 If you entered any library in the late 90s through the late 2000s, then you would have been greeted by an entire shelf of books with covers like this. Humans slowly changing into some sort of animal, and if you open it up you can see a full-color picture inside. It's pretty eye-catching and odd, but the actual contents of the book puts it to shame. For months I've been promising this video would come eventually, so I'll just tell you now. Animorphs was absolutely bonkers. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. For those who don't exist on the arbitrary border between millennials and Gen Z, or who do but had friends as children, let me explain the plot of this Godforsaken series. Also, I'll be playing clips from the show in the background while I talk, because it was terrible and hilarious. A race of alien parasites, known as yurks, have invaded Earth. Yurks are just slugs that can wiggle inside your head and take over your brain, imitating you perfectly and luring your friends into the same fate. Another alien race, called the Andalites, are waging a war to prevent the yurks from taking over and they aren't doing so hot, as evidenced by the fact that one of their ships crashes into a construction site one night. Five teenagers with attitude happen upon the crash and see a dying andalite named Elfangor inside. He explains the situation to them and gives them the power to morph into any animal they touch and this isn't a Power Rangers ripoff because shut up. Thus begins their mission to fight aliens by turning into bears and shit, while also dealing with regular teenagers stuff like school. As a kid that sort of plot doesn't seem that odd, but now that I'm in my 20s, I've come to the conclusion that Animorphs was fucking weird. There were 54 books in the core series, 10 spinoffs, and even a TV show. It was huge, released one entry every month, and mostly ghost written, so it's no surprise that it involved some of the most bizarre storylines ever crafted by human beings. And just for fun, I'll explain some of them in a numbered list. Number 7. One of the Animorphs morphs into a starfish and then gets cut in half. Both halves then grow back into a full human. The title for this part pretty much sums up the entire plot of the book. In book number 32, The Separation, an Animorph named Rachel loses an earring in the water, so she turns into a starfish to retrieve it. But she gets cut in half and, in shock, she turns back into a human. Or rather, two humans, each of which has a different personality. Mean Rachel is really mean and violent and tries to kill the other Animorphs. Nice Rachel isn't actually nice, she's a cowardly wuss who can't fight anymore. The two halves work together by having one turn into a fly and, well, fly into the villain's ear, god I hate the English language sometimes, then she threatens to turn back into a human killing them both. And the villain lets them go. The two Rachel's merge by morphing back into a starfish while touching each other on the advice of their android friend. What's that? There are androids in the series? Yep, that leads us to the next entry. Number six, the Animorphs discover that one of their classmates is an android dog. In book number 10, The Android, one of the Animorphs runs into an old friend, Eric, while in dog form. He realizes that Eric has no smell and so they investigate. Turns out he's something called a chi. The chi are a race of sentient, immortal machines created by an extinct alien race called the pemelites. They're described as looking like dogs that walk on two legs, but they project holograms of humans around themselves so they can blend in. They know about the yurks and want to help fight them, but they're limited because their programming prevents violence, so the Animorphs go off to find an ancient pemelite computer that'll allow the chi to override that and destroy the yurks. They get the computer, then are almost killed before Eric rewrites his programming and saves them by killing all the yurk soldiers, but the violence makes him sad so he puts himself back to normal and refuses to fight anymore. The book ends with them throwing the computer into the ocean. Yeah, don't keep that, there's no other way in which it could be useful. Oh, and by the way, the dogs on earth were created when the chi injected wolves with friendliness. Number five, the Animorphs try to drive the yurks insane using oatmeal. In book number 17, The Underground, the Animorphs discover that there's a type of oatmeal that, when eaten by yurks controlling a human body, drives them insane. They can no longer leave their host, but they do retain some control over them, which causes them to have spasms and babble incoherently at random intervals, which causes most of them to be institutionalized. So the Animorphs turn into moles and dig a tunnel to the yurks underground lair where they hang out and swim around in a big pool filled with radiation from their home planets. I know you want me to explain that, but if I explain everything about the lore in this series, we'll be here all day. The plan doesn't go as they hoped it would, and several of them are captured during the raid. But don't worry, they toss the yurt commander in the pool along with an unopened barrel of oatmeal and point a gun at it, so rather than threatening him with the weapon they have, they threaten him with going crazy. Makes perfect sense, you don't want the kids reading about violence. What's that? This series also includes a scene where the POV character shrinks down and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend's stomach while she's in the form of a tiny elephant. Huh, that's kind of dumb then. Anyways, they escape and the book ends with one of the Animorphs pretending to be a psychic grizzly bear and breaking one of the insane yurt-controlled humans out of his mental hospital. Now that's certainly odd, but you've probably seen stranger stuff over your lifetime. The age of the internet has given rise to all forms of depravity and projected them onto the insides of our eyelids 24-7. However, it's got nothing on children's media from the 90s. Like that time when... Number 4. The Animorphs Visit Atlantis The title might sound like comedic hyperbole, but no, it actually happens. In book number 36, The Mutation, the Animorphs follow a yurt ship into the ocean because they think it's going to kill the whales or something. Them and the ship are both captured by a group of blue humans with gills and webbed fingers. They're taken to an underwater city and brought before the queen. They learn that these fish people are called Nartex and that they used to be humans long ago. Not to be confused with the OTHER race of alien fish people that the