Animorphs 101: You Have NO IDEA What You Slept On 

Hey everyone! Thanks for watching! Just wanna mention that there is a TON of cool stuff that happens during Animorphs that I didn't include due to time restrictions. Animorphs are a simple read, but the story is really compelling, so if you like what you heard here, feel free to check out the books themselves! To the hardcore Animorphs fans, sorry for some mispronunciations and the inevitable occasional slip up or exaggeration. Kind of a side effect of doing this live. I hope you'll forgive the slight infractions and enjoy what's here! Also, apologizes to everyone for my incessant nose scratching. Had a bit of a cold all during Radcon, which was HILARIOUS considering the circumstances. Now go treat yourselves to a cinnamon bun.

Animporphs, aka Scholastic Book Club Evangelion

K.A. Applegate: "Haha cinnabon" Also K.A. Applegate: "There are no good decisions in war."

I remember reading these in Elementary school... then being told to stop because my teacher wanted me to stop "making up my book reports"

I know how it feels for a Bloodborne character to gain Insight now

This was a 4 hour thermal updraft

3:06:30 Jake didn’t just kick the Howler off a roof. He flew at it in Perigrine falcon morph, causing it to stumble and fall of the ledge of a GIGANTIC skyscraper, and as Jake fell with the Howler, he morphed to human, acquired the howlers DNA, and morphed back to a falcon, all while plummeting to a possible death. Hardcore.

Guy with a cane in front of whiteboard explaining things to his underlings. This is just house md.

I hope someone in the PCP is a hidden Bionicle loremaster that someday delivers a Bionicle lore lecture.

To be fair to Cassie, while she is a bleeding heart when the shit gets real she's one of the most ruthless characters, for example the whole plan to trap David as a rat on some small trash island and leave him there was her idea

Tobias, uh- he doesn't really... Have a battle-morph. He's *usually a red-tailed hawk* Haha, oh, listening to this knowing what's coming...

what i thought was going to be captain planet with furries was actually "warcrimes for kids" jesus i passed on a gem in highschool.

Something the author wrote in response to some negative reception of the end of the series (spoilers): "Dear Animorphs Readers: Quite a number of people seem to be annoyed by the final chapter in the Animorphs story. There are a lot of complaints that I let Rachel die. That I let Visser Three/One live. That Cassie and Jake broke up. That Tobias seems to have been reduced to unexpressed grief. That there was no grand, final fight-to-end-all-fights. That there was no happy celebration. And everyone is mad about the cliffhanger ending. So I thought I'd respond. Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don't end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones. That's what happens, so that's what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn't by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it's a start. Here's what doesn't happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn't a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don't do a lot of celebrating. There's very little chanting of 'we're number one' among people who've personally experienced war. I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I'm a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I'd wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war. So, you don't like the way our little fictional war came out? You don't like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don't like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. If you're mad at me because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers." kids book btw

Tom is living out my dream of having a group of friends that are willing to listen to me explain fictional stories for hours.

Tom having a cane for this lecture really enhances the scholarly professor vibe. Also because animorphs is clearly a series for intellectuals.

The Cover: "oh look, an educative book about cool animals with relatable adolescent themes" The Inside of the book: "haha warcrimes go brrr"

Why is youtube insisting so hard that I watch a 4 hour lecture on Animorphs while I'm intentionally not watching my lectures for actual college? And why did I still watch this and not my actual lectures?

I feel like Tom undersold the anti-morphing ray arc. Tobias spends that ENTIRE BOOK in captivity of a controller with a mental torture device with pleasure and pain buttons, which makes you experience memories associated with those feelings or just invents new ones. He gets fucking rocked back and forth between them for the whole book as they try to use the emotional whiplash to break his spirit.

Watching several newcomers slowly acclimate to the idea that Andalites are assholes is WELL worth the 4 hour runtime. Time well spent.

Tommy on twitter: I'm gonna make an Animorphs video "Hell yeah" Actual video: 4 hours long "HELL YEAH"

I still remember the scene where Marco dreams about what people would say about him in future history classes for having to kill his own mother. This shit was real as hell.

Funniest moment in the whole series is probably when we find out Ax has a picture of a Cinabbon inside his little house.

That bit about them turning into termites reminds me of that time in the book that a few animals gained the ability to morph, one of them being an ant that crawled onto the cube and gained Cassie's DNA, and when it's halfway through morphing it just starts fucking screaming like it's in pain, the reason given being that it's suddenly having to deal with the very concept of free will and not being connected to a hive mind and it's half ant half human brain just can't fucking deal with it and it basically drives itself insane before it's even though with the morph

If Animorphs was in literally any other medium- movie, TV, comic, whatever- it would have been a HARD R rating, nowhere near child appropriate. But because books just weren't monitored all that closely... yeah, this is pretty much the only franchise aimed at 9-year olds where characters regularly stumble around holding their own intestines, get their legs ripped clean off, club enemies with their own severed arms...

