Celebrity Animorphs

About

Celebrity Animorphs (also known as “Modern-Day Animorphs”) is a photoshop meme that involves morphing images of 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 over 39,000 notes within six days.

Animorphs

The original Animorphs^[9] book series was published by Scholastic in June of 1996, with 54 books released before ending in May of 2001. 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 battled against alien invaders. In May of 2011, the series was re-issued with updated lenticular book covers 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”, which reached the front page receiving over 3,000 up votes within five days. On the following day, the Cheezburger site ROFLRazzi^[5] published a post titled “Updated Animorphs: Adele”, which highlighted an image of the British singer-songwriter Adele morphing into a Dell computer.

On July 17th, the Pitbull image was reposted on the Internet humor site College Humor.^[7] On July 18th, compilations of the series 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 meme has continued to spread on Memebase^[10] and Tumblr^[6] under the tag “#animorphs.”

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not yet available.

External References