Animorphs II: How to Write a Book Series Like a TV Show

now i've got to give an interesting old lady a manicure but i'll be back before you're done [Music] i have a question what is the plot of looney tunes if you're over the age of zero you've probably seen a looney tune or several you can immediately recognize their distinct visual style and its cast of characters but what is it about what's the major story thread that connects all of the various looney tunes what does bugs bunny's narrative arc and the obvious answer is who cares it's a cartoon it's not supposed to have a plot in fact on the rare occasions that looney tunes has had the freedom to develop a full length feature plot line i was brought in to leverage your synergy things haven't gone well however when constrained to short five to seven minute animation segments where telling a traditional plot is impractical looney tunes is paradoxically more free to be what it is a weird cartoon where characters go to space give haircuts to monsters and throw pies at humphrey bogart with no greater goal than to make you laugh rather than being limiting the restrictions on the medium will forgive the series the traits we know it for today so what in the elemist's name kind of constraints did animorphs have on it to produce all of this [Music] all right so in my last animorphs video required reading by the way i made a whole deal about how i don't have time to get into all the weird stuff that happens in anamorphs and that's still true there are entire podcasts and youtube series and lectures about the details so cramming it all into a single one-hour video god i hope it's just one hour at this point is impossible i'm going to go into a lot of it don't worry i keep my promises but first i need to explain why it's so hard to discuss anamorphs in an organized way you see everyone who has explained anamorphs before me has been doing it wrong no disrespect but you're doing it wrong because there is not just one animorphs there are two the first anamorph is the one i explained in the previous video it's the long epic story of the year convention of earth the stories of six children who are forced to lead a war using the ability to morph into animals as their only weapon and the traumatizing effects their battles and their choices leave on them this anamorphs is a linear epic growing grander in scale from sneaking around their vice principal's house to leading the world's armies in open intergalactic war this is effectively the actual origin of the y.a dystopia trend but there's a second animorse co-existing alongside it that animorphs is a colorful episodic sci-fi adventure series where world-changing concepts are introduced and just as quickly forgotten whole books are effectively skippable if you only care about the first anamorphs that is because they're undone before the last page returning the series to some semblance of a status quo like it's a sitcom on every weeknight at 8pm and you don't want viewers who missed last week's episode to be completely lost which is actually sort of true part one the scholastic book fair effect the scholastic book fairs were and continue to be to this day the most baller way for a kid to spend their time in cash since the 1980s scholastic book fairs have been the gateway drug that suckers kids into a debilitating lifelong reading addiction once a month or so scholastic would roll out these heavy metal cases into your school's gym or library like it's the band's equipment and you're about to get your ears blown off but is it for a concert no those cases are full of books it's hard to overstate how rad scholastic's book fairs were as a kid these weren't the books that teachers made you read because they were culturally important or whatever they were filled with the magic school bus the babysitter's club and best of all the latest installment in that granddaddy of all episodic children's books goosebumps okay i i say granddaddy like it started the trend of a monthly book series but not even close sherlock holmes short stories for example were released in monthly installments in the strand magazine as far back as the late 1800s and by the time goosebumps came on the scene in 1992 there were already plenty of monthly book series that made appearances specifically at scholastic book fairs sweet valley high for example began publishing in 1983 and by 1998 it had 143 books in just the main series that doesn't even include sweet valley twins sweet valley kids the unicorn club sweet valley junior high sweet valley senior year sweet valley university sweet valley confidential sweet valley the suite life and elizabeth these monthly series were a huge deal for scholastic which in the 1980s had started to hit some financial trouble in 1984 scholastic lost almost 14 million dollars a first for the company which at the time was mainly known for selling educational textbooks scholastic lost money off and on for the next few years until the company took itself private in a leveraged buyout there were a lot of complicated reasons for that but for our purposes it just means that the company didn't have to publicly report its financials anymore so there's a bit of a dark period where we don't know exactly how much money scholastic was making for a few years after that or at least i don't know maybe someone who's smarter about this stuff can come correct me later but in 1996 scholastic filed to go public again which meant we got a peek into how much money the company had been making and let me tell you it was a lot in 1987 the last year before it went private scholastic had 206 million dollars in revenue by 1996 it had 928 million most of that happened in just the last few years revenue in 1992 was only 489 million in four years the company's income rose by half a billion dollars if you're not a numbers nerd let me translate that for you goosebumps make bank scholastic's ipo filings call out the highly successful goosebumps series that sold 150 million copies in four years averaging around 3 million copies every month with just 68 titles the babysitter's club similarly sold 149 million books off the backs of 245 titles and that's without touching the merchandise which oh man was there ever merchandise and the book fairs were key to that success scholastic paired a recognizable brand name with either a recognizable cast of characters or a consistent theme to get kids interested in picking up a new book and it worked there is quite possibly no greater excitement as a 10 year old kid than finding out oh there's a new goosebumps book is this knight of the living dummy three but i thought there were only two if your goal was to get children excited to read a book any book then this was the way to do it it was essentially the marvel cinematic universe model but for kids novels the plots characters and even the ghost writers might be wildly different inside but as long as they had that big recognizable banner at the top then you knew what you were spending your four bucks on also like the marvel cinematic universe this model prompted concern that this was the death of sophisticated media as we know it speaking to the new york times in 1984 one educator from yonkers new york said that many of the books sold through book fairs quote are the educational equivalent of the television sitcom and while one might argue that a child reading anything is better than a child reading nothing the comparison is not without its merits in fact book fairs borrowed a lot of techniques and shared a lot of the same distribution problems that episodic tv shows had back then if you only discover