Something that I still think about regularly was when tobias ate the baby bunny and explained that if he ate the mom all the babies would starve, and that stuck with me.

Broke: Paying attention to my two hour college lecture Woke: Paying attention to a four hour animorphs lore lecture

When Tom got crippled they gave him morphin' insteade of morphine.

When Applegate said, "I just really love animals" I guarantee she was deflecting the question. You don't accidentally write severe PTSD

Animorphs - underrated book series Tom - Underrated PCP member

Animorphs: TOBIAS YOU GOTTA DEFORM FROM YOUR HAWK FORM RIGHT NOW OR ELSE YOU'LL STAY LIKE THAT FOREVER AND LOSE YOUR MIND TRYING TO FIGHT HAWK INSTINCTS AND POSSIBLY TRY TO KILL YOURSELF FROM THE MADNESS OF LOSING YOUR SENSE OF SELF DEFORM NOW PLEASE Tobias: haha thermal updraft go brr

All the "war crimes" chanting and no one mentions Jake's war crime of flushing 17k yeerks into space? "A what?! A what did you need? You're going to tell me you needed a diversion so Jake massacred seventeen thousand sentient creatures? A diversion?!"

Goosebumps were the most banned books at the time, despite being goofy campfire stories as chapter books, meanwhile animorphs featured usually at least one graphic dismemberment in the first person every book. Our parents absolutely never cracked one of these open to see what we were reading, did they?

Missed a pretty important part of the "David Saga": He finds another kid who was in critical condition from a car crash and steals his identity so he can have parents again, and we're just left to assume the original kid died in a dumpster somewhere.

I can’t believe he left out the most evil part about the David Saga. Jake and Rachel’s cousin Saddler was in the hospital from a car accident. At one point, the power goes out, and David acquires Saddler’s morph, murders him and hides the body somewhere. The book lingers on the fact that this is done so quickly, David is so happy to have taken Saddler’s place, and nobody ever learns where the body is.

Adding the blip sound to the images was a great call. I tabbed away a few times and that was super helpful.

man I remember when Ax goes on somebody's dad's computer and corrects a human satellite program in order for it to be able to detect Andalite ships because he thought it was a game lol

As someone that has been running a TTRPG (like D&D) for 20 years in the animorphs universe, Im super happy this video exists. My Traveller setting (D&D but in space) takes place in space, 200 years after the animorphs books. Humans have spread to other planets, and the Yeerks and Andelites are still at war. My players didnt know that their 20 year campaign was based on a kids book until 3 years ago. I didnt tell them because i didnt want them doing tgeir own research. One of their kids started telling them about Andelites, and his brain about broke lol. We're actually finishing the campaign this weekend. I'm happy to see someone else showing the series some love.

Imagine being the poor alien doing the first test runs of the morphing technology BEFORE they made it not hurt...

For any newcomers or anyone wondering, the cane is for his back which has been attacking him for a while now.

So the rest of the guys are joking around a bunch, and that's fine, but I love how Tommy is treating this with all the seriousness of an actual college lecture. The way he's able to answer all their questions (even the troll questions) and explain things that he wasn't even planning on mentioning in the lecture shows that this is a man who truly knows his shit.

Animorphs would be the perfect long-running animated show. Imagine a campy 90s thing with the music and blockbusters and it eventuating with them cutting to hard black after Visser 3 kills that guy in the beginning and slamming the screen with -- A N I M O R P H S --

"Andalites are the good guys" Me: *sucks in air through teeth* "Oooh."

Munchy taking Animorphs more seriously over the course of the lecture as opposed to the Guilty Gear one where he just kept yelling how stupid anime was is a pretty hilarious contrast

As a rare zoomer that somehow read all of these books in 3rd grade (and had to explain the actual premise to virtually everyone I know) I feel vindicated.

“The Andalites are the good guys. They wouldn’t genocide a whole species” Umm, yeah, about that...🙄

I always thought Animorphs were like Goosebumps mixed with Captain Planet. If I knew it was The Thing mixed with They Live, I would have been interested.

