Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Liora on March 07, 2014, 05:08:31 PM
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Question for all of you who were fans when the Animorphs TV show came out: what did you think of the show then, and what do you think of it now?
Personally, as a kid I hated that show with the fire of a thousand suns. I don't think I'll ever take anything as seriously as I took Animorphs when I was 12, and for an adaptation of the #1 thing in my life to be that bad was basically an abomination.
More recently, I re-watched it (and watched Eric's Opinionated Animorphs Episode Guide) and while I definitely wouldn't call it good, it's not as terrible as I remember. Part of it might be that there are things I understand now that I didn't then - like the difficulty of having wild animals on-set and getting them to do what you want. And of course, if they'd put the animals in any actual danger for the sake of verisimilitude, that would have been totally unacceptable. I also understand that they were doing what they could with the budget they had. Thinking about it in that context, I understand why they changed some of the things they did.
On the other hand, there's stuff in there that's just badly done, and it wasn't a budget issue at all. Like the writing - Tobias dying in one episode and coming back with no comment in another. Rachel as a fly being squashed in one scene, then perfectly fine in the next. Like the many times when the actors just sort of stand there staring at each other for several seconds. I don't know if that's the acting or stage direction or what, but it's really awkward. And the cheesy piano music they played during Rachel/Tobias scenes. All the music, frankly, except for the theme song which was actually kinda cool.
A lot of my fan rage came from how they declawed Rachel, who was my favorite character. Seeing it again now, I notice that Cassie also has less of a personality; her strong sense of morality never comes up except in that one videotape intro she did. They kept the male characters' personalities roughly the same as in the books, but sanded off the edges of Cassie and Rachel until they were both just blandly nice young women with no particular personality traits beyond liking gymnastics and liking animals. Which actually pisses me off more now that I notice it.
What about you guys?
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I kind of liked the show as a kid, just for the sake it was my favourite thing ever finally made into a tv show. But I was disappointed.
I began a rewatch recently but could only find the first 3 episodes, so I'm gonna have to look again for the rest.
You're right about Rachel and Cassie though, and I know they only had a certain budget and it would be hard getting wild animals and all.. but come on, why the heck was Cassie's battle morph a horse????
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I often say that the reason I'm so chill about bad movie adaptations is because nothing can be as bad as Ani-TV. Like the first two Bay-verse Transformers movies, for example. It was like "Yeah, it's not perfect, but at least it's entertaining. Still didn't destroy the franchise as badly as Ani-TV did."
When I was a kid, the TV show ended up being a HUGE disappointment. I mean, yeah, I'd probably gotten my hopes up way too high, but to be fair, I was 13. Every episode was just more and more disappointing than the last. And every once and a while they'd come up with something decent, or give us a funny one-liner ("Oh, that lizard"), but mostly it was just... urgh.
Funny enough, though, one of the things that disappointed me the most as a kid was that there weren't any Taxxons. I mean it makes sense to me now as an adult, Taxxons would NOT be kid-friendly on screen (they're barely kid-friendly on paper). Plus they probably would have stretched the budget too much. But man, as a kid I was so mad they weren't there.
When I watch it now, it's not as bad (I still hate how they handled Erek, though), but I think it's mostly because I know in advance how bad it's going to be.
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As far as kid's TV shows circa '98 or so go, it really actually was pretty solid. Zero budget, G rating, Nickelodeon calling the shots: considering all that?
Sure, the kids all look about 22 or whatever, the morphing's generic 1990s "two images smoothly blending into one" CG, there are plenty of arbitrary changes to the plot that really just do seem for the hell of it.
But. I feel like considering what they had to work with they did a pretty solid job of conveying the paranoia and eeriness inherent to the series (even if the dialogue and voiceover is beyond cheesy, and doesn't have the immediacy or impact of the books), the actors were all fairly decent despite being oh-so-wrong for the roles, the ambient music was pretty cool, and I mean all in all, what did we really expect?