the series in the middle then you would have a ton of material to catch up on to get the full story if you're a regular reader but you miss one issue you might have no idea what's going on next month and if the book fair or bookstore didn't have every book in stock well good luck filling in the gaps yourself this incentivized books to have some consistency from month to month in the same way that you don't need to see every episode of the simpsons to enjoy whichever one happens to come on every entry in the book series needed to have familiar elements characters and a formula even if there was an overall serialized plot this is part of the reason why older mystery series like nancy drew and the hardy boys saw a revival during the 80s and 90s mystery series are very easy to make episodic it's why we get so many crime shows today franchises largely avoid the problems that arise with monthly churn more by selling related media rather than focusing on new entries in the series zachary valdo you remember him from the last video right explained this based on his time working in a scholastic warehouse i worked there for a decent amount of time and i didn't see a whole lot of news new entries and series come through i saw a couple of them but they weren't as they weren't as notable as goosebumps animorphs uh or any of the other suit like any other series that i wound up reading at the time and it was more so like you said a new product that tied to the franchise like this book that is connected to this goosebumps being an anthology largely avoided most of these problems which helped make it the second best-selling book series of all time with over 400 million books sold as of 2015. you could pick up almost any book in the series with no prior context know exactly what kind of softball horror story you were getting and not worry about collecting the whole set to get the full story which is good because buying every book in a series like this is expensive sure every individual book is cheap but even at just two dollars buying every goosebumps book would cost you over 120 bucks of course it wasn't really necessary to buy every single goosebumps book you could just buy the ones you felt like buying animorphs on the other hand part two tune in next month every writer of an episodic series has to make some decisions about what they expect of the person consuming their story when writing it for example i wrote this video with the soft expectation that you've seen my previous video but i also intentionally wrote it to largely stand on its own if you haven't i even included one sentence earlier that gives you the basic gist of the story if you skipped that video and came to this one the goal there was to work it in naturally so it doesn't feel like i'm recapping the series all over again in the same way animorphs had to write with the knowledge that not every reader has read most or any previous animorphs books it uses a number of strategies to keep readers engaged or at the very least avoid making them feel lost some of which work better than others here animorphs borrowed a tool from television the formula formula is really just a basic framework that gives a story a structure which every story needs in a tv show like for example house the formula basically goes house doesn't care about a patient because the case is boring but then there's a complication that makes it interesting he and his team brainstorm some possible solutions they administer treatment it seems like it's going to work but then the patient has a new symptom that makes things more complicated usually someone lied about something that changes everything house has some epiphany when someone says something entirely unrelated and then he storms out to deliver a triumphant lecture usually confronting someone else about their hypocrisy formulas so easily become recognizable that shows will often lampshade it themselves i've just given you the answer haven't i and now you're going to walk out of here without saying a word nope but formulas serve an important purpose they give stories and their writers a sense of stability even if you have no idea what's going on in the overarching plot you can be generally sure that in this episode bart's gonna get into trouble house is gonna solve the medical mystery and the anamorphs are going to turn into animals to fight some bug-eyed aliens and their evil principle while still fighting time to get their homework done that's not my analysis by the way that's the explicit formula laid out in the anamorphs bible under a big subheading called formula as michael grant explained on twitter this was largely in place to quote convince scholastic we um had a plan but the loosely followed formula allows each book to be about something other than constructing a complex narrative the book where cassie gets lost in the woods isn't really about fighting jerks it's about whether or not cassie is willing to live as a caterpillar forever in order to spare a young girl from living with a yerk in her head a formula works pretty well to keep readers engaged even if they don't read every book that's how goosebumps works after all but animorphs has a more complicated story than goosebumps there are brain infesting jerks morphing with complex rules like a two hour time limit and having to touch an animal first and there's thought speak a mechanic that analytes can use all the time but humans can only use and morph also sometimes you can direct thoughts speak to a specific person like a whisper other times you can just blast it out like a broadcast these are basic mechanical elements of the story that readers need to understand in order for it to make sense not knowing about these elements would be like watching star wars for the first time by starting with return of the jedi the hell are these laser swords why can people move things with their minds who is this old guy and critically does he anamorph solves some of these problems in some clever ways for example all thought speak is written using carrot brackets rather than typical quotes even if you don't get a detailed explanation for how thoughtspeak works you intuitively get that it's not quite the same as speaking aloud the other way anamorph solves these problems is by just repeating the same exposition over and over and over here is an excerpt from rachel's first book only the second book in the series describing the yurks the eurex were parasites in their natural state they were just big slugs who lived in a sludgy pond called a year pool but the yurks have the power to take over other bodies they have enslaved many races throughout the galaxy the taxons the hork bajir and others and now they had come to earth looking for more bodies to control and here is an excerpt from book number 48 rachel's tenth book and like five books away from finishing the entire series the years are here parasitic aliens their goal is to conquer the human race and believe me they've been doing it one human at a time this is like if in avengers end game they stop to explain so listen sometimes people have superpowers and also aliens exist and one of those aliens got these infinity stone things which are colorful rocks that control things like space and time well i guess actually infinity war did kind of do that last part even though the infinity stones were kind of already explained back in guardians of the galaxy but you can't be expected to remember that one scene from a movie five years ago for such a plot critical element in the same way animorph's books are forced to re-explain basic plot elements over and over the first half