Was Animorphs very popular back in its day?

[Andalite_Shorm]

Being born literally two months after the first book, I'm a little young to remember these things, but was Animorphs very popular when it was first released and on-going?
My older sister says she doesn't remember it but then living in the UK it, like most things, probably wasn't as big over here as over in America (most book series that are released means we normally only get the first few books in your average store regardless of how popular it may be, even if the author is English or whatever- I know KA was American but you get me)

I mean I think it's strange how they re-released it when it was coming up to a 20 year anniversary (ani-versary ho ho) and it was stopped at just Book 8
I also think it's strange that finding these books now is next to impossible when books like The Famous Five which are much older than Animorphs and still seem to hold the same popularity can be found anywhere with a variety of editions.

There's also the fact there were 64 books (specials included) which doesn't just happen with an unpopular series.

So yeah... Those who are old enough to remember; was it popular or what? :3

[RYTX]

It wasn't camp-out overnight to get the newest one, #1 on the NY best seller list popular, but as young adult reading goes it was pretty prominent. Major feature at book-fairs, libraries had copies, and most kids were probably aware of it being next to goosebumps or baby-sitters club, but it was not a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter or Twilight. (As an aside, I know some people only became aware of it after the show came out, which it had to be popular enough to generate. Very few ever took to it because of the show though.) IMO, it's like Eragon. It gets it's own little section on the shelves, so most people have seen it, but it's following is limited to the devoted that took to it, not the masses.

[NateSean]

The majority of my local bookstore's initial profits very likely came from my monthly purchase of the books. My only proof that anyone else in the world was reading them was the Internet, before forums were really a thing. Fortunately, I never cared much if something I liked was popular.

[Chad32]

More of a cult following than a cultural sensation. The fanbase was there. It stuck out as something that really pushed the boundaries of what it ok for young readers, but that also kept it from being picked up by everyone. Cookie cutter products are more likely to sell, but less likely to be remembered.

[NothingFromSomething]

I recall a lot of pissed-off parents back in the day, too, in relation to that pushing-the-boundaries stuff you mentioned. 

[Chad32]

That's going to happen any time you try out-of-the-box stuff. Animorphs started dark. It lightened up a bit afterwards, but it went dark again towards the end. Then again, I grew up with kids movies like Land Before Time and Secret of NIMH. You can be pretty dark, as long as the ending is a happy one. That's part of the reason I expected the series to be more sweet than bitter, though I fully expected a bittersweet ending. Although one could debate that the ending is practically a downer one.

[NothingFromSomething]

Yeah, while book #1 is pretty tame in the overall scheme of things, compared to where it would eventually go, that whole construction site opening really hooked me from the beginning.  I remember as a 10 year old just sort of "getting" that whoever was writing this wasn't talking down to us, y'know?  Kind of had a higher expectation of what we could handle.  That whole Hork-Bajir-slash-homeless-dude moment, and all the aftermath of Jake and Rachel fleeing in this overwhelming panic was pretty crazy.

It's sort of what I always loved about the series, through a lot of it it's kind of "light on action stuff", smaller in scale (obviously this changes at the end), but every time something actually happens it just hits home, has more impact.  The fact Katherine and Michael were really willing to "go there" was so cool, I was really into Goosebumps around that time but never found one iota of it to be scary.  Animorphs was a whole other thing.

[Chad32]

If only RL Stine took some notes from Don Bluth.

[Andalite_Shorm]

If only RL Stine took some notes from Don Bluth.

If only everyone took some notes from Don Bluth xD That man is a genius- honestly I think if he was born a few decades later and was making movies nowadays (since kid's movies seem to be getting a bit darker now) he'd be as big as Disney was :3

[Chad32]

He was definitely a gem.

[Azguard]

it was pretty popular between my friends and i. and popular enough that when i mention it more than likely someone will go "i remember animorphs!"

[Shenmue654]

I recall there being a massive Animorphs section in my local Barnes and Noble, which I perused once a month back then for the next book. I was utterly hooked on Animorphs, and their release date was reliable.

To some extent, I have always been attracted (Even as a kid!) to kids movies that did things that were brutal and cruel and strange. Animorphs threatened its characters with death and real danger from the get-go, which was very different than most books for kids of that age or even of Sailor Moon until the later stages of the show. It talked about war and PTSD as topics for children. o__o; It laughed at dumbing things down for its target audience.

And yeah, Don Bluth was like that too. In that same less-than-superficial, up-front manner.

I recall a lot of pissed-off parents back in the day, too, in relation to that pushing-the-boundaries stuff you mentioned.

Wait, seriously? Then again, who am I kidding...My parents let me play games where you impaled a guy bloodily on a man-sized pike...XD

[NickDaGriff]

I remember every single classroom in my elementary school having at least two or three different books from the series, and I knew a couple kids who were die-hard fans of it.  I only read a couple back then (my focus at the time was reading as many Goosebumps as I could get my hands on), but #33 stuck in my mind for years.  First fictional torture scene I ever saw, and it haunted me with how brutal and psychological the whole thing was.  That's why I went back and read the whole thing last year, because I remembered liking that character but wanting to know more about what was going on.

[AniDragon]

It was apparently popular in a lot of areas, but definitely not at my school. I was one of the very very few who were reading it, and I got picked on for reading it so no one else dared to associate with it.

[Alan Fangor]

In Italy I think not. 

I knew in person only one who read those books, my cousin - he introduced me to Animorphs - but he left the series with #6.
Later I met a group of 10-15 fans on a mailing list, but I lost contacts in 2002.

I have never known another reader, and my town isn't so small - more than 50,000 inhabitants, with hundreds or some thousands of schoolboys - all potential readers.

As far as I know, we could be the only readers in the whole country!

Moreover, the TV series was a flop.

Once I learned from a spokesman from the publishing house that the series had sold around 400,000 copies; this means that, assuming that not all people have actually bought all 52 books published, there may have been from 10,000 to 20,000 readers, I believe.