It's not even close to being a faithful Animorphs adaptation, no, but I mean for what it was? It gets the job done, y'know? Most adaptations with a kid demographic turn out at least no better, in a lot of cases worse.
This thread makes me want to track down wherever the hell I have my two VHS tapes from back in the day, I think it was a bunch of season 1 episodes. Ah, crappy nostalgia, even if it's still crappy, is...nostalgia, and such.
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The budget has now been mentioned 3 times in this thread. Can someone give me a source for this apparently minuscule budget: every-time I bring it up in an Ani-TV conversation the thread dies, but no one has ever provided me numbers or where they get this idea that it most have been done on a shoe-string (for TV) budget.
As for the animals, I was 10 an new then it shouldn't have been live action. And that I still try and tell y'all til this day.
On point, hated it as a kid, honestly haven't looked at it since. I tried once a few years back, but I still couldn't stomach it. I remember thinking all the characters were off. Particularly disappointed in Marco, the funniest thing about him was the damn jacket; Visser Three wasn't imposing, Ax was, i don't have words, human or muppet.
So no. Still hate. Heart filled with hate.
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For some reason, as a kid, I had zero interest in watching the show. I was a huge book-nerd so I would read the books over and over again and loved them to death but it just did not interest me to seek out the show. So the first time I watched the episodes was last year, alongside the Opinionated Guide and I actually couldn't finish it. I wasn't like filled with hate about it but it WAS a big disappointment. After the first few episodes I just gave up on it and watched it solely so I could laugh along with the reviews and even that got boring by the time I got to the "second season."
The one thing I really did like about it though was the actors. I felt like they had a **** script to work with but they were trying their best to bring the characters to life and it showed I think. Saddened by the enormous lack of alien characters. I mean if you're gonna set out to make a TV show based on a book completely about aliens shouldn't you at least feel confident that you can put some aliens on screen every episode? The most they could manage were stiff puppets of parts of Andalites and that was only occasionally.
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The Andalites didn't look all that bad. Sure, they didn't get it right, but again, for what it was. And I didn't mind the actors, they were totally miscast and approaching a decade too old, but you can't blame them for taking a job and doing what they can with it.
As for the budget, RYTX, I don't have numbers. But, yeah... It's a Nickelodeon show, made in Canada for tax breaks, circa 1998. As far as TV shows go, they weren't exactly throwing money at this thing, even for a licensed-property kid's series.
You're being a little harsh for something that was basically just a cheap way for Scholastic to make some quick cash by milking one of their properties while it was still being published. There are plenty of examples of the exact same thing, especially with kid's franchises.
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You're being a little harsh for something that was basically just a cheap way for Scholastic to make some quick cash by milking one of their properties while it was still being published. There are plenty of examples of the exact same thing, especially with kid's franchises.
This is why I'm (and I think I can say many of us are) being harsh on it: they were looking for profit, we were looking for something significant to our lives being presented in a new medium. Scholastic is entitled to do that, but I can say that they did a ****ty job of it, one that hurt reputation of their series (know plenty of folks who say they never followed the books cause the show was stupid), and worse, personally, it showed me that the people with the ability to craft it in new ways didn't care about it as much as I did.
It didn't have to be the greatest thing ever, but it was clear this was a marketing stunt only, and a poor one at that. I'm glad to see that there's enough attachment to the source material to get a little indignation at what they did to it.
Also, I'm trying to remember if they ever showed a full body of an Andalite, all I remember is head shots and silhouettes; was there ever a full, head to tail body of an Andalite in motion?
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Not in motion but there was the scene where Ax gets lassoed and I think they showed his full body then. But he was just standing still and staring off into nothingness.
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I'm pretty sure most of the budget went into the morphing effects. Which are ****ty by today's standards, but let's face it, were pretty amazing for a 90s show. (I actually recall reading something about how there was this Brand New Technology being used for the morphing CGI)
But really, with the way the rest of the show turned out, I would have rathered they had all the morphing off screen (which is pretty much what they started doing after a while) and spent their budget on better writers or better costume design/animatronics/whatever they were using for the aliens.