chapter or so of each book serves the same purpose as the intro sequence to a kids tv show [Music] it establishes the characters and basic premise every time just in case you only tuned in this month now at this point you might think that it kind of sucks that anamorphs were shoehorned into a format where it has to stick to a formula waste time re-expositing and had to be rushed out every month that's what i thought anyway so i reached out to anamorph's co-author michael grant to get the real story about how scholastic's corporate greed ruined the series and no they wanted it that way we knew from the jump that we wanted a monthly series we wanted to be goosebumps author bob stein or babysitter's club author ann martin we'd already had some experience writing for sweet valley twins and we'd moved up to y a series that were long manuscripts and we were getting those out monthly we knew we had the speed of course we had no idea would go on for so many books wait hold up catherine applegate and michael grant wrote for sweet valley twins the high school drama well no having that monthly cadence though necessarily shapes the type of stories that you can tell or in some cases have to tell not every book can be a big dramatic climax you'd escalate to all-out war by book 10. instead the rapid release schedule allowed room for smaller more experimental stories to keep the excitement up during the summer there would usually be a mega morphs book featuring every narrator rotating by chapter instead of dominating a whole book these stories were usually bigger than a typical episode but still in the main continuity then there were the annual chronicles books these usually came out between october and december and they were some of the biggest stories and would deviate the most from the main animorph storyline they were also the coolest most interesting stories expanding the lore around the franchise when you map the books out onto a timeline a pretty familiar pattern emerges the main series books are like regular episodes of a tv show the megamorph's books are like a mid-season multipart episode and the special holiday season book would wait about 10 to 12 books a year an annual special around the holidays animorphs isn't goosebumps it's doctor who okay let's be real it's also star trek [Music] for every episode of doctor who that centered around the time lord's galactic battle with the daleks also small slug-like creatures inhabiting bodies more physically capable than their own there are more episodes that are standalone adventures the doctor goes back in time to kill hitler cassie goes back in time to among other things terrorize racists the doctor encourages van gogh elfangore teaches bill gates about computers to understand animorphs purely as a linear story where every event must be critical to the full arc is like saying that the girl in the fireplace sucks because it's not about the dalek time lord war but giving the series space to have smaller stories while simultaneously putting limits on any individual story's scope necessarily allows a different kind of creativity to flourish the bounds you place on the storytelling influence the kind of story you can tell as michael grant put it i read somewhere long ago someone pointing out that bugs bunny was great in part because it was so time constrained seven minutes if i recall correctly i spent some time a while back casing the reich's museum in amsterdam for a book and thus a lot of time with paintings ranging from the vast night watch to relatively tiny vermeers girl with a pearl earring blown up to night watch size would be overbearing and night watch reduced to the size of girl with a pearl earring would be equally wrong you also find that those unimportant episodes can often be the best ones in doctor who that episode with van gogh is heartbreakingly genuine but it doesn't get to happen if every episode of the show has to tie into a big space epic there's just not room for that kind of storytelling for a series like animorphs that had to output so much so fast these filler episodes and deviations were critical not only to pace out the bigger story but also to explore new weird topics or even just to give the writers a break as michael grant told me the episodic nature meant we could write bottle episodes i imagine you know the term but it's a tv reference to a standard lone episode outside of any long-running narrative and using limited resources regular cast existing sets etc of course we don't have issues of cost but the idea still applies a standalone outside the continuing narrative this was a sort of escape valve where we could do stupid that amused us if no one else the helmecrons come to mind well i suppose that's as good a place as any to start part 3 the bottle episodes of the 54 books in the main anamorph series 26 of them were written by ghost writers but if you think that makes it easier on the writers then you've never tried to outline a story with a pace that blistering at a certain point you kind of throw all the ideas you've got at the problem which is how you get helmicrons the suspicion the helmicrons are the best don't have me in book number 24 cassie and the other animaworks discover a spaceship about the size of a toy hanging around the place where they hid the cube that gives people morphing powers but they can't let anyone find the secret cube do not observe the secret cube turns out the spaceship is populated by a race of creatures all around 1 16 of an inch tall called helmicrons and they have mastered advanced technology like space travel shrink rays and bombastic passive aggression several chapters start with messages from two of the helicon ships the planet crusher and the galaxy blaster addressing the helicon emperor now keep in mind these are chapter by chapter updates each letter is directly relevant to what happened in the previous chapter which means the helmecrons are stopping what they're doing mid-combat at times to send sassy messages to their boss like most powerful emperor lord of the galaxy disaster has struck your bold minions our engines have malfunctioned we have sustained damage but we are undaunted perhaps the weak and unworthy captain of the planet crusher will assist us so that we may achieve everlasting glory most omnipotent leader we have located the fools of the galaxy blaster they have allowed themselves to be taken by the large aliens of this planet but your loyal ship planet crusher will destroy all who stand in our way and will save that other unworthy ship so that they might perhaps by mere accident serve your great will so i think this is a good time to talk about tropes the idea of shrink rays and even shrunken civilizations aren't all that new honey i shrunk the kids did it ant-man did it superman did it even twilight zone did it but from a storytelling perspective that's a bit like saying oh blue yeah blade runner already did blue instead tropes are shorthand elements that can be utilized to tell new stories without having to invent entire concepts from whole cloth which spoiler alert no writer has ever done so maybe the concept of a shrunken society isn't new but how can that idea be remixed to make it more entertaining for this filler episode of animorphs well for starters the tiny society can all have massive virulent egos convinced of their own technical superiority and they're obsessed with grovelling they love it when people grovel when cassie and margo get shrunken down and taken prisoner the helmecrons insist that they grovel before the captain but they've never groveled before like how exactly does one grovel