So, here is a thing that exists:
This thing that exists is the creatively named parody, Vegemorphs, written by Leif E. Green (son of a...) and published in 1998 by Troll Communications. And it is assuredly and objectively the SECOND-strangest book I have read that attempted to cash-in on the Animorphs series.
Right off the bat we get a pretty dead-on parody of the famous Animorphs opening, "I can't tell you my first name - or my last name either. And I can't tell you where I live. But I might be lying in your refrigerator's vegetable bin or in the produce section of your local supermarket right now." This is Kale Kyle the leader guy. Rounding out the rest of the cast are Carrot Cary the wacky smart guy, Olive Olivia the... however you'd categorize Cassie I guess, Tomato Tommy and Radish Randi the other two (literally, they're here so that there can be five humans in the cast), and the evil Jerkks. It's that kind of parody.
By the way, it's 1998 and Kale and company "like to wear funky clothes, listen to alternative music, and do crazy things." They also hang out with old ladies in a Bingo parlor. Yup.
It's on the way home from playing Bingo that the gang runs into a giant flying mushroom that is covering a farmer's field with fungal spores. Shortly afterwards, they meet Prince Brassica, the talking broccoli and the wise and brave ruler of the Vegetable Kingdom. The Prince informs the kids that certain otherwise ordinary plants are as intelligent as humans but are unable to speak to normal humans. They are extremely rare because they live most of their lives underground and the few who venture to the surface risk getting eaten. They are also at war with the Jerkks, evil fungi who want to infect everything alive on every planet they land upon, and they are losing badly.
But Prince Brassica has a new plan. He will use his magical salad dressing to give his new human friends the ability to transform into giant talking vegetable-people who will better be able to fight the space-fungi.
I promise you, I am stone-cold sober right now. (At the time of writing, I mean.)The kids agree to all this because I guess being a talking vegetable is at least more exciting than playing Bingo. It's worth quoting Kyle's description of Newman's Own Escafil: "I felt tart and tangy, crisp and cool, hot and spicy, crunchy and mellow - all at once... It was like I had been all mixed up - and now everything was mixed right. I had been tossed."
Kyle's salad... has been tossed...
AAAAaaaaanyway. So for those of you wondering if turning into a talking vegetable is the worst kind of Blessed With Suck, it... well, it isn't the WORST kind, but it's close. You can smell a vegetable and then transform into a vegetable-person, but you can also make your clothing invisible, turn into a normal vegetable, shoot a magic beam of vitamins and minerals at people, and transform other people into talking vegetables because...??? If you are wondering, we're not told why you can turn into a tomato or an eggplant if the magic supposedly only works on vegetables. Oh, and of course there is a time limit. Stay a vegetable past the "recommended cooking time" and you're stuck like that. Wee. (For the record, a character does ask whether that means "steamed, stir-fried, boiled, or microwaved" before getting his question shot down.)
Enter the villain: his name is Fun Gus. Of course it is. And he is a Rubrum fungus that can turn into a giant vegetable. And he dresses like Urkle. And he drinks celery juice made from his enemies. And he holds evil secret meetings called the Snorings, where people go to eat mushroom soup and be infected by fungi in their sleep. And he stinks. In fact, he and his followers' favorite battle tactic is to swarm all over their opponents and make them sick.
The kids escape the battle and run home. And in the morning Kyle wakes up to find that Cary has somehow entered his room and has turned into a carrot-person. Cary then turns into a normal carrot and talks about how awesome being a carrot is and how he actually wouldn't mind being a carrot forever and could Kyle hop downstairs and get some salad dressing and pour it all over Cary's carrot body and oh God what? WHAT? WHAT?!?
Thankfully Kyle's mean older brother arrives before things get wicked awkward and since he is wearing tacky clothes and is suddenly obsessed with animation (something I have to point out because I am me) he has obviously been infected by the (sigh) Jerkks. Specifically, the dreaded Streptococcus or Strep Throat bacteria. One of (*sigh*) Fun Gus' other favorite tactics is to turn fungi and bacteria which are normally harmless, like Trichophyton, evil and super-virulent. I was previously unaware that the fungus that causes Athlete's Foot is more often than not mostly harmless. This is a hell of a context in which to learn that.
So the gang gets together and practices turning into vegetables and turning other people into vegetables and endive right into stalking bad guys to get right to the root of why they can't leaf the Vegetable Kingdom alone peas kohlrabi nasturtium and - sweet mother of Gregor Mendel there are so many vegetable puns. Like, an entire Xanth novel's worth of awful puns in a little over a hundred pages.