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Oh and I forgot to say how much I hated the andalite fight between Visser 3 and Ax.. they fought with their arms and basically wrestled. Awful.
And they never aired the episodes with Erek here in Aus so I've never actually seen them!
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Here is where (http://animorphsforum.com/tv/) I re-watched the TV show episodes.
One thing I actually liked about the show is that Visser Three had a human morph. (It's implied that it was some kind of super-rich guy that he acquired and then killed.) That's not just a good way to save money, but also makes sense for someone leading an invasion of Earth; if you won't part with your precious Andalite host, you can at least pass as human for two hours at a time.
You're being a little harsh for something that was basically just a cheap way for Scholastic to make some quick cash by milking one of their properties while it was still being published. There are plenty of examples of the exact same thing, especially with kid's franchises.
This is why I'm (and I think I can say many of us are) being harsh on it: they were looking for profit, we were looking for something significant to our lives being presented in a new medium. Scholastic is entitled to do that, but I can say that they did a ****ty job of it, one that hurt reputation of their series (know plenty of folks who say they never followed the books cause the show was stupid), and worse, personally, it showed me that the people with the ability to craft it in new ways didn't care about it as much as I did.
It didn't have to be the greatest thing ever, but it was clear this was a marketing stunt only, and a poor one at that. I'm glad to see that there's enough attachment to the source material to get a little indignation at what they did to it.
This. Just because adults don't (or didn't, at that time) take children's entertainment seriously, that doesn't mean the children were wrong to get deeply invested in these stories.
The budget has now been mentioned 3 times in this thread. Can someone give me a source for this apparently minuscule budget: every-time I bring it up in an Ani-TV conversation the thread dies, but no one has ever provided me numbers or where they get this idea that it most have been done on a shoe-string (for TV) budget.
Apparently, it was actually an unusually high budget for a Nickelodeon show, which is one of the reasons they cancelled it. But for what Animorphs needed (complicated-looking aliens, morphing, wild animals), that budget wasn't nearly enough.
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Apparently, it was actually an unusually high budget for a Nickelodeon show,
Source, source, I beg you for a source. High or low, I don't care, I just want to know after all these years where people are getting the idea that the budget had the effects we claim
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Source, source, I beg you for a source. High or low, I don't care, I just want to know after all these years where people are getting the idea that the budget had the effects we claim
I got it from Opinionated Animorphs' interview with Ron Oliver.
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I doubt we're going to ever find a "budget-per-episode" figure here, guys, it's not Lost or something where there's enough of an audience to even bother documenting that in a public sense. Yeah, of course it was big budget for a Nickelodeon show, which basically says nothing at all. It'd be significantly less cash than, say, early-days Buffy, which was considered a cheap cable show even for '96. I guess Animorphs'd be similar to something like Alex Mack (which was obviously far more genuinely great than AniTV), or their other live-action stuff from the period. Likely less than the Goosebumps series, which was actually successful.
As for the "I hate it because it was a cash-in" argument, it's valid, but again what would you expect? Any crossover-medium thing with a book series, especially while it's popular and still in circulation, is a cash-in. Let's just be honest here with the reality of this not exactly being Game of Thrones or Walking Dead or whatever, it was a quickly-hashed-out afternoon series on Nickelodeon, aimed at elementary kids. There's nothing wrong with that, really. We don't seem to whine about stuff like Ninja Turtles, which started the exact same way, a sanitized version of a somewhat-popular-but-niche property to make the most of the license.
And, also, to be fair, we'd all hate any Animorphs series that was suitable for kids (not in K.A.'s sense, in a television executive's sense of the term) and financially viable. Of any description. That's not their fault.