they looked at one another then the one i'd spoken to said you may grumble in the style of your own people grovel as you normally grovel i saw the sly gleam in marco's eye you heard the man cassie let's grovel oh great and glorious masters i i abased myself before you in grovelry i'm pitiful worthless husk of a man unworthy to kiss your feet i'm pitiful the captain doesn't respond though because the captain is dead sitting in the captain's chair was a helmecron shackled to the seat and pierced by three large swords later cassie asks one of the lower class helmecrons why and why do you want your captain to be dead how else can you be sure she will not make a mistake those who make errors must be eliminated it is inevitable that a captain who would make many decisions if she were alive would therefore also make many errors what is the point of a captain who must be killed for error in this way we have a captain who may be respected and revered by all oh and did you catch those pronouns well in case you didn't allow me to spell it out the helmecrons at least the vainglorious ones we've been dealing with so far are all women which means those letters really should have sounded like this oh greatest of the great most magnificent of the magnificent we have taken two of the strange transforming aliens prisoner they tremble before us they abase themselves they quiver in cowardly terror and it should be noted that the galaxy blaster was of no help whatsoever meanwhile the male helmicrons are essentially a slave class not even given the dignity of names but like however the women are in charge but not two in charge or else they well they become the captain yes a helmecron female may not ascend to a position of importance in our society unless it is certain that she will not cause problems she must be a symbol that all can admire so wait hang on that means that the emperor is dead too like they're sending passive aggressive notes to no one and and so are the only homicons who are alive the ones who aren't important enough to ascend to higher ranks how the hell does that even work viscer 3 of all people has the answer you can't kill a helmecron they're a fungible species kill one and its mind if you can call it a mind is absorbed into another they never die even when they're dead they're not dead so they're sort of like a hive mind and their minds just get recycled over and over and the men are slaves and the women get killed for being too good at their jobs but when they're killed they just become other helmicrons so like maybe the female emperor and the male slave are the same person i honestly don't know what to make of this like at times it has some really interesting takes on gender but it's also so baffling i can't even fully wrap my brain around the implications is it good i think so but does it have to be this is the kind of material you can't get from a more streamlined series if you don't like the helmicrons then they'll be gone by the next book and probably won't make it into any movies but they were an experiment worth trying you know those lists of 30 best episodes of friends or twilight zone or the office or whatever those are usually selected out of dozens maybe hundreds of stories that didn't work but that kind of experimentation is how you wind up with the few gems that do perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the helmicrons is that they are essentially at war with themselves they're separate individuals but they're also the same as each other each reflecting a different piece of their shared collective memory and personality and oh god this is a segue into starfish rachel isn't it the separation starfish rachel properly known as book number 32 the separation is easily one of the most widely mocked entries in the series but does it really deserve to be dunked on as much as it has been yeah well mostly let me explain the separation begins with rachel on the beach she loses an earring in a tidal pool and to get it back she morphs into a starfish the fact that a starfish wouldn't be much better than a human at finding an earring in a tidal pool is lightly lampshaded mere sentences before we get to the real reason for this contrivance rachel gets cut in half now if you remember anything from middle school biology it's that starfish can regenerate which in a world where children can morph into animals translates into both halves of starfish rachel morphing back to human but each half only gets part of rachel's mind the first is aggressive violent and impulsive she's capable of taking immediate action but not thinking very far ahead she's also a massive meanwhile the other rachel is like totally super nice she hates fighting she cries when someone hurts her feelings and she loves shopping yes because the clothes are super cute but also because scoring a deal is satisfying she's able to plan routes through the mall to optimize the number and quality of the deals she can get but she also gets lost in her plans throughout the book she's paralyzed not knowing which of her well-laid plans to follow through on in the end the two versions which are literally described at the start of each chapter as nice rachel and mean rachel learn that they need each other nice rachel needs to be able to take action in the moment and mean rachel needs to be able to play ahead for the future and also maybe not solve all her problems with murder [Music] maybe it's a decent one-off story about different aspects of one's personality and it's also the exact plot of star trek episode 6 the enemy within [Music] this is also a good time to point out that this isn't the only time animorphs took inspiration from star trek you could draw a straight line between the elemist and q from the next generation and the jerks themselves well their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex this has the effect of rendering a victim extremely susceptible to uh suggestion and before you insist that i'm reaching with that connection allow me to be correct but if this book is based on a classic star trek episode you might ask why is it so roundly mocked even among people who like animorphs to which i would first reply but also this is an area where the episodic nature of both series work in their favor while they're coming out but the benefits degrade over time like okay put yourself in the shoes of a 5th grade kid it's the summer of 99 you've only got a few more months before y2k kills everyone and you're bored because you're not cool enough to hang out with the kids whose dads have pools but luckily a new animorphs book is out in the time since school ended for the summer you've got a mega morphs book where the kids travel through time marco has a massive book where he tries to kill his own mother and jake has to protect his father from getting infested two of those books are big enough events i brought them up in the last video so even if rachel's book is tropey it's kind of a break you'd get exhausted if every story was a massive climactic showdown that fundamentally altered the shape of the universe or whatever the book barely even acknowledges that there's a mission against the jerks since the entire book is told from one of two highly distorted character povs it's a little hard to get an objective grasp about anything that's going on but you don't really care because it's a way to kill time for a bit and it's nice to just chill and focus on some simple character growth but like watching old star trek episodes it's harder to go back and visit it's not 1999 anymore and all the books are out now so if you're reading it now you're probably