What Happens When Your Kids TV Show Is Really an Ad For Books

The Nickelodeon Animorphs TV show wasn’t a very good adaptation. But maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube.

In 1998, Scholastic Entertainment produced a live action adaptation of the Animorphs book series to be distributed on YTV and Nickelodeon. It was coming out alongside the books and, according to both fans of the series and new viewers, it was a poor adaptation of the books it was based on.

Except. Was it?

Answering that question is harder than it sounds. The common criteria we use to judge whether or not an adaptation is “good” tends to be simple: how faithful was it to the core of the material it’s adapting. But on that front, the Animorphs TV show isn’t quite as bad as it fans might remember. Some plot points are changed, sure, but many episodes are lifted almost verbatim from the books.

The plots are the same, and in a few cases the show even enhances the original material precisely because it doesn’t have the budget to do more elaborate scenes. When you can’t…