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As for the "I hate it because it was a cash-in" argument, it's valid, but again what would you expect? Any crossover-medium thing with a book series, especially while it's popular and still in circulation, is a cash-in. Let's just be honest here with the reality of this not exactly being Game of Thrones or Walking Dead or whatever, it was a quickly-hashed-out afternoon series on Nickelodeon, aimed at elementary kids. There's nothing wrong with that, really. We don't seem to whine about stuff like Ninja Turtles, which started the exact same way, a sanitized version of a somewhat-popular-but-niche property to make the most of the license.
Well, I was a kid, so I had very high expectations of it. I don't think it's fair to say, "Oh come on, were you seriously expecting these people not to try to make as much money as they could as quickly as they could?" because we were children. I was not yet old enough to develop that kind of cynicism. I didn't think of Animorphs as a product to be milked for cash; I thought of it as literature that spoke to me. It hurt me that the people making the show didn't feel the same way. I felt like they were entrusted with this story and these characters that meant the world to me, and they betrayed that trust.
Yeah, Scholastic wanted to cash in, but there's cashing in and then there's cashing in. Look at what's happened with kids' book series since then. The Harry Potter movies were a cash-in, but they were good - with fantastic British actors, gorgeous special effects, and writing that was almost obsessively faithful to the books. Even the toys and candy were high-quality - I mean, cross-marketing with Jelly Belly to make Bertie Bott's Ever-Flavour Beans? That's just flat-out genius! Everyone involved has made ****tons of money from this fictional universe while simultaneously respecting it. It can be done.
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Harry Potter was bought out by an enormous movie studio to make the films. Animorphs wasn't.
And, just to be clear, I pretty much hated it as a 12 year old too. It annoyed me a lot. That being said, it's not a horrible series or anything, if we're being objective in looking at it. It's well made for what it was, it just had a buttload of seemingly arbitrary changes, probably just for convenience given what they had to work with.
Another point here is, no series that's given the green light for kids is ever going to be as intense, gray-area controversial, or yep, bloody as Animorphs. The whole issue with wanting it adapted into basically anything is that it's going to be watered down and sanitized to the point where it bugs us. When you consider the stuff that went on in those books? It's not exactly even PG-13 material. Still amazes me how Katherine and Michael got away with half of that stuff, such an anomaly.
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Books are rated very differently than TV/movies. Readability level and the age of the characters matter a lot more than actual content.
While I do agree that it's unlikely they could have actually made an AniTV show that 13 year old me would have enjoyed, I still think they could have done a better job than they did. It's one thing for fans of the original material to not like a thing, it's a whole other for people new to the franchise to ALSO not like it.
With things like, say, Michael Bay's Transformers movie, there were a lot of transformers fans who (reasonably) didn't like it, but they (the first couple of movies, anyway) were still good enough to draw in new fans, who then took a deeper interest in the franchise. AniTV did the opposite. You STILL hear people say "Animorphs? Isn't that that ****ty TV show?". People saw the TV show, didn't like it, and then were even LESS likely to read the books than before.
So yeah. If a thing fails at pleasing the existing fanbase: *shrugs* It happens, but it might still have merit.
If it's so bad that it even discourages NEW people to check out the franchise: Complete failure.
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Yeah, books definitely get away with a lot more than movies or TV can. A lot of the problem with the series is the violence in the context of...kids. You'd be presented with either the option of ageing the kids up, being like Hunger Games age, which I'd hate, or sanitizing it all to be more palatable to a wider audience. You could have the same broad story arcs, but have to skirt around a lot of the less acceptable themes and content. Unless you want to go with a soft-R rating, which no studio would even fund.
I'm not so sure I agree with the TV show being more known than the books, though, at least not among a certain generation. It would have reached a *wider* audience maybe, younger kids watching Nick in '98/'99, but if you were say 11-14 in the second half of the 90s you were probably at least vaguely aware of the books.
Transformers, I guess that's an example. Though I don't know that that sold because it was Transformers, y'know? Yeah, it pisses off the fans of what came before, but the general public just saw "big giant robot movie, Michael Bay, Shia and Megan", y'know? They didn't give a crap whether it was the Transformers brand.
