Blast From The Past: Animorphs

Hey peeps,
For today's blog I'm going to talk about a fond memory from my childhood - the book series Animorphs. The series was brought back to my mind recently because of a conversation I was having at Roleplay Society with one of my friends, in which it turns out he was a fan of the series too.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the series, I'll give a brief summary - a bunch of friends are walking through an abandoned construction site one night when an alien space ship crashes in front of them. The dying alien inside tells them (telepathically!) that Earth is being secretly invaded by brain-slugs called Yeerks, and so they must use the power he gives them - the power to change into animals - to defeat the evil aliens. The good alien is then swiftly eaten by one of the bosses of said bad aliens. And thus begins 54 or so books of covert warfare between a group of 5 teenagers (plus one alien they find in about the 6th book) and a whole horde of mind-controlling Yeerks and their range of deadly hosts, includng voracious giant centipedes and 7-foot tall bird-reptiles covered in razor-blades
Okay, so maybe I didn't do the best job of making it sound like an interesting series, but to my 10ish-year-old mind, it was amazing. I love animals, so the idea of being able to transform into animals really appealed to me. Plus, being a sci-fi fan, the array of alien species was also pretty awesome. For example, the main good-aligned alien species - the Andalites - basically look like blue deer with stalk-eyes instead of antlers, and a bladed tail. And as I mentioned before, they're telepaths.
I've read the main series of 54 books, plus the side stories The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (which I picked up cheap on Cambridge market recently for the sake of nostalgia) and The Andalite Chronicles. There are still half a dozen or so books I've yet to find, but will attempt to track down in charity shops at some point. Of the ones that I've read, I think my favourite is #26, The Attack, where they're transported to an alien world by a good demi-god who uses them as pawns against an evil demi-god and his soldiers which have an ear-splitting scream... literally. After a little investigation, it turns out that, as I had suspected for a while, the evil demi-god (Crayak) was indeed based on the Eye of Sauron.
The books spawned a TV series (of which I saw a few episodes and wasn't overly impressed with), and a few video games, none of which received very good reviews (I had the GBC version which was a bad Pokémon rip-off, I'm sad to say). However, I still think very highly of the books, and after Wikipedia-ing them in order to write this article, I have half a mind to read the series again over the summer. Guess we'll see :)
Anyways, that about does it for this time. Maybe I'll return to other childhood hobbies and such in another blog, if I can think of any good ones. But for now, cheery-bye ^^