Anyway the gang causes some chaos in the local salad bar where they meet with Prince Brassica again and he explains their new plan. They will invade the next Snoring as vegetables with anti-fungal cream smeared all over themselves, hijack a delivery truck full of anti-fungal cream, and then zap everyone with their vitamin and mineral beams.
I just wrote that, right? I just actually wrote that.
Well, the battle goes surprisingly smoothly, and is even helped along via Deus ex Machina, a big thunderstorm that washes away all the evil fungus. Fun Gus goes underground, presumably shaking his fist like an 80's cartoon villain, and the Vegetable Kingdom warriors are at the ready whenever he returns in the sequel that will never happen. The downside is that Cary is now a carrot permanently, but he's now living among the Vegetable Kingdom warriors and is happier than he has ever been.
Repeat: CARY IS HAPPIER ABOUT BEING A F***ING CARROT THAN TOBIAS EVER WAS BEING A HAWK WHICH, just as a reminder, IS NOT THE GODDAMN ROOT OF A GODDAMN PLANT AND CAN F***ING FLY!!! Wow.
So there you have it, I guess. For the curious, a version of the book with a different, spooky cover and credits is available at Amazon. It's worth visiting the page for the comments alone.
Now, since I think I am spent, who wants to tackle these things or these things?
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Sketch of the Day
Here is a squirrel:
What? You expected an immediate "Terra Nova" reaction? Well, sorry; there's something much, much more important on our plate right now.
I mentioned this game in the comments for the precursor of the wonderful wonderful Cinnamon BUNZUH! blog/project. I have no idea what the story is behind the game, where it fits in book continuity (not at all; check out Lion!Rachel), or why I happen to own a copy of it. All I know is that in the middle of the four-day power outage we suffered after Hurricane Irene, I was bored enough to play it, as I promised I would.
Here, then, is (I'm sure) the Internet's first and only attempt at a playthrough of the "Animorphs" Game Boy Color game. Yes, Game Boy Color. I'll be playing it on my trusty Game Boy Advance. I should warn you that I haven't the slightest clue how those neat, clear screenshots of GBA screens in handheld game-based Let's Plays are done.
So here's the first thing you see when you pop your game in. Note the barely-visible "continue" option. I will spare you, but I got to see it an awful lot.
This is as good as the graphics get in this game. If I had perused my very brief childhood fixation with needlepoint, I'd cross-stitch this and applique it to a pillow. (Nice hair, Marco.)
And heck yes, I am ready to become an Animorph! Man, it has been a while since we had a game where your player character was an animal-based shapeshifter, hasn't it? Will this be as complicated and kind of mind-blowing as "Evo: Search for Eden"?
No. No it will not.
The small blob in the upper-left is a mouse. The giant green towel is a "Note from Dad" telling us that animals have been acting strange lately. The blue thing is Ax and the bird is... well, more on him in a second.
That little yellow blob-thing is our player-character. We start the game as Cassie, and here is, all things considered, the weirdest observation I have about "Animorphs: the GBC Game": Name another game where your player character is a black woman. (The fact that the only other one I can think of is half of that crazy "Matrix" tie-in thing means that something is dreadfully wrong.)
Tobias J. Emohawk will be our Navi ("Hey, listen!!!") equivalent for this evening, flying and bossing us around. Having Cassie make him repeat what he says here ("Talk to everybody! Even though we are the only resistance against a secret invasion!") leads to this amusing screenshot:
I have a new Crack Pairing.
Although, come to mention it, my real Crack Pairing is Cassie/Ax... Oh, hey, an Original Song (hey, the last video game had a song, this one must have one too.)
CASSIE: "Four! Eyes! Hypnotizing!
Could you be our savior? Could you be a Centaur?
Your! Powers! Are tantalizing!
I don't understand them, but I wanna have them!
Share! Them! A-with me!
Cause I want to transform! Don't want to be the norm!
A! Cquire! DNA!
I don't get how that works.
"You're from a war out in space
with hideous brain-worms!
But since you're at my place
wanna make love with someone who shares the same fa-ace?
(Chorus)
"TOUCH! ME!
ACQUIRE ME!
Visitor from the 'bove!
Let's redefine 'self-love!'
TRANS! FORM! INTO ME!
Let's destroy some barriers! Fly like Northern Harriers!
"You're an ALIEN!
You're so outa sight!
I'm an Animorph!
You're an Andalite!"
AX: "Got me horny like a Hork Bajar!
they go run around the trees eatin' BAH-A-A-ARK!
Got a tail blade could kill a T. rex!
Folks are like, 'yeah, that what she said.'
Shapeshfting squick is good, clean fun!