doing it in one of two ways either you're binging it in which case this story isn't very deep compared to the ones you know are coming and since rachel re-emerges with her other half you know this one won't even matter that much in the long run or you're picking your favorite books to return to and this probably isn't it either way it feels like a bit of a drag however die hard starfish rachel fans might argue this is the book where rachel beats a guy to death with her own severed arm wouldn't that be cool to revisit and yeah it would be if you could except that's not exactly what happened it would be more accurate to say rachel tells us that she beats a guy to death with her own severed arm i know off screen isn't really a thing in books but it's still not very exciting to just be told that something cool just happened but that's fine sometimes your only goal is to keep a kid entertained for an afternoon in the summer also the enemy within isn't even the best star trek episode specifically about evil versions of characters i um i forgot to write a transition here in the time of dinosaurs ensemble casts are difficult to write for instead of having one or two main characters you have many and it's easy to forget that some of them need to be developed it's why joey is mostly comic relief while ross the worst friend gets countless episodes devoted to how much of a selfish dick he is even in animorphs which cycles out character povs every book tobias that acts share a slot in the rotation leading to both getting less page time and no matter who's narrating a first person pov means that much of what happens to the other characters will happen off-screen it's really hard to do parallel stories when you have to follow just one character megamorph's books were a chance to break this trend and give everyone something important to do each chapter was narrated by whoever ka felt was best for that particular part of the story and everyone got a turn to talk this made it possible to tell bigger more elaborate stories which kinda makes returning to the status quo at the end harder which probably explains why three out of four of them involved time travel or alternate timelines that didn't affect the main story at all so if you're going to go that route go big or go home and it doesn't get much bigger than a t-rex in in the time of dinosaurs the second megamorph's book the kids investigate a downed nuclear submarine wow the kids investigate a nuclear submarine cool sentence but then it explodes the nuclear sub explodes killing all the children series over the end okay okay no that would be ridiculous instead the explosion blows them back in time by about 65 million years a period that tobias the nerd correctly identifies as the cretaceous period shortly before he and rachel get eaten by a chronosaurus tobias would point out that's technically a masosaurus which is like twice the size of kronosaurus and that's why he's a nerd after getting eaten rachel and tobias cut their way out of the dinosaur then after acquiring a few dinosaur morphs and discovering that apparently t-rex tastes like fish the group finds out that prehistoric earth was inhabited by aliens two sets of aliens to be precise the merkora a race of seven-legged lobster people and space ants well i mean i guess they're still earth ants because they're on earth but they're a sentient race of ants called the nest that cooperate to take the form of other aliens they've encountered use weapons and fly spaceships the nests hate the merkora but the animorphs help the macora out to scare off the space ants except on their way off the planet the phase nudge a comet that was just going to pass by into a collision course with earth so apparently ants killed the dinosaurs i don't know what paul rudd sees in you now because this is anamorphs the kids still have to make some awful choice in this case the merkora who have been nothing but helpful this entire time think they can blow up the comet before it destroys the planet so tobias and ax sabotage their plan they wipe out the race that's been helping them and all the dinosaurs while they're at it in order to create a narratively confusing causal loop that preserves the timeline that creates the human race now look going back in time to hang out with the dinosaurs causing their extinction and even space ants aren't new just like shrunken societies and good and evil twin stories aren't new but the fact that they aren't new isn't really the point what's new is these characters in those situations does tobias really have it in him to wipe out an entire species in order to preserve his own timeline how does rachel reconcile the two opposing sides of her personality and what does cassie think about a matriarchal homicidal society of microscopic flat-headed and if you're not interested in those deep philosophical questions perhaps we can interest you in some dinosaurs a million tiny doctor dooms and rachel beating someone to death with her own severed arm yes i'm counting it these books are filler but they're often great filler the fact that you can't talk about animorphs without tripping over a discussion about some wild one-off book is kind of a testament to how exciting these stories are even if they didn't mean that much to the plot in the long run on the other hand if it's a big story with huge lore dumps and massive stakes you want then what you're looking for are the chronicles part four the holiday specials animorphs annual chronicles books aren't themed like holiday specials in the same way that say doctor whose specials are but they did come out every year during the holidays so long as you include the month of halloween in the holidays which in this house we do there are four chronicles books the end of life chronicles the horcree chronicles the alamus chronicles and visser which i know isn't called chronicles but come on we all know what it is most of these only loosely involve the animorphs themselves instead providing backstory for the various alien races and major events in this universe the first book the andaly chronicles was divided into three parts that were seeded to school book clubs early before going on sale to a wider audience in one combined volume selling the books in smaller chunks to both build hype and minimize risk is a move straight out of the lord of the rings playbook however by the time the next chronicles book was coming out the hype was self-sustaining i guess because the remaining chronicle books were sold as a single volume and objectively the best of these is the hork bejeer chronicles it pains me to say it because it's not my favorite my opinions can't be swayed by petty things like objectivity but it has one of the most complicated tragic stories and for this franchise that's saying something it starts with unleashing the jerks on the universe the book is framed as a story that one of the few free hork bajir on earth is telling tobias one he's heard passed down for generations this is also the book where we first see the events that lead to siro's kindness the law that andalights don't share technology with other races the book is partially narrated by an andalite named aldrea daughter of prince ciro and she's in the room when news breaks that a group of around 400 yurks have attacked the andalites who were stationed on the york home world cira was teaching them about the universe how to fly spaceships what weapons are and so a small group of jerks slaughter a crew of vandalites steal a spaceship and make off with a quarter million other years and a lowly warrior by the name of alaran the same one who would