Guardians of Ga’hoole a TV Series?

• Notes from Kathryn

One journalist thinks it should be!

With hearts sublime and a rich lore, Guardians of Ga'Hoole would make a great TV show -- if given the chance.

In the early 2000s, Scholastic Publishing started releasing Kathryn Lasky The Guardians of Ga’Hoole books. The series, which has fifteen core books, follows a brave band of owls who with hearts sublime take flight to fight evil and defend the weak. In 2010, production company Animal Logic and director Zack Snyder released The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, a movie based on the books that received the same criticism many movies based on books receive: the books were better.

There’s no denying Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is a beautiful movie. Every shot is gorgeous, and thanks to Animal Logic, the characters all look realistic and believable while still retaining a range of expressiveness not found in nature. The vistas are breathtaking, and the visual effects are spectacular. Legend of the Guardians doesn't look ten years old, and the visuals still stand up compared to the big blockbusters of today.

Where Legend of the Guardians suffers is in the story. To someone new to the series, the story is very straightforward: Soren is a young owl kidnapped by evil owls after he falls from his nest. He escapes, and with his newfound friends finds the good owls of Ga'Hoole. The good guys prevail, defeat the evil and save the day. While this seems very straightforward, it's also a severely truncated version of the story.

Some changes make sense for the movie, and there's a lot that gets condensed into exposition. However, the Legend of the Guardians spans the first six books in the series, and in trying to cover so much ends up missing a lot of the nuance involved. Important arcs and character developments that hit hard in the books are completely omitted in the movie, while others are severely condensed.

There are also some changes that don't make as much sense. Despite romance not really being a focus of the books, Legend of the Guardians contains a love triangle, which is an odd narrative choice. There are also character changes, as Twilight is coarser in the books, while Jatt and Jutt are more menacing. Some major characters in Guardians of Ga'Hoole, like Zan, Streak and Hortense -- are nowhere to be seen in the movie, while the bats, who are minor characters in the first book and not mentioned again, play a bigger role.

To be fair to the film, Legend of the Guardians had a 97-minute runtime, which means fitting six books into such a small amount of time was always going to cause problems. Those issues are only exacerbated by the fact fans of the books can't help but notice issues like those mentioned above.

That's why Guardians of Ga'Hoole needs to be a TV series.

The market for TV has never been stronger, with not only cable but a multitude of streaming services looking for new series to hook audiences. With fifteen books in its main story, Guardians of Ga’Hoole can easily support a couple of seasons of great TV. And in doing so, the TV series can give the book series the time it deserves to flesh out the events, places and characters.

And this series can go very, very dark. In the first book alone, owls are brainwashed, murdered and tortured. Zan, one of the bald eagles, cannot speak due to her tongue being ripped out during a battle with the owls of St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls (St. Aggie's). Twilight is orphaned and living on his own at a very young age, while Digger’s little brother Flick is ripped in half and eaten by Jatt and Jutt. The action only gets darker from there, as the series delves into wars and politics and at times even magic. The second arc of the original series alone introduces hagsfiends, strange crosses between owls and crows that can make other birds freeze and fall out of the sky via a yellow glow from their eyes, and firesight, the ability to see the future and other important events through flames.

Not to mention the mystery of the Others, who are strange creatures long since extinct that left structures and media that baffle the animals that find them. Readers would recognize these Others as people, and are left wondering just what happened that made them all vanish. In the main storyline, at least, this is never addressed, and even during the time of Hoole ages before the main story, Others are a distant memory.

Having the books made into a TV series also lets viewers properly linger on the quiet time and enjoy the worldbuilding. Book One is spent almost entirely in St. Aggie’s. Over the course of that book, Soren and Gylfie, two young owlets, learn the ins and outs of St. Aggie’s to better report its horrors to the outside world, from moon-blinking owlets to having vampire bats drain the older owls of blood to tamp down the temptation to fly. Book Two, conversely, is spent learning how the Great Tree and the Guardians work, from the chaws to the rybs (teachers) to flying through forest fires for the hottest of coals. The vast Northern Kingdoms and their history of war is explored deeply in Book Six, while several books are dedicated to the Beyond, a land of fire and volcanoes where the Ember of Hoole resides. A TV show, like a book series, can linger in these places easily.

The Guardians of Ga’Hoole series also offers a very promising structure that TV shows seem to be leaning into now: a definitive beginning, middle and end with the promise of sequels and spinoffs, should it prove popular enough. The days of never-ending series that continue season after season seem to be fading into the past, while modern television seems to favor shows that hit fast and hard and give a satisfying ending.Guardians of Ga’Hoole offers the sort of sweeping format and hard battles that long-running shows like Game of Thrones presents, but still has the quiet character moments that other popular series offer. And with 2D animation making a comeback, Guardians of Ga’Hoole has its pick of animation formats to sample from.

While a Guardians of Ga’Hoole series would be nice, the movie’s poor performance at the box office might keep this from becoming a reality. Still, if an adaptation of Guardians of Ga'Hoole should ever fly again, it should do so on TV, where the story can be done justice.

Dr. Kelsey Dickson