.
omgyes. I think I remember something about walking on a floor made of still living people’s heads? And her half-rotten body. It was so long ago, but that scene and all of Vikingland probably stuck with me more clearly than anything else.
OH SHIT! I was completely obsessed with Everworld.
That series got real intense, real fast. Especially with the ‘real world’ stuff like OCD.
There was that other series as well about a spaceship that takes the last members of humanity into space or something? And there was a girl called 2Face? And it was also all very traumatic.
ohgodohgodohgod REMNANTS. That’s the series I was blocking out. Full of terrifying Space Babies and Worms-as-People. 2Face I remember as pretty badass, along with the Jane girl, but most of it was hardcore NOPE
Oh nooooooo. Now I remember where my worms nightmares come from.
Just from the wiki page. Um, holy shit, what?
“Tate developed a mutation called “the mouth”, which causes her head to grow to a monstrous size when she feels threatened, and accidentally eats Yago, Charlie, and Amelia, who continue to live inside Tate until she dies or they die a natural death.”
Yeah, Applegate is *really good*. You can kind of see where her direct involvement in the Animorphs series begins to taper off (I forget when it happened, but I do remember seeing her allude to it on her website with Q&A’s and stuff), partly I think because she originally intended a much shorter series, but it got wildly popular.
My brother and I (he’s 6 years younger than me!) pooled our money whenever we had some to buy the books, and it was the first major thing we shared. I kind of hated him and we fought terribly, and I fantasized about killing him, but this was a thing that brought us together! (We still share books – the other Major Series that we read together was Garth Nix’s ABHORSEN trilogy – imagine the excited texts back and forth when Clariel came out last year)
Get ready for the ugly cry: http://submissiveinwonderland.tumblr.com/post/100…
ahhh no 🙁 🙁 🙁 what a great tattoo but wow, apparently that line is still a punch in the gut after–has it been twelve years? It’s been a lot of years.
Never have I been quite this nostalgic for the promise and unending pleasure of the elementary/middle school book fair.
THAT’S EXACTLY WHERE I FIRST DISCOVERED THIS SERIES. I was in fourth grade and I picked up the fourth book and the Andalite Chronicles. Oh my Gaaaaaaawd, the memories.
Just reading this piece and all the comments I seriously am feeling the rush of running into the book fair and grabbing the latest Animorphs title. Oh man. What exciting times those were.
My hamster was named Tobias! And we definitely still have the entire series in storage in the attic.
I re-read them all last summer and they do hold up well for me. The writing can be… a bit much, I guess, but once I got into the story again I didn’t have a problem with it.
I also spent a lot of time during my re-read imagining the auteur hbo series I would make of the books. They’d have to get pretty surreal in order to deal with some of it- like book 6 is almost entirely inside Jake’s head with the yeerk, and the later book where they’re on that alien planet fighting the howlers would be hard to do right. But it could be so cool!!! And you’d barely have to cut anything out bc each book is so short, it’d easily translate to ~50 minutes of screen time.
BOOK 6 WAS SUCH HEAVY ISH
Yeah, seriously! In the fake hbo series in my head, Book 6 is the season 1 finale. Then it’d grow to 12- or 13- episode seasons, but the first 6 are such a good arc by themselves.
I really need you to make this series happen.
It would be so much better than the Nickelodean show
(but I still love it)
move to LA
start writing screenplays
work my way up to showrunner on some other project
get buddy-buddy with everyone at Scholastic Media
20 years from now at Comic Con:
“so, how did you get into television?”
“well my life’s ambition has always been to make this show based on the Animorphs…”
win lots of Emmys
the end
umm do we really have the entire series in the attic? If so, I know what I’m doing next time I’m home…
I’m actually not sure if it’s the ENTIRE series. I think we might have been missing a few here and there towards the end. But we definitely told mom she wasn’t allowed to get rid of them, so they got shuffled up to the attic.
I also have .pdf copies of all of them… I mean, if you want. just saying.
Was book 6 the one with Jake morphing into a fly on the cover? THAT ONE FUCKED ME UP.
Yep, that’s the one! where he gets infested by a yeerk and the only way to save him is by starving it to death. while it’s in his head.
Taxxons: no thats fine we know we’re not worth your adaptation budget Nickelodeon
i tell this story every time animorphs are mentioned and i don’t care.
when my brother and i were…maybe, 9 and 8 years old, respectively, we were big into animorphs. and one time i was trying to get my brother’s attention, and he cut me off with a terse, “shh, i’m morphing!”
nearly 20 years later, nothing is better than cutting him off with “shh, i’m morphing” and watching him try to decide whether to laugh or get mad.
