The TV show, then and now

[Liora]

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?

[Nateosaurus]

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????

[AniDragon]

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.

[NothingFromSomething]

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.

[RYTX]

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.

[lolapandi]

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.

[NothingFromSomething]

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.

[RYTX]

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?

[lolapandi]

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.

[AniDragon]

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.

[Nateosaurus]

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!

[Liora]

Here is where 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.

[RYTX]

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

[Liora]

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.

[NothingFromSomething]

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.