Not sure if the Animorphs show could reasonably have been "better", at least as an adaptation (faithfully) with those resources, and content limitations, but I agree it wouldn't have been hard to be more accurate in terms of a toned-down version of the plot. It pretty clearly wasn't made by anyone with any subjective, sentimental connection to the series, just another job, but admittedly that was going to be the case as a majority of the book's fans were, you know, 12-13. :P
I still feel they at least went some way to capture the "average town with something very, very wrong going on underneath the surface" vibe pretty well, Twin Peaks light. :P 1993 Body Snatchers movie tone, but more kid-friendly. It had atmosphere, for what a Nick show can get away with. Jake and Cassie were more or less Jake and Cassie, Chapman was done okay. Nice ambient music. It's not good, but there are non-sucky elements to this thing.
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I'm a new-comer to this site. I was 14-16 when I watched the show on Nickelodeon. I remember very little about the series til I decided to re-watch a upload put online from the re-mastered Qubo channel airings. I can't find the link now...But it's very high quality. I'm 29 now so WAAAY out of the intended demographics. But I liked the series as far as I can remember as a kid...But seeing the show now...Yeah the CGI effects are poor but of the quality in the 90's. The morphs were always the same. But I also thought that maybe that was for the best...Most of the animals they used were lions, tigers, etc....So big strong ones. But naturally subtlety was needed at times too as in rats, ****roaches, lizards...
The show in the 90's got me reading the books. I really loved the books and how adult the author KA approached everything. I didn't get all the books and only had, maybe 15 books total. I had a Megamorph book also. I got rid of the books 4-5 years ago though while cleaning house.
But back to the TV Series. I did like the action....But it did have a cheezy feel and of course no one used guns they used those light/laser things lol.
But the thing I HATE the most about the series now was it never ended! While the show highlighted most of the best books...It just...Stopped. Then opened up that deal with Tobias being the son of Elfangor...To this day still wonder how that worked, and he was still human. lol...
Yeah the music was cheezy almost like a soap opera type. But had solid actor... Shawn Ashmore as gone on to be in most all the X-Men movies and the new TV Series on Fox, The Following. Looking much older of course.
Brooke Nevin and Paulo Costazno have also been fairly active. While the rest just went off somewhere.
I do wish there had been some continuity...since it was a serialized series. But I guess with over 30+ books to choose from by the time the show started they had to pick and choose.
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Yeah, Shawn Ashmore and Brooke Nevin show up from time to time in a lot of Canadian stuff. Pretty cool getting that little "Animorphs!" moment when they're in a movie.
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Over the last couple weeks, I took it upon myself to watch the entirety of the Animorphs TV show because, well apparently I hate myself.
Okay, honestly, it's not a terrible show. It's not good mind you, but it's not a terrible show. It is however a terrible adaptation of Animorphs.
I think these are two seperate issues and looking through this thread, it seems we are aware of most of them, however, since it's fresh in my mind, and the web is for letting you relish see your own opinion over and over again, I'ma post my opinion.
As a show it was just not well done. The live animals were boring in the action scenes, which were assembled by frequently cutting the camera. The dialogue was pretty weak, the way too long "dramatic" pauses that made me think the volume was faulty, and the acting while not terrible (by the main cast)wasn't strong by anyone except for a few a lines. There was other little things that they didn't build well, the "big game" had thirty people, generic extra's were really, really bad, and other that the opening theme, a lot of the music bugged me.
All that said, the biggest annoyance with it as it's own show was that almost every episode ended with "I still have my friends..." ,"as long as we have each other..." . And that was bad. It was cheesey even for nick back then.
But as an adaptation of Animorphs, it was vile. I can forgive the breaks from the source. I can forgive aging them and making new plots (hell, some of them I liked. Drop all the kids in the pool at once. Neat.) But every one of the Animorphs character was... I don't even know the right word. Wrong.