Just going to add that the reason why the super-advanced Androids (the Chee) only fights for them once and then begs to be turned back to normal is that these androids *never forget* . After the battle, when Erek asks someone (I think Jake) about how the humans cope with having all of these horrible images in their head about them murdering people, Jake responds that they have to live with them, they find ways to aprehend them and eventually they forget. Which prompts the amazing response of "I'm a Chee. I don't forget.", and his decision to never harm anything ever again because he's permanently scarred for eternity. Also, the animorphs later forced the Chee to help them in the assault on the Pool Ship (against their wish to never harm anything), just throwing that out there

Putting in a word for Jake here: when they discover that their covers are blown, they scramble to get their families to safety BUT they have to do it quickly and cover each other so they can only grab 1 family at a time. Jake immediately makes the decision that they will go get his family last which he knew would all but doom his parents but give everyone else a decent chance to get their families to safety.

This teaches me that I shouldn´t judge a book by its cover even if it is as corny as the Animorphs books.

The worst part of what happened to david was to trap him in rat form, they had to trick him into getting into a rat trap. They then sat there, watching the entire two hours as he screamed in thoughtspeak. They watched him as he pleaded and begged until he is trapped in that form.

It is a crime that you did not mention the absolute best part of Marco's personality being figured out in the David saga. It is during those books where Jake explains why he keeps Marco around. When he wants the ethical solution he goes to cassie. But when he wants to know how to make things go from point A to point b he goes to Marco.

Animorphs are the Spec Ops: The Line of children’s book series.

Never read the series but by what you described, i think its really sick that the author doesnt just trusts pure violence to convey the horrors of war but actually comes up with neat dehumanization metaphors and interesting interpersonal/familiar drama. It really brings home the fact that animals do be cool 😎

"I was Nine Years old at Catholic School and they had no idea what they were selling!" Can Confirm. Animorphs was huge at my catholic Elementary

This whole video was like a 4 hour long thermal. Based and Class 5.

My dad bought me a bunch of these when I was a kid. One day he picked one up and cracked it open. He got addicted and bought more, read them himself and THEN gave them to me. They really helped him¡learn English too. Fun memories

There is actually a scene where Tobias explains how he had to learn that its better to eat the cute baby rabbits instead of the larger adults. His reasoning is that the adult rabbits can replace the young but orphaned babies will die on their own. He becomes a baby killer.

"I'm just a gamer. Like you." -Crayak

This is now my favorite pcp lecture. I love this rare thing that happens sometimes in media were something that was suposed to be simple and for kids becomes a big,heavy violent fest with deep lore,i love it and o wish more things were like that.

My 18-yo self raged for days after the end of the series. It was the first time I had encountered in media where the heroes did not get a happy ending. I literally felt betrayed. I had spent so much time and money invested in these characters, engaging in their pain and sacrifices and ship teases for nothing?! I had all the books, even the CYOA, and I immediately donated all of them because looking at them made me sick. But my current 30-something self can now understand the points I was missing back then. Kids and young adults NEED to be aware that sometimes there is Gray-and-Grey Morality and that sometimes no one wins.

Don't forget about how in The Seperation, Rachel beats a Hork-Bajir to death with her own severed arm!

This is incredibly well done, but MAN you really undersold that ending. The new threat introduced at the end was foreshadowed and basically implied to be an unknowable being even more (?) omnipotent or some shit than other beings encountered in the series so far. And you are basically left with all the living Animorphs who could never move on going to discover that Ax has been horrifically assimilated by this being. And Jake's conclusion is that their only option is to just ram their ship into the Bladeship ( the ship Viscer 3 had, and that Tom and Rachel died on). Literally the last line of the series is Jake smiling and then saying "we are going to ram the Bladeship". A suitably bleak and fucked up ending for a bleak and fucked up series.

None of those children are going to be psychologically healthy ever again and the fact a 14 years old has a severe mental breakdown and attempted suicide multiple times is.... Horrific.

My favorite part of all of it is how K.A. Applegate responded after people got mad that no one had a happy ending "There are no happy endings in war."

this is the first time ive ever seen this channel and im not sure what prompted me to click on a 4 hour long video that ended up inflicting psychic damage on me

I remember the time they acquired these genetically engineered bio weapon creatures, and used them for combat. They were these big, lean muscular four armed creatures with heavily bladed limbs and bisected anatomy. Effectively their spines were designed to rotate at high speed, turning them into walking death blenders. When they made the change, and started fighting, the kids initially prepared themselves for some bloodlusted murder mentality, but instead what they got was... happiness. The only instincts they found were not malicious, just a strong sense that what they were doing was just fun, bubbly, childlike fun. I don't know if they ever turned into those things again, but it was really fascinating. EDIT: I guess I did a shit job remembering the howlers

How could you skip over the super plot critical books where they break into area 51 to find a jetisoned andalite toilet?!