eventually become the host body to visser 3 insults his prince ciro a thing unheard of in andaly culture and in front of his daughter no less and he lays into ciro for being foolish enough to trust the yerkes when a commander has been incapacitated due to injury or mental defect his subordinates may relieve him alaran quoted from the regulations what mental defect my father demanded stupidity halleran said harshly the stupidity of kindness charity to potential enemies you're a fool siro a soft sentimental well-meaning fool and now my men are dead and the yeeks are loose in the galaxy how many will die before we can bring this contagion under control how many will die for cyril's kindness cyril's kindness my father's love of peace had released the evil of war on an unprepared galaxy anyway that's chapter one for the rest of the story cyril and his family are effectively banished assigned to a dead end colony where they'll study another new species of peaceful tree dwelling reptiles the horkbajir though they look fearsome toweringly tall with long sharp blades on every limb they aren't very intelligent and want nothing more than to strip bark from the trees and live simple lies the hork bhajir are essentially deadly giant lizard hobbits but one hork bajir in a generation is born smarter than the rest a seer who can lead their people at a time when they need it most for this generation that seer is dakhami he joins up with aldrea daughter of cyril she teaches him what she can about the greater universe but not long after the yearks arrive and they've found their shock troops a large number of powerful dangerous creatures too stupid to defend themselves and before aldriya can make it back to camp to warn her family the yerks blast her home into ashes so aldrea helps stack organize the horcrageer who haven't been infested to lead a resistance dak doesn't want to become a killer but aldrea embittered by the loss of her family convinces him of war's necessity that this is the reason he was born a seer to help his people defend against the yerks it's at this point the book could very easily turn into another avatar pocahontas story of the single brave alien leading the ignorant natives to victory against the very threat they helped bring upon them and a lesser story probably would but this is god damn animorphs as dak and aldria lose more and more battles they are eventually driven into the deep fog filled valleys where the hork bajir usually never dare enter here they discover another alien race called the arn the arn lived deep in the cracks of the planet formed eons ago when a comet struck their world they've survived in their destroyed home by carefully balancing the composition of the atmosphere in order to keep the valleys breathable they would need vast forests and someone to maintain them the trees i said i knew then where this was going i turned one stock eye to look at dak he had not figured it out yet should i silence the arn should i stop him before he revealed the truth to dak so you created a race of tree herders i said right here in this room yes in this room we used all our genetic skill to design and build a species that would be perfectly adapted to caring for the trees preserving them we made them bark eaters we gave them bodies perfectly adapted to the task dak's eyes widened he looked at me disbelief on his face i nodded slightly yes dak i said this is your creator the arn designed the hawk bhajir to be unintelligent on purpose because quote intelligence was not necessary for tree herders dak is not a divinely appointed leader he's a rounding error the one accidentally smart hork bazier that the arn weren't able to entirely eliminate he's the only member of his race capable of understanding the awful circumstances of his people's life and death but hey don't worry not too long later the andalites show up and if you've been reading animorphs for a while you know that the andalytes are here is code for finally the war is over they're going to save us and if you've been reading animals for a long time you also know that's not true at all the endolytes that arrive are too few they can't fight back the ears especially as they infest more and more of the fearsome orchestra bodies and so alaran who is among the andalites that arrived creates a quantum virus one that would brutally kill every horkbajir preventing the jerks from using them as hosts now this is a strategy a few analytes try to repeat later on earth but fortunately the animals are there to stop the virus from being released preventing a global genocide but there aren't any anamorphs on the horch bajir homeworld aldrea tries to contain the virus by putting it in a container that they can safely dispose of but she and dad get attacked the canister is lost and later when they can finally regroup one of the other horde bajir none the wiser about the contents of the canister or the fact that it's now open carries it towards their camp he's happy to return the lost important thing dak and aldriya run the virus escapes it wipes out nearly all of the hortmogee the ones who weren't already enslaved the hork bhajir were workers for the arn tools of the andalites and slaves of the yerks and now those who aren't slaves are dead until tobias helped free a few of them on earth establishing a hidden hork bazier colony where he could hear this story that's an amazing story i said to jeremy not exactly a happy one though yes good story sad story jarrah said jeremy tell father tell jeremy father father tell father i tell daughter he looked fondly at the young horcreer who had curled up beside her mother in the night but what's the end of the story you didn't tell me the end story have no end jarrah said laughing like i was a great fool stories go on this book is one of the least connected to the main series of all the chronicles books but its story is gut-wrenching in keeping with the animorph spirit not every story has a happy ending especially when they're war stories tobias sits with the scarce fledgling remnant of a dying species many of whom he's personally killed in the war with the jerks and even as the horkbajir tells him that stories go on it's impossible to avoid the truth that for many people much of the time they don't okay but this is starting to sound too much like that first animorphs you know the serious war story i mean hell i could actually see some of this ending up in a gritty hollywood movie that's not what you wanted to hear about you wanted that weird alright you win i can't avoid this one any longer it's time to explain god part 4.5 what the actual f is the element on a long enough timeline every fiction franchise will go to space travel through time and invent god or gods animorphs did it in book seven even after getting an entire chronicles book of backstory on the guy the alimist is kind of hard to explain but i'm gonna try start the clock so billions of years before the earth was formed on the other side of the galaxy there was a race called the quet they were bird creatures who lived on continent-sized crystals that floated over a toxic planet and they had to spend most of their time slapping their wings to keep the continent in the sky because if too many of them stopped their entire society come crashing down around them which probably isn't a metaphor for capitalism but one day they invent twitch and it destroys their civilization the cat broadcast video games where they do to alien races what you do to your sims another alien race picks up these broadcasts and goes all galaxy quests thinking they're real and so they show up to annihilate the