I get why this is hard. I believe much of the strength of the books was that you spend a lot of time listening to the characters perspectives on what the fight did to them as people. I get why that's hard to put on television, and the opening and closing monologues, while a reasonable attempt, failed. But each of the Animorphs essentially became, nothing. Not even something else, they where completely interchangable with any other human being.
But Jake and Tobias where way too rough round the edges for my taste. Marco, Marco actually wasn't as bad. His age showed when he spoke Spanish, blt mostly he lost is cool in places that Marco shouldn't have. I give him a little break because I laughed at this character, which you're supposed to but still, his role as a tactician, the real concern he did have for his family and friends is not at all discernible.
Someone used the words de-clawed for Rachel, and yeah that's perfect, which is a shame, because there were moments I was convinced Nevin could slay it (telling Tobias to try harder days after being trapped-Yes.) But then they just ruin it(Freaking out in Yeerk morph and afraid Tobias doesn't like her for it? No.)
And Cassie. Cassie was, God. Don't get me wrong, I hate book Cassie, but a part of Animorphs is hating Cassie. But I don't recall any real moment where Cassie was given any depth, any morality other that apparently freaking out about animal testing. It was terrible. (Also, that girl was way too pretty to be Cassie. I know Cass was supposed to have a kinda cute thing, but that actress was as pretty as Rachel /shallow).
And Ax. Ugh. Spending all his time as a human. Kinda funny at points, but never as intelligent or serious as he should be. What really killed it for me was him wearing a watch. I yelled at that.
There is more, of course the magic (card+fur+hold = break any code), lack of emotion, almost never felt fear, V3 didn't decay, but he wasn't really frightening at the start, the "I can see it's a Yeerk by looking in their eyes" (no, you can't, that's what makes it such a terrifying threat) the Tom hitting on Melissa. Ugh.
So one the whole, here's what I say about the show then: I watched it because I loved Animorphs, and I was a kid-I'd watch anything that wasn't overly sad or gross if it was mildly amusing and tied to things I liked.
Now: It did not age well, but I suspect any show won't look great if I've taken of the rose-colored glasses (got commercials for Caitlin's Way during this. Don't remember what I thought about but I'm not going watch it to try and recall them). It is stain on the Animorphs name, but you know what? It made me laugh. Parts from the books they did right, parts from the books the did wrong (no always a good laugh) and new parts. And to me, any show that makes me laugh is okay.
I think it will be a long time before I watch it again. It'd been 15 years, I think I can wait that long again. I will remember it for the hurt it did to a wonderful book, and I will remember it as bad for that, but as a TV show, as an entity that is "based on the books by KA Applegate" it is....okay
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Yeah, I re-watched the 5 or 6 episodes that I own after posting in this thread the last time, still kinda feel the same way about it.
What I find funny though is how people that hate the show still seem to want a movie. You'd get a better adaptation now, most likely, with the cheaper high-quality digital canvas to work with and an influx of slightly-more-intense YA book adaptations. But it'd still be the same problems we'd be complaining about, "why couldn't they do this? or this? or this?", and it'd still come down to things like "they might have been able to get away with that in print, but we can't in a movie", and "13 years old? Let's just make 'em 18 instead, that'd be cool, right? right?".
I keep thinking about stuff like Ender's Game in relation to an Animorphs adaptation. I actually think they did a pretty halfway-decent job with that movie, it's definitely not bad, but at the same time people that love the book have a right to be pissed off. It's just sort of...unfilmable, at least in the way it's presented in the book. And the movie producers aren't even necessarily wrong in making the concessions and sanitizing it, it's sort of their job to do that. You can really only get away with that Animorphs explicit violence and Vietnam-esque theme choices if you have an adult audience, it's kind of one or the other: keep it aimed at kids and make it way more palatable for the concerned parents of America, or change the audience to a young-adult college-kids thing, and that'd no longer really be Animorphs.
Special effects have gotten better, and things like cable TV shows are more complex and ambitious than they used to be, it's still not really enough to change the landscape where any of-sane-mind producer or studio is going to let anyone directly adapt the books though.