It seems that every time a piece of nerd media comes out, other people in other nerd media spaces surface declaring that now, now is the time that our nerd media thing is ready to strike while the iron is hot. It doesn’t matter how unrelated it is. One of those spaces where I think I comfortably belong is the Animorphs fandom, even if I think I must come across as being so utterly negative all the time.
Whatever the current context, there’s always some reason that now, here, Animorphs is due a comeback. With the backlash against Hogwarts Legacy, there was a push that hey, now, now is a great time for us to make sure our Young Adult Fiction media property from the last millenium gets to take prominence and become the new thing everyone talks about with its own theme park! Then it was Goncharov, where the sudden thirst for creative element that encouraged people being able to make new Animorphs books and pretend they were always part of the canon as a great way to tap into that community! And then most recently, the fact there’s shapeshifting in the Dungeons & Dragons movie and an actor who’s a jerk —
Why, this movie is proof that we could totally have a great, successful, reboot movie for the Animorphs! You know, a movie! For that set of forty plus books!
Problem: This is completely unfeasible.
Part of it is just that the Animorphs books, for their own sake, are just impressively dated. It’s not just that the books are of a particular style or time or place, but the way they are is part of how they exist. The late 90s was a period when portable phones and secret communication networks and maintainable online conspiracies were a different species to what they are now.
If the Animorphs kids existed in the smartphone age, they could be tracked by the fact they were the only teenagers in town who didn’t want to carry smartphones around. And these aren’t small questions, these are questions that would fundamentally alter the world of their existence: How is the movement of Andalite spaceships going unnoticed in a world where everyone has cameras? How is there not a graphical database of everyone in town being surveilled from every diverse avenue by a conspiracy of Yeerks?
The world of the 90s was smaller. It was less connected. There was simply less surveillance, a conspiracy took a different form, the Yeerk’s avenues of attack were limited to needing a lot more material presence. It’s not like you’d need to answer all of these but these things would present questions that would need addressing to address the concept of the Animorphs at large in the newer world.
In 2020, if the Yeerks were invading, they would have Alex Jones telling you about themselves. They would advertise the idea of shapeshifting monsters and mind-controlling slugs, because we know there’s a population of people who can be mobilised and weaponised in a way we really didn’t anticipate in the 90s.
The whole idea of a reboot seems to be built out of a want to have more of it. The idea that Animorphs is good, and that means more of it would be better is at odds with my opinion that we’d be better off with less of it.
Some of Animorphs is effectively filler. Some of it is contradictory. Some of it is extremely silly. Some of it – like, y’know, the Ellimist and Cryak story chunks – can feel cheap in the context of a story that starts out as a science fiction fantasy narrative. The Megamorphs and other game material, that stuff isn’t really ‘part’ of the Animorphs narrative and it can feel really weird and wrong compared to the core material. Just having a clear vision of how important the mystical elements would become compared could make that eventual discovery a little more gentle.
What I would really like, if the idea was to create a new Animorphs product, for the vision of the fans of the 90s work who want some way to bring the product back, is an immense editing parse designed to attain the following goals:
- Restructure the narrator order to give those picky fans the right number and sequence they say they want.
- Diminish a few inconsistencies from early in the story that wound up being unimportant to the later stories.
- A few added scenes or sequences to mention or explicate what happened to some minor characters that people like.
- A single, standardised collection that lets people like me buy the whole set in a nice, readable form in a way that gets money to KA Applegate and the other contributors.
Problem: This is completely unfeasible.
What’s on the page is on the page. The people who made the books have moved on, they don’t get the money from reprints of the books, they don’t get to benefit from our desire to turn their existing, successful, good media, into another, different, differently available media. The last thing in the world we should want is ‘Animorphs Media’ being produced because it’ll all be just the same thing we already have, fan media, but being made by people who are going to make us pay for it.
Make fan content. Make Animorphs stuff. Share it with friends. Make reading lists. Make editorial revisions – show how you’d trim things or change them. Make fan comics. Sure, even use whatever dumb image tool you like to make fanart, 3d rendered or whatever.
Right now, Animorphs is a rare and precious thing in that it is widely available. You can get digital ebooks reasonably easily without spending money. You can find the books second hand if you want physical copies. The people who are sitting on the rights for it are not trying to monetise it, and the people who made it have moved on. We are free.
I get it.
I really do.
But stop thinking of the companies as sources of what you love.