I still do this.
I always resented the David story for unfairly stereotyping young Megadeth fans.
And that was literally the only flaw I found with these books in junior high. That was it.
I JUST SAW A RED-TAILED HAWK. I walked out of my office building to get lunch, and THERE IT WAS, SITTING IN A BARE TREE. Truly this is an auspicious Animorphs day. Although this might mean that my office campus is home to a secret Yeerk base/alien device.
Don’t tell anyone, they’re probably Controllers. And be very, very suspicious of anyone trying to get you to join any new fun clubs.
… I edited trifolds advertising a new company fitness program a few weeks ago. And now they’re sitting on every table in the cafeteria. What have I done?!
True fact: I mentally mapped the Animorphs to different Buffy characters back when I was a tween, because they were my two main obsessions in life, and also because that was around the time that I realized character archetypes were A Thing.
I hated Marco for the longest time because he was The Xander, and any character remotely like Xander was a complete bag of dicks in my twelve year old mind. I feel pretty bad about that now (about Marco, not Xander-the-dickbag).
I am surprised at the level of outrage I felt reading this. Marco was always my favorite.
These books were my favorite thing. I had so many feelings about them. To this day I love hawks when I see them because they make me think of Tobias.
I love you all and I feel like I have found my tribe.
Animorphs!
That’s the best thing about these posts. Suddenly, my people are all around me. In elementary school, I spent ages getting just one friend to read Animorphs and join my obsession.
As a child I read like five of these in no particular order and also The Andalite Chronicles. And that one weird one where they got sent back to the Cretaceous (or whichever era they actually got sent back to, who cares, dinosaurs). Time to go to the library and do this properly.
the first megamorphs book!
Oh these books.
A year or two ago I got a hankering and totally acquired the books legally instead of finding a torrent of every single one ripped to epub and read the whole series again.
It holds up! So well. some of the books were still totally horrifying. Yeerks are creepy as hell!
and yeah, let’s write a kids series where one book is pretty much entirely tying a kid to a chair and listening to him scream for 3 days. That’s a good plan.
(oh good I’m not the only one)
Welp, looks like I know my weekend plans.
My favorite ‘filler’ book on the re-read was the one where the Yeerks spend the whole book trying to recruit this teen heartthrob actor who isn’t /called/ Jonathan Taylor Thomas but is TOTALLY Jonathan Taylor Thomas, circa Home Improvement. And Rachel and even Cassie think he’s sooooo cute but then it turns out he’s kind of an asshole. But they still don’t let him get taken over by a Yeerk.
YES that one’s so good.
oh no
i’m twelve
Basically the story of my life as a twelve year old.
I have just been constantly falling down an Animorphs memory hole today. How sad I was for poor, sad Tobias. How jealous I was of Jake’s peregrine falcon morph. Dreams I had about fighting the Yeerks. Elfangor’s terror at Loren taking her shoes off, as he thought they were hooves. How much I hated the Ellimist (as a character *and* a concept) and how I now, right or wrong, blame that character for my losing interest in the series.
Yes, oh my God, that moment when Loren took her shoes off and the Andalites freaked out — that’s still my favorite moment of sci-fi, also the most perfect revelation of what sci-fi can be and my favorite kind, which just explores all the particular weirdness of the human species and how other species might feel about us.
I didn’t realize until years after I read these books as a kid that I had had a queer, grungy crush on Tobias. Sad bird fly to my heart.
I could write reams about the ‘morphs, so I’m gonna stop myself right here.
I thought they were like 15!? Are they seriously only 12?
Also: WHO THE FUCK IS TOM? (I seriously do not remember a Tom, but everyone else, yes.)
Tom is Jake’s older brother who is also a Controller.
They start at 12/13, they end at 16 or so. Teenage soldiers.
My best friend at primary school was mostly my best friend because she had the first 40 Animorphs books and so when I went round to see her mostly she would play with another friend and I would read her books. I wanted to be Rachel more than anything.
When I was in Raleigh last July I went to a used book store with my friend, and in the back there was an entire bookshelf full of Animorphs books. I got very excited!! Not because I meant to buy them, but just because nostalgia. (I left with a Star Trek book I’d been looking for but still haven’t read because I am absolutely /awful/ at consuming media these days.)
As someone who has only dated boys with serious mood disorders, this hit a little bit close to home. Gah.
So much Tobias love though.
As a tiny trans kid I never understood why they weren’t morphing into the opposite sex all the time. There’s one book where someone has to morph into Rachel and Marco’s like I’LL DO IT and everyone is creeped out and Cassie does it instead.
I see you, Marco!