cat before they kill again a small group of cat managed to escape on a spaceship and spend their lives trying to find a suitable home for birds who live on flying rocks instead they find a moon covered with water which is like the exact opposite and then the moon attacks them one cat two men who used to be a filthy casual gamer back home wakes up and finds himself underwater his body has been infested by tendrils penetrating his nervous system the entire planet is covered by one spongy creature known as father who has grafted members of thousands of other species onto himself creating a hive mind trapped forever so there's nothing to do but play video games two men loses over and over to father until he finally gets good which pisses father off are you winning son yes two men slowly starts to absorb the other people that father had infested and he keeps winning and keeps absorbing and winning and absorbing and winning and absorbing until eventually he has become father himself a thousand minds trapped inside his head he starts building a massive spaceship body database thing he hacks himself into a fleet the size of several planets and life is pretty cool like that for a while until a toxic gamer enters the chat another being crayak is apparently just like tooman an abhorrent conglomeration of machine and flesh with the power of a cosmic god except crayak has a joker avatar so he likes destroying worlds just to watch them burn tuman doesn't like that so he chases crayack around the universe trying to save the worlds that krayak is trying to destroy and they fight each other from millennia until toomin trips and falls into a black hole this puts two men in the 5th dimensional closet from interstellar and much like matthew mcconaughey he's now able to pluck the strings of reality playing them like a poorly tuned piano eventually crayack manages to find his way into the same interdimensional space and the two agree that if they ever fought each other directly it would destroy the universe so instead they'll have a proxy war playing games with mortals like the animorphs for all eternity now twomin with the vast knowledge of countless civilizations and the experience of eons lives with great and terrible power standing as the lone force against an equally powerful evil that he can never hope to defeat but only to keep at bay and that two men's gamer tag albert element no seriously elemist is just the dude's old screen name from his early gamer days the unfathomably powerful cosmic god basically got his name from his racist equivalent of xx underscore 360 no hope for 2069. his isn't as cool as a side note the entire lms chronicles book is being told in a moment where one of the animorphs we don't know who is seconds away from death the elemis stops time to have a quick chat and tell his whole life story to a child who is on the verge of dying the alamus chronicles came out in october of 2000 and the ending of the series didn't happen until around april or may of 2001 which means for seven months and as many books we knew one of the main characters was going to die and had no idea which one well okay you could probably guess after six months but it was still a gripping tease this is like how promos for lost would market the next big reveal in the series this is lock seeing a bright light coming from inside the bunker do you want to know what he saw come back in eight episodes in conclusion wait conclusion what am i talking about there are like 64 books in this series and i have talked about maybe five tops what am i missing it was the time that rachel was allergic to a crocodile and the time jake maybe kinda was a grown-up for a while when elfinger sireda sun by going full on exophile and visser three got sidetracked by technology most juvenile and marco in the arctic morphin enough the friendly polar bear and viscera 3's twin brother was a cannibal tech billionaire when cassie scared off racist losers in the time of polio and when she accidentally made a hybrid human buffalo excess morphing mass caused them to rubber band through time and space and jake and cassie beat howlers by finally getting to first base when cassie became luggage and crash landed in australia and when she must assassinate her mid-to-day regalia this is a lot of books controllers started getting high on maple and ginger oatmeal and rachel morphs a giant squid while crayock tries to cut a deal tobias gets familiar with taylor and her brutality and jake escapes the amazon by fracturing causality rachel has to take the lead her methods are quite overkill experiments with cows trying to eliminate human free will this are three traps to bias with the fake mom and tax attorney and fish folk from atlantis dabble in some human taxidermy rachel fought the helmet crowns and marcos bodwell microscopic texans made peace by becoming anacondas in the tropic and so much more it's arduous to chronicle i must confide all the homicide and fratricide matricide and genocide [Music] actual conclusion now if you're a die-hard fan watching this before the eventual movie comes out you might understandably interpret everything i've said as a damning indictment of the decision to turn animorphs into a movie instead of say a gritty hbo series in which case calm down don't worry things can still be good even if they aren't exactly what you expected them to be also what exactly did you expect hbo to do with the helmecrons but it does raise the question how are they going to fit everything from this series into a movie or even a series of movies well the answer is they won't best to rip that band-aid off now i guarantee you that the helmecrons or starfish rachel possibly even the elemist won't have a place in even a long series of animorphs movies because that's not really the animals we're getting if you want an idea of what might make it into a movie check out the first video in the best case scenario that's what we'll come through the core of morally gray complex characters making hard choices and living with the reality of war it might still be weird and outlandish and even funny at times but it's unlikely that every single event from the books will end up in a movie it just can't animorphs was written like it was a tv show in book form sold to children at book fairs the basic structure of the anamorphs books is fundamentally opposed to how movies are told however if you want something that actually does try to adhere to the silliness of the book series that isn't afraid to touch some of the more ridiculous plot lines and tries to capture the spirit of the sci-fi adventure series an argument could be made that we've already gotten that not a good argument not the kind of argument any sane person who wants to have a shred of critical credibility should ever make but you could make the argument that the anamorphs tv show is not entirely [Music] bad and that is why i don't sing karaoke uh that was that was a lot uh that was a lot to do in just a few months um i got a ton of help from scott and peter who were both amazing at the music and laura finally let you collaborate with me and uh and i know i said it in the credits but thank you michael grant for taking the time to talk to me um i'm i'm gonna do a third one it won't be soon please i hope i hope that this is enough to show that like the weight is worth it i hope um but i've got a couple other videos that i need to do before the end of the year like they have to be done before the end of the year so i'm gonna do those first and i'm gonna take as much time as i need to on the next animals video but that was a lot thanks for watching