I still remember the part in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles when Dak Hamee suddenly understands that things that are far away look small, and the stars might be suns.

RU-vid recommended feed: Do... you wanna watch a four hour summary of the Animorphs series? Me: *CONSUME*

Funny enough my parents were very strict on stuff I read as a kid, but Animorphs got a pass because the covers made them think it was just kid friendly 'kids turning into animals' adventures.

The instant maple ginger oatmeal doesn't kill the Yeerks. The reason they decide not to use it after the initial attempt to put it in the Yeerk pool is because it actually makes the Yeerks bat-guano insane AND removes their need for Kandrona, so basically any Controller is permanently infested with an insane Yeerk they can't get rid of. It's perhaps marginally better than being infested by a sane Yeerk because the host regains some control, but barely. It's not a matter of ew, we can't use chemical warfare against the Yeerks because ethics; it's we can't use chemicals because any Controllers caught in the crossfire have any hope of freedom from the Yeerk and sanity snuffed out forever. Also, the Chee don't let their Yeerks starve because every species in the series is awful, even the pacifists. They actually imprison their Yeerks inside their heads, feed them Kandrona rays generated from their android bodies, and can brain scan the Yeerks to access their memories. So when a Yeerk infests a Chee, it's arguably a fate worse than Yeerk infestation because at least Controllers briefly get freedom every 3 days and they get to still experience their senses even if they're not in control of their actions. A Yeerk in a Chee is still blind, can't escape and is completely without hope of death or rescue.

Objection: the narration kind of IS that complex! The kids certainly have very different views of the same events, which just makes sense given their varied perspectives. Most of the time they’re generally reliable, but marco notably comes the closest to outright lying to the reader, usually about his own thoughts or feelings, espeeecially in the last book. The first person pov reveals some interesting quirks in narration for all of them, though! Which is really cool to me as a literature nerd, lol.

Best Lecture EVER. >Epic Length >Epic Series >Told from Start to Finish

My absolute favourite moment from this series is when Cassie is popping off about the vio-lence and she’s sort of butting heads with Rachel aka Miss I-Get-Shit-Done, cause the thing they need to do is raw but it’s absolutely the only call. Basically Cassie is like “I don’t think this is the right call, are you sure you can do it?” And Rachel being an absolute baller says; “Actually you’re right. I don’t think I can do this. You do it for me.” And she has NO answer. It’s sensational. 10/10 dunk Rachel is basically Punisher

waiting for him to talk about how Tobias was a bird and not only was Rachel into it but I was too, middle school me was cracked

K.A. Applegate is also cool as hell and has repeatedly said she's cool with folks downloading them

"I'm just a gamer. Like you." - The Crayak

Came for the memes, stayed for the lore. Seriously tho these books need a Netflix adaption or something

The fact that I read these books 20 years ago when I was a kid and I still remember all this goofy shit is a bit of a testament to the fact that they were at least somewhat good

28:25 you are describing the time they morphed into ants not termites. The termite morph they learned their lesson and acquired termites from the correct colony, but they are overcome with termite instincts and start working in the colony before Cassy is able to convince her termite brain the queen is an ant and kills her freeing them from their instincts. This of course creates an emotional scar for her.

I'm kind of sad you didn't mention the part where Elfangor founded Microsoft.

I’m at 2 hrs 29 and they didn’t put together that Ax is Tobias’ uncle. I remember that blowing my mind a bit when I was 13 lol

I love that between the _Guilty Gear_ lecture and this one, that Tommy is slowly but surely turning into V. Except he refills his power by quoting _Animorphs_ passages.

i was googling animorphs and this came up, i thought it was uploaded years ago but no. nine days. quarantine hittin hard for all of us i see.

I cannot remember when it happens, but when the animorphs turn into lobsters the book describes how they could feel their faces splitting open and their guts turning inside out. The POV character then remarks that ‘I would have thrown up, if I still had a mouth’... good shit, definitely suitable for kids

