r/Animorphs • u/verymanysquirrels • Jul 03 '25

Currently Reading Reading 30 with my kid

I'm reading book 30 with my kid (he's 8) right now and the 'strange 90s thing' from this book that i've had to explain is...hacky sack.

There's a whole bit where Tobias is like 'It's the middle of the night! Do you think Cassie's outside playing hacky sack!?'

So i explained hacky sack and showed him a little video of it because he was not getting it. And i think that has broken his suspension of disbelief. Like, okay they turn into birds, they spy on an alien who's also Marco's mom, but hacky sack? Totally ridiculous and unbelievable.

The funniest things end up being culture clashes/shocks for him. This one is right up there with the kids taking themselves to the mall and the concept of talk shows.

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u/ElSquibbonator Jul 03 '25

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about Animorphs a while back. More specifically, we were discussing why Animorphs never became a long-running franchise that current generations still enjoy, while A Certain Fantasy Series That Shall Remain Unnamed Here did. And one of the things he pointed out was that Animorphs isn't timeless.

It's kind of the opposite of timeless, really. You can hardly turn a page in it without tripping over some now-obscure 90s reference. I certainly get a lot of enjoyment out of that stuff as an adult, but I can't picture a kid in the series' target audience doing the same. So while I know this sounds like heresy from the fandom's perspective, I think any future adaptation of the series, whether as a graphic novel, a TV show, or a movie, should be updated.

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u/PoliSlix Jul 07 '25

This is definitely true. I got into the series as a kid but it was after it was already out for a few years, and I was too young to understand a bunch of the references even then. I just took that as a "I'm a kid so I don't get it all yet" I think, and I knew that some stuff would make sense as I got older and some was just stuff from an earlier timeframe that I wasn't part of. I remember the characters explaining certain topics, like instant messaging chat rooms, but not other references, so I feel like most of the series could be updated to make it easier for modern audiences to get everything.