Channel: Lord Ravenscraft

Views: 79,566

Rating: 4.9682059 out of 5

Keywords: animorphs, animorphs movie, scholastic, young adult, ya lit, 90s, video essay, k.a. applegate, animorphs series (literary series), television, tv, house, doctor who, star trek

Id: 6gw-nZ00D7I

Length: 51min 49sec (3109 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/the_c0nstable]

I discovered this channel last week and really enjoyed both of these videos.

This one in particular led me to two completely different conclusions. The first is it made me even more wary of a theatrical adaptation because the format is really not conducive to the disparate types of stories Animorphs excelled at telling.

Second, unrelated to Animorphs, it kind of helped me articulate why I don’t care as much for the newer Star Trek shows that eschew its traditional episodic storytelling (like in older Star Trek and Animorphs) that helped both series tell a variety of compelling stories, try new things, and give characters and backstory room to grow beyond a single narrow high-stakes world ending narrative - the episodic storytelling helped both franchises feel bigger in a way.

I think this is why Animorphs would have been better served by an animated adaptation with the same scope and semi-serialized storytelling as Avatar: The Last Airbender - a children’s show that also broached complex “adult” themes better than most tv shows in the same genre intended for adults.

[u/reddit_feminist]

It really is such a good point how the serialized distribution format of Animorphs is something that is both hard to re-experience once the series is released in full, and not something that really exists anymore. Streaming channels mostly dump finished seasons onto their platforms and "binging" is less a particular method of consumption than it is the new norm in terms of engaging with media. The monthly release schedule both gave the books a much tighter grip of control on the "information" faucet, since each reader was getting the new information on the same regular schedule, while also needing to be inviting enough to brand new readers so that they wouldn't get lost, confused, and frustrated if they jumped in in the middle. It's sort of like how sitcoms USED to be vs. how sitcoms are now. Did you need to watch Seinfeld from the beginning? No, and therefore each episode of Seinfeld had to be accessible enough for new viewers but consistent enough for fans. It's a balance you don't really see anymore. Shows can be whatever they want, they don't have to constantly re-exposit the fundamentals since everyone has the ability to jump in at the beginning at any time, and episodes don't really need to be self-contained anymore, either. Narrative structure has changed a lot since Animorphs was written and it really makes me wonder what they would look like if they'd come out ten or fifteen years later. More like Harry Potter/Gone probably, idk

[u/FilthyFoxxingAway]

Thanks for posting this! This channel makes great content, I'm glad the word is being spread!

[u/blackblack_club]

This YouTube video single handely started my re-read of the entire series and i'm so glad that it did lol