Alright, so here's the deal with Crayak and Ellimist. Tom glossed over it because it really isn't relevant to the story of the Earth invasion, but it's actually really interesting. So Crayak isn't *really* just about wanting to destroy everything and frankly Ellimist isn't that super great of a guy either. What they are is playing a game against each other, and they have very different approaches to it. Ellimist wants to cultivate sophisticated, cultured, peaceful life that cooperates and evolves and explores the galaxy for its own sake, and Crayak wants to see stuff blow-up. If they're playing Civ, Ellimist is all about that sweet diplomacy and turtling and gradually building a perfect society, and Crayak plays as Ghandi and throws nukes everywhere. That's what's fun about the game to him. It's why just them wiping out huge chunks of the universe isn't a viable approach, because it's not much of a game for either of them. You can't play chess if you burn all the pieces. They're both cheaters too. There are four larger books spread out through the series called Megamorphs which reflect all the character's perspective. In one of them they go back in time and meet dinosaurs for instance. In Megamorphs #4, they're given a chance by Crayak to basically undo their involvement in the war, which shunts them off into a parallel universe where the invasion is still happening but they're unaware of it. Only it fails because Crayak's lackey realizes too late that Cassie is "temporally grounded", meaning that her mere existence in a parallel timeline destabilizes it and causes the entire experiment to fail. It's at this point that the book points out that the Animorphs are comprised of: 1. Elfangor's son 2. Visser 1's son 3. Elfangor's brother 4. A temporal monkey wrench Only Jake and Rachel are "normal". Crayak (it's actually a guy named Drode, one of his henchmen) says that Ellimist basically stacked the deck, engineering a group of teens (presumably with attitude) whose fundamental nature forces them into this conflict and precludes attempts to undermining the timeline. He's really pissed at it and Ellimist is very smug and says "oh, did I do that? Huh that was clever of me." It's actually a fairly believable explanation of some of the coincidences in the cast, in that they're not coincidences at all but set-ups by a higher power.

This is 4 hours of my 32 year old life that was incredibly well spent and Ill fight anyone who disagrees.

I can hardly believe a lecture happened where I didn't have to skip ahead 10 seconds every time Munchy opens his mouth. This is proof that Animorphs puts the "rad" in Radcon. Thank you for sharing this saga with us, Tom.

The bait and switch aspect is so true. My parents would only read the first couple chapters of a book..... They never knew how epic and dark it is.

So, that ending isn't quite a cliffhanger, "war never ends" ending. Jake, the rest of the animorphs (Tobias comes back) and 2 randos (to replace Ax and Rachel in their 6 man band) send thei spaceship in a KAMIKAZE MOVE into the vague alien threat.

The opening to the last book, when Jake gives his full name is one of my favorite opening lines in fiction. These books were dope.

I started re-collecting this series in my adulthood on a whim. Enjoyed it for a while when I was a kid but kind of grew out of it (or rather, got turned off during the Great Ghostwriter Stint in the middle). Learning what I missed later on I figured I'd experience the series again and ramp up to it. I remembered, of course, thinking it was the coolest thing when I was child. I also remembered the part where Rachel beat a Hork Bajir to death with her own severed bear-arm so I thought I was prepared. Then that part with Tom at the end of the first book. Then that moment with Melissa Chapman in the second book. Then Tobias' existential breakdown and attempted suicide in the third book. Then EDIT: Pfft "I just wanted to communicate to kids how cool animals are" There's a line in one of Cassie's books where she reflects after a vicious, bloody battle that "Everybody thinks the color of nature is green. It's not. It's red."

So skinwalkers fight the slugs from StarGate and I was too busy reading magic treehouse and Pokémon manga to notice?

Dude their legitimate surprise whenever they find out who Visser 1 is made me so happy. Because it reminded me of the exact same surprise I had whenever I learned the twist.

I feel like a GONE series lecture would be the perfect spiritual successor to this lecture. The GONE series was another extremely violent, brutal, and oftentimes disgusting sci-fi dystopian series filled with body horror and cannibalism, aimed at a YA audience -- though I think the main difference might be that GONE was really popular with teenage girls, while Animorphs was marketed more generally towards boys aged 9-12. Also, important: the GONE series author, Michael Grant, is K.A. Applegate's real life husband and also one of the Animorphs series ghostwriters.

I DIDN'T SLEEP ON IT. I READ EVERY BOOK IN ELEMENTARY, THEN AGAIN IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND AGAIN IN HIGH SCHOOL. I used to bully people verbally by calling them YEERKS

Tom gave bomb lectures 2 years in a row. Keep it up man

"All non-genetic wounds are healed"... So you're saying all the male animorphs regrew their foreskins.

You forgot the part where one of the ghost writers went rogue to dedicate an entire book to the evils of eating meat. Needless to say, Applegate effectively retconned the whole thing and she was kicked to the curb.

The explanation about how the robot dogs don't get caught is what won me over. It's actually really satisfying and well thought out. That's the mark of good scifi for me, when things don't just happen for no reason, but rather, there's a meticulous explanation for everything.