I wanted to do something big for my 1-year anniversary, and boy was this night one of my favorites in a long time. Max Temkin and I got to carry on about our mutual love of the long-running young adult novel series Animorphs for an hour while getting laughs from a live audience and being flanked by some other incredible past guests along the way. If you've never read Animorphs, there's no need to fret: Max covers the plot basics before diving into his favorite aspects of the novels and the many, many qualms he had with the short-lived television show (I realize at some point that I overlooked them for the dreamy Shawn Ashmore and Christopher Ralph). Along with the observation that "If you had told me that all of my hours of consuming Nickelodeon things would lead to me reading a science-fiction series and then get to talk to a girl about it for an hour, I would have not believed me if I said that... that would've blown my mind as a kid," Max also dropped the lovely Ebert quote, "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it," which also applies to how people like things, an MBSing theme. Along the way we get an apology to Auburn football from Chandler Goodman and Spencer Smith, a Bio-Dome complaint in the form of a ridiculous song from Tim Dunn with a rebuttal from Rob Grabowski, the settling of an off-mic poke war with Matt Young, a lovely MBSing-based game show (called Matt, Mark, Julia, Jeff) from Adam Levin, and a heartfelt thanks from Nick Johnson that made me straight up cry. Thanks for a great year everyone. Here's to many more.
Max's tweet about the Animorphs pullout in Nickelodeon Magazine that was one of the only things he could find when trying to actually Google to find the issue.
