When I wrote my own show pitch, I had to articulate a series of things you couldn't change without breaking the tone of the books. Remember, the point of a good adaptation isn't to change the tone to appeal to a new audience, it's to show the new audience what the appeal of the tone was to the old audience.
And if you don't write it down in person, people will change it to make it arbitrary changes.
- You can't age the characters up to more than 14 at the start. (I made them 14 so that they'd visually be surrounded by much taller upperclassmen when they were in a new and confusing school environment.) Above 14, their reaction to their actions becomes less of a Child Soldier and more of a Teen Soldier problem. And it introduces too many new problems - can they drive? Would the war be interrupted by them going to college immediately? Would Tom still be living at home?
- You have to either set it in the nineties, or in a No Man's Time that resembles the nineties. It's not just Nostalgia, it's not just But How Would They Morph With Smartphones On Their Person. First, the setting can't have omnipresent surveillance cameras and cell phone videos without that changing the tone of the paranoia from "What if the people around me suspect" (causes character drama, makes them lie and writhe) to "How do I hide from the cameras" (Mission Impossible) and giving the characters no chance to be characters.
Secondly, the world the Yeerks are invading is a safe world. The last war America was in in Iraq, we won. The Soviet Union is dead, the economy is booming, we're ignoring the simmering racial tension, the mall/movie theater/amusement park is the trifecta, the cynosure of recreational life. If you set it today, first, there are no more Third Spaces for the characters to just hang out without their parents demanding they be chaperoned. But more to the point, if you set this during or after the War On Terror, or during or after the Present Regime and Biden Interregnum, if the kids told people that an invasion was happening, people would probably believe them. A secret invasion has to have an incongruous surface.
- It has to be silly, it can't wallow in the horror. When I pitch this series, I say "Most things have dramatic scenes punctuated by comic relief. Animorphs has those, but it also has mind-melting horror punctuated by moments of mind-melting silliness. It took those peaks and valleys and turned them into a Rollercoaster. You laugh, then scream, then laugh, and each of those two feed into each other." That's the visceral experience of reading the books, and something no other series achieved so smoothly. They have to coexist.
- The adults have to be nonchalant, for all the reasons above. Yes, a character is a seagull being chased down by a horrible alien monster, about to die any moment. But the adults have to react to this with "Hey, that bird has too many wings!" "Must be some kind of mutant bird. Go, seagull, go!" All the iconic adult scenes are things like "it's the bear that's nuts, it's carpeted up there." Or Rachel's mom attacking a bear with a spice rack. The important thing to establish is that adults are Too Much Of The World. The adults around them, if they tried to help, are trained to be adults, they're not flexible enough to do what the situation demands. This is a source of simultaneous humor and tension. I say this, because writer's rooms like the ones I've worked in are notorious for not being good at writing kids who are smarter than the adults in a relatable way. There's age and ego in the way.
- As much as we can, see if we can come up with dialogue on the fly by improv between the writers. The banter in this series remains some of the best ever written on TV despite being a book rather than a show, and it's because the authors were a husband and wife clearly improvising the dialogue by yelling out loud to each other as they wrote, topping each other. The characters can't sound like they took the time to finely craft a joke, they have to sound like friends who would interrupt a war room meeting by arguing about if Batman could beat up Spider-Man, or the title of a Jules Verne book. Keep the rough edges.
- And for Pete's sake, you can't make it horny. If you write a show with appealing characters, fans will do that for free for years down the line as puberty affects their brains. Applegrant wrote it because they were sick of writing a series called "Making Out." If you add it in, all it will do is repulse the eight year olds while making adults feel vaguely uncomfortable. These are children who have to wear skintight outfits in front of each other, turn into animals and attack aliens while biting. If any of those elements isn't equally horrifying to them, it loses its impact and the necessary humor. Again - hollywood writer's rooms will assume any situation from Power Rangers to the Starship Enterprise is a college dorm in different outfits.
- Be violently wacky. If there's too much blood and violence in any one scene, you're not using enough incongruous music, Ed Edd n' Eddy sound effects, yodeling noises as a controller gets thrown off a cliff, or jokes about Rachel having "the right to bear arms." The violence was never off-camera, it was just told in abstract prose. Off-camera violence looks like nothing, but on-camera violence is desensitizing.
Funny Horror is a really hard balance to strike, but here's my philosophy of it as embodied by the Butthole Surfers (quoted in Azerrad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life"):
If it was all humor or all Horror, you'd tune it out. You're watching children get PTSD. It has to be something that, as a kid, you would feel braver for watching.
For the pitch, I assembled music ranging from Wagner and Sousa to 1930s novelty chanson, calm 1950s vibraphone jazz, afrobeat, city pop and Raffi. If you can't get the rights to have Marco as a dolphin, bleeding out with his tail bitten off, deliriously singing "Baby Beluga" to himself to calm him down, you have to replace it with something even more incongruous. This is the type of series that demands you play Newport Folk during a duel to the death, but Death Metal during a math test.
(Worth mentioning is that Guardians Of The Galaxy was, when it came out, comically incongruous for mixing cheesy seventies rock with alien warfare. We've forgotten what a good impact that had.)
- "Wanna get Mickey D's?" said Marco. "Shock yeah," I said, doing a kickflip. We were specks in an uncaring void. It was a great day to not be dead.