Animorphs met up with earlier, those are lyrans. According to the Nartex queen, they lived in a walled city that flooded and then they slowly adapted to life underwater. That's not how evolution works. That's how your uncle who insists that he didn't come from monkeys and listens to Alex Jones thinks evolution works. One of the Animorphs theorizes that radiation hastened their mutation, but he doesn't have any proof of this, and I expect my children's literature to follow the strict methodology laid out by the scientific method while explaining fish people to me. So anyways, the Nartex want to steal their organs because they're inbreeding too much. The Animorphs manage to escape by working with their arch rival, Visser 3, but not without shaking their fists at each other and dramatically shouting, we'll meet again. And the Nartex are never seen or mentioned again. Number 3, the Animorphs defeat the minions of an evil god by teaching them how to love. Okay, now he's just making shit up, you might be thinking to yourself. First aliens and teenagers turning into fleas, now there's an evil god that gets beaten by those same teens? Even the 90s weren't that weird. Well, hypothetical viewer, they were. They were that weird. In this universe there exist two major gods called the Elimist and Crayak. The Elimist is a good guy and Crayak is a bad guy, but they can't fight directly without destroying the whole galaxy, so they subtly influence people to get their desired outcomes. It turns out that Crayak is helping the Yurks to conquer the galaxy just like the Elimist is helping others to resist. Of course, that makes perfect sense. The only surprising part is that we didn't figure it out sooner. The two agree to have a duel of sorts on an alien planet with the Animorphs fighting on one side and a group of aliens called Howlers on the other. The Animorphs get their collective asses handed to them in their first engagement, but one of them manages to acquire the DNA of a Howler and morphs into him. They discover that the Howlers are on the same mental level as toddlers and like to kill people as a game. They were the ones who wiped out the Pemolites. Remember the ones who made the android dogs? The Howlers also have a collective memory, so the Animorphs inject their human memories into it. The Howlers are no longer able to fight and so Crayak kills them. The Animorphs win. According to the Elimist, the next time the Howlers will try to conquer a race, they'll just kiss them instead. Wait a minute, can the Elimist travel through time? Yes he can, and that leaves to even more shenanigans like... Number two, the alien who gave the Animorphs their powers also founded Microsoft. Now we're getting away from the core series into the spin-offs. The Andalite Chronicles takes place about 20 years before the main series and follows Elfangor in his war against the Yurks. When he was young he ran into a group of aliens who had kidnapped some humans and was ordered to bring them home, but they also had a hold of something called the Time Matrix. It's a machine that, as the name subtly implies, allows people to travel through time. The Yurks try to steal it, the Andalites try to abuse its power, and Elfangor loses faith in his leaders. You know the drill. In the end he decides to hide the Time Matrix on Earth and turn himself into a human for the rest of his life. That's not the weird part. The weird part comes when Elfangor makes an offhand comment about becoming a computer programmer and developing new technology with his friend Bill. Turns out Bill Gates really is a human, and he really did steal his ideas from more intelligent people. If you thought that the person who revealed that to the world would turn out to be a children's book author, then you're a fucking liar. Then the Elimist shows up again and brings Elfangor back to his own timeline so that he can give the Animorphs their powers. It also turns out that Elfangor was the father of one of the Animorphs because shut up, you're reading this instead of doing your math homework. Number one, the Animorphs kill the dinosaurs. After that last entry you were probably thinking, good lord if that was the second weirdest thing they ever did what could possibly top the list. To that I say time travel and genocide. So basically the Animorphs get sent back in time. Not by the Elimist or the Time Matrix. No that would make too much sense. They get sent back in time because they're too close to a nuclear bomb when it goes off. Well yeah what else would happen? As we all know powerful explosions don't kill people. That's why we never find bodies after terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda doesn't want to hurt anyone. They just send them to a more peaceful time before modern society sucked out our humanity. Although it does make the Hiroshima bombing funnier when you imagine they all got eaten by velociraptors afterwards. While avoiding the T-Rexes, the Animorphs come across two different alien races that are fighting over the earth. They steal a warhead from one of them and destroy their base. In retaliation those aliens abandon the earth and send an asteroid towards it to kill all their enemies. The remaining aliens ask for the warhead to destroy the asteroid. The Animorphs give it back, but they disable it first, allowing all their allies to be killed by a rock the size of Mount Everest. Joking aside, these books got pretty hardcore at times. Then the Animorphs get sent back in time by the force of the asteroid driving most species to extinction and sending the planet into a long cold winter that forced life to go down a radically different evolutionary path. Unless the time travel was a result of angry dinosaur ghosts bitch slapping the Animorphs back to their own side of the street, that's pretty stupid. I would just like to point out that this is not the only time that author Ka Applegate had the characters of one of her books go back in time and send an asteroid to earth. This isn't even the tip of the iceberg with the bizarre shit that happens here. I didn't mention the tiny aliens that are ruled by a corpse or the Animorph that gets turned into a hawk permanently or that time the governor of California tries to warn people about the aliens or when Rachel gets sick and turns into an elephant in her bedroom. But if you want to understand those, you'll have to read them on your own. Thanks to my patrons, especially my $10 and up friends, Oppo Savalainen, Brother Santotis, Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinton, Joseph Pendergraft, and Tobacco Crow. Now that I've done an Animorphs video, you can all stop yelling at me, or keep yelling at me about Ranger's Apprentice. But don't worry, that'll come later. Bye.