#katherine applegate

[thefaultinourchickennuggets]

well. you know who will never turn 30 😠

[fyanimorphs]

Katherine Applegate Reflects on 'Breathtaking' Legacy of the Animorphs Books as They Turn 30: 'We Had No Idea' (Exclusive)

Applegate and her husband had the idea for the series when they were 'very young'

Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant "had no idea" that their series Animorphs would turn into a major phenomenon

The series debuted in June 1996, and its legacy lives on in the hearts of fans

A new Animorphs TV series is in development

When Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant had the idea for Animorphs, they didn't know what would happen next.

“It's just breathtaking because we had no idea,” Applegate, 69, tells PEOPLE. “My husband and I wrote these when we were very young, and we had a brand new baby, and we wrote a book every month.” The first book, The Invasion, was released in June 1996.

Applegate says at the time, books like Goosebumps and The Babysitter's Club were also coming out monthly, and, she thinks, “That's such a great way to get a kid engaged right off the bat.”

The book series followed five teenage humans — Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel and Tobias — and one alien, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, who gain the ability to transform into any animal they touch. The six of them used their abilities to battle a secret infiltration of slug-like aliens called Yeerks. Though written for children, the books grappled not just with coming-of-age themes, but also with intense topics like war, imperialism, morality and horror. The original covers famously featured actors “morphing” into their animals, often with a sometimes uncanny effect.

“We of course had no idea it would take off the way it did,” Applegate says of the series.

By the time the series had wrapped up in 2001, Animorphs had released over 50 books and created a phenomenon with kids who were happy to shove each other aside in school libraries or Scholastic book fairs to get to the next one. Animorphs was adapted into a TV series that aired on Nickelodeon from 1998 to 1999, a 1998 board game and multiple video games. Applegate has continued to work as a writer for children and young adults, with series like Everworld, Remnants, Making Out and The One and Only Ivan among her many works.

Thirty years after the first Animorphs book was released, adult fans still obsess over the series. New readers can also discover the books, thanks to new audiobook and graphic novel adaptations. The first three books in the series — The Invasion, The Visitor and The Encounter — also received new covers from Scholastic this May to mark the 30th anniversary.

Applegate, who continues to write children's books, including her latest, Wombat Waiting, says she often meets Animorphs fans at her events. “They are covered with Animorphs tattoos,” she says. “I have multiple babies named after characters, a lot of Tobiases. I had a guy drive seven hours so I could meet his dog named Tobias. It's really lovely.” They dress up as the original covers for Halloween, the Reddit page dedicated to the series remains an active place and fans have written about the series as a trans allegory.

Applegate is also excited about the news from this April that Ryan Coogler's Proximity Media is developing a new Animorphs TV series for Disney+. Sev Ohanian, who's working on the series, “is a huge Animorphs fan,” Applegate promises. “He knows more about Animorphs than I do.”

She thinks given the advancements with CGI, “There's so many more things you could do.”

“We're really hoping it works out.”

https://people.com/katherine-applegate-reflects-legacy-animorphs-books-exclusive-11989591

[ape-apocalypse]

POV - You're watching Planet Of The Apes and you start siding with the apes over the humans

[diet-poison]

Incredible (X)

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Do you have any thoughts on the Remnants series? Because I always see people talk about how frightening they found the Animorphs series as kids, and while a lot of the horror in that series went over my head, Remnants was absolutely terrifying.

I haven't finished the series, but! A few thoughts on Remnants:

I love how prescient the depictions of Earth in the 2020s end up being. Jobs's parents' music is "whiny emo stuff" from the turn of the millennium, cars have gotten self-driving but still suck, and trust in the U.S. government is at rock bottom.

TBH, the big thing Remnants is missing for me is the within-team love and support of Animorphs. I said the same thing about Everworld and Gone (also series I gave up on ~3 books in), but if you're going to surround your protagonists with horror, you have GOT to have something warm or comforting to balance that out. The Mayflower crew distrusting each other AND being under constant attack by the alien ship just makes the series feel too relentless with not enough humor or love to balance it out. At some point the 40th terrible thing happening to Jobs or Mo'Steel in a single day isn't so much horrifying as it is exhausting to read.

Relatedly, the other issue with Remnants is that it'd be a pretty good horror novel, but it's marketed as (and in many ways kind of tries to be) a sci fi adventure story. I can take a guess as to why — if I was Scholastic I'd also be pumping this as the spiritual sequel to Animorphs — but it's Procrustean as hell.

That series is begging to be YA, even though it predates YA genre conventions. It would work so much better as a trilogy of big meaty stories (see: Endling, which is spectacular) than as fourteen choppy little novels. As it is, each novel feels like it doesn't so much tell an episode in the survivors' lives as, like, half an episode, followed by a cliffhanger for the next book.

Speaking of Endling: holy hell does Remnants need to be illustrated. I don't often say that, but. "Mother Ship tried to recreate Earth, but all she had to work from was Hieronymus Bosch paintings" is such a cool concept for me as an adult... and it completely flew over my head as a kid. And I was that weird freaky horror-obsessed kid who literally had printouts of Bosch paintings hanging on my bedroom walls — I'm about as close to the target audience as you can get! But there's just too much going on in that story for the concept to come across. I wish it'd been illustrated, or even better been published as a comic book.

So, like: there's a lot of good stuff in there, but I don't think it hangs together into a page-turner whole. And more than anything, I think it's forced into the wrong genre.

[andalitean]

ALL of the animorphs audiobooks are available NOW on libro.fm!!!

(via Katherine Applegate! )

[kooldewd123]

At the start of each Animorphs book, before the first chapter begins, there is a page. On it is a simple acknowledgement. Two names. The first name is Michael - Katherine Applegate's husband and co-writer on the series. The second name is that of a boy. This name belongs to their son. Or, should I say, belonged to their son. Because they don't have a son anymore. They have a daughter. Every time I pick up an Animorphs book, I can't help but linger on this page as I quite literally hold her deadname in my hands. It's a peculiarly beautiful feeling. Peculiar because the context behind that name makes it seem all the more personal. I feel like I've violated her privacy simply by knowing it, even though it's openly out there for anyone to read. But beautiful because dammit, doesn't this represent this series's relationship with the queer community so well? Animorphs is often regarded as a queer (and especially trans) narrative, despite the fact that such subtext was completely unintentional. Applegate did not write Animorphs to be queer media, but she's embraced the fact that it has became so in the hands of the fans. How perfectly fitting is it, then, that she unknowingly dedicated the entire series to a trans woman?

[mikubinderthomasjefferson231]

i love my super niche books that like 3 people have heard of because they're so peak and make me cry every time I read them

some of them are Wish by Barbara O'Conner, The Girl who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill, Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen (think of it as girl Harry Potter) By Geri Halliwell-Horner, Little Town on the Prarie by Laura Ingalls-Wilder, Wishtree by Katherine Applegate, and the Millie Maven book series by Ted Decker