Tell me what's next? CINNAMON BUN!
They call me a Centaur
four-legged, horny, tough!
Maybe it's cause your boy
Axie's in-to weird stuff!"
(Chorus ad nauseum to end.)
Making sweet, boundary-defying love to Ax nets us our first password, and one of the game's stranger mechanics:
The game has no Save option. At all. None. Instead, whenever a major plot point happens (or not), it spits out a password for you to input after hitting the "Continue" option. Too damn bad if you don't understand what's going on here or forget to write the thing down.
I may have mentioned that I am an obsessive-compulsive Save-er.
So, about the mouse I mentioned earlier. Let's go near it and see what happens.
We are suddenly in an epic struggle between girl and mouse! Yes, here we have the game's strangest mechanic: to Acquire the form of an animal, we need to fight it while in the form of another animal.
Our first Morph, or "Starter" if you will, is a redonkulously overpowered dog.
Let's see what attacks we have:
You wonder why dogs are so popular, given all they do is kick things and scream all the damn time.
Anyway, kicking the crap out of the mouse allows us to transform into it. Just like it works in the books.
So we now have Mouse and Dog at our disposal. We can have six forms at a time, including our human form. Each form, in turn, has it's own health bar. Also, each animal has four -and only four- special moves.
This is the single most original game ever created for a Nintendo handheld system ever ever!
(Not even halfway through the review and I really hope everyone has their Sarcasm-detector on by now. Otherwise, I am in for some interesting comments.)
Let's head outside and see if we can't save more animals by beating them up and stealing all their DNA!
Ah, nature. Hey, is that indistinct blob in the upper-left a goat? I like charging into things; that could be useful! Let's see what moves it has...
Later on, although I did not get screenshots, we will learn that elephants can punch. I don't even want to know with what.
A word about the moves in this game. Some of them are evasion moves and some of them are attacks. You will not know which is which until you use them and they actually hit. That's the other thing: accuracy in this game is for sh*t. There's also no consistency with regards to which attacks (or creatures!) are more powerful than others, but we'll get to that soon enough.
Tobias tells us to get over to the pet store:
Here we get the useful Chimpanzee (with a tail?) form...
Oh wow. This game...
Aw, come on fishies! I just want your DNA!
The pet store also nets us the useful Generic Snake (Swim/Burrow/Climb/Venom yeah) form, which we'll use to sneak into the Zoo and...
Oh God dammit.
Even though the books went on to be more nuanced about them, here the Hork-Bajir are Goddamn Spiders. Any one of your attacks merely chips pixels off their health bar (except when and if it randomly doesn't), while they merrily stomp each of your forms without a care.
By the way, every time one of your animal forms loses all of it's hit points, you lose that form for good unless you can fight the animal and Acquire it again. Lose all of your forms and you lose the game, so you're essentially playing a forced Nuzlocke Run. With an impossibly wonky attack system and enemies who are ridiculously overpowered, right from the very beginning.
Thanks largely to the Hork-Bajir, we get to see this screen a lot:
We will skip over the part where I forgot to write down the last password (FUUUUUU-) and proceed directly to the Zoo/Gardens.
Tobias neglects to tell us exactly what we're up to here, but it could only involve acquiring as many species as possible, right?
Gettin' Cassie's trademark Wolf first. I will use Wolf to nab what is surely the best form early on in the game:
So majestic!
Now, unfortunately, walking within fifty feet of an animal starts a battle with it, even if you've already fought it. Wikkid, wikkid fun when you just barely survived the last fight. Also, it results in things like this happening:
There's lions in the zoo too! Now that's going to kick some ass. Surely, if I attempt to fight him, he won't kill each of my powerful pain-in-the-ass-to-acquire forms in a row while they make not a dent, leaving me with only my least-powerful form to fight with, which he will them smash easily, right?
This f***ing game.
("Continue", password, re-get every animal, see that a bat is available -a flying form!- attempt to acquire and...)
This. F***ing. GAME!
Yeah, I have no idea where to go. I leave the Gardens and wander around for a bit -- as Wolf!Cassie!
This mountain has a glitch that gets me stuck and unable to move.
Working my way free, I head upwards to... a plot point, surely! The Sharing is the creepy Yeerk brain-slug cult thing where visitors are merely instructed to walk around without a helmet. Maybe I'm supposed to enter this building and...
No.
Yeah, uh, I'm going to quit here. Because there's probably three more levels of this B.S. and I'm done. Just one last thing before I go...
Batmanning like a pro! Until I get stuck beside this bush. *sigh*
...
...
...
Oh, what the hell.
