Animorphs

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About

Animorphs (also known as "Modern-Day Animorphs") is a photoshop meme that involves morphing images of characters or celebrities into various animals and inanimate objects that are associated by name puns or physical resemblance, inspired by the cover art from the young adult science fiction book series Animorphs.

Origin

On July 14th, 2012, Tumblr^[1] user majortvjunkie posted a photoshopped Animorphs book cover featuring the rapper Pitbull transforming into a pitbull dog with the caption "To understand the future we must go back in time." The post was heavily reblogged, receiving more than 39,000 notes within six days. However, it has since been deleted.

Animorphs

Animorphs^[9] is a book series written by American author K.A. Applegate which was initially published by Scholastic from June 1996 to May 2001, with a total of 54 releases. The series told the story of five humans and one alien who could morph into any animal they touched. They referred to themselves as "Animorphs" and ach cover depicted one of the characters transforming into an animal (shown below, left). In May of 2011, the series was re-issued with updated lenticular book covers (shown below, right) and altered plot elements.

Spread

On July 15th, 2012, Redditor beergoggles69 submitted the Pitbull image to the /r/funny^[2] subreddit in a post titled "My favourite 'Animorphs' book." It reached the front page receiving more than 3,000 up votes, 1,100 points and 75 comments within five days. On the following day, the Cheezburger site ROFLRazzi^[5] published a post titled "Updated Animorphs: Adele," which depicted the British singer-songwriter Adele morphing into a Dell computer.

On July 17th, the Pitbull image was reposted to CollegeHumor.^[7] On July 18th, compilations of multiple Celebrity Animorphs images were highlighted on the viral content site BuzzFeed^[2] and the Internet humor blog Pleated Jeans.^[3] On July 19th, the fashion blog Lovelyish^[8] published a post titled "My New Favorite Meme: Celebrity Animorphs", which lauded the series for its nostalgic value. The series has also been featured on Smosh^[12], We Know Memes^[13], music message board ATRL^[14] and humor site Kill The Hydra.^[15] Additional images can be found on Memebase^[10] and Tumblr^[6] with the tag "#animorphs" and "#celebrity animorphs."^[11]