Do sequels/prequels tarnish the original?

[Klaus]

I was at Worldcon in Boston in 1980, and as a surprise they added 2 showings of Star Wars to the movie track at the last minute... that was the summer Empire had come out, and none of us had seen the original in at least a year [since the 2nd release iirc]. Perhaps predictably, the first showing turned into "The Luke Skywalker Picture Show" with lots of us yelling things at the screen at "appropriate" times.

Luke: "I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father."
Audience: "NO YOU DON'T!!"

They asked us to be quiet for the 2nd showing lol....

 

[Gojira]

Do sequels/prequels tarnish the original, I would say no. They can tarnish the film series but not an individual film.

A great film will always be a great film.

I agree with that. I look at the original Planet of the Apes (1968) and that is such a great Science Fiction classic. The sequels were ok but as a stand alone film nothing tops the original.

Although not science fiction the Rocky series is a franchise tainted by its sequels. The original won the Academy Award for best picture. The sequels turned the character into a cartoon. The very last movie, Rocky Balboa, redeemed the franchise a bit.

 

[Christopher]

Although not science fiction the Rocky series is a franchise tainted by its sequels. The original won the Academy Award for best picture. The sequels turned the character into a cartoon.

I find that an interesting and oddly appropriate observation coming from someone whose username is Gojira and whose avatar is of the "cute" version of Godzilla from the later Shōwa-era movies. Talk about a serious character becoming a cartoon in the sequels...

 

[shivkala]

A crappy sequel doesn't "tarnish" the original, in my opinion, just by existing. For me, when a sequel retcons something in the original, drastically (and unpleasantly) changes something about the characters, etc. than, yeah it kind of changes my view of the original.

Case in point, Superman Returns. It's hard to view Superman II, especially the scene in the Fortress of Solitude between Superman and Lois, in light of the fact that you learn in Superman Returns that their night of passion resulted in Lois getting pregnant and the fact that Superman has a son, but Lois is married to another man, and all that baggage. Maybe "tarnish" is not the right word, but it does change my experience of watching the original (which in this case, is a sequel to Superman: The Movie, but I digress).

However, the quality of a sequel doesn't tarnish the original for me unless, as I said, something in the sequel itself impact the story in the original. I did not enjoy X3, but it didn't tarnish X-Men or X2 for me. I think the original Back to the Future is the best, but the fact that the second and third were not as good doesn't ruin the original for me.

Prequels are a little different. I keep going back to the fun it was as a kid to imagine what lead up to Star Wars. Seeing the prequels ruined a lot of that, to the point where I'm pretty much in favor of ignoring the prequels and going back to making up my own back-story for the characters. That being the case, it's hard to watch the movies and not think, "Anakin built C3-PO" and how ridiculous that is, for me to imagine happening.

Another example would be the Babylon 5 movie "In the Beginning," which was sort of a prequel. Overall, I thought it was well done, until three major characters were partnered up, despite the fact that none of the three ever mentioned them having met previously (it was, technically, a classified mission, but still, there should have been some recognition). It's even worse when a fourth character encounters the three, and again, nothing is ever mentioned about her having met any of them, including the man who would one day become her husband.

These are the things that impact my enjoyment of the original, as they constantly float in my mind and distract from my enjoyment of the movie/tv show.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Case in point (and one I've used before): A lot of people forget that the original Rocky was a nuanced, Oscar winning film that had more in common with independent cinema than most of Stallone's films. They forget that in part because the sequels have caricatured the concept to the point where many people think every Rocky movie was a cartoonish fantasy and don't even realize he lost the first fight.

Well, I don't forget it - mostly because I don't watch the sequels. See, this isn't hard. You can enjoy the story on its own by not watching the others.

 

[Derishton]

Case in point, Superman Returns. It's hard to view Superman II, especially the scene in the Fortress of Solitude between Superman and Lois, in light of the fact that you learn in Superman Returns that their night of passion resulted in Lois getting pregnant and the fact that Superman has a son, but Lois is married to another man, and all that baggage. Maybe "tarnish" is not the right word, but it does change my experience of watching the original (which in this case, is a sequel to Superman: The Movie, but I digress).

Exactly. The argument that the original film or book doesn't change is true, but incomplete - the individual viewer HAS changed, and pereception is a huge part of the viewing and reading experience.

 

[Disruptor]

APES mention had me thinking, Heston was right. Sequels suck. They shouldn't be made. Real film makers and serious actors don't do sequels.

Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme.

 

[Greg Cox]

APES mention had me thinking, Heston was right. Sequels suck. They shouldn't be made. Real film makers and serious actors don't do sequels.

Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme.

And yet how many people on this board are counting the days to the next Iron Man movie--and saw The Avengers this summer?

Fandom often seems to give off a distinctly mixed message. One always hears that "Hollywood has run out of ideas! We want something NEW!" But, at the same time, you have people pining for more Star Trek, more Stargate, more BSG, etcetera, while obsessing over every new spoiler or rumor about the next Indiana Jones or Superman movie . . . . .

[A quick scan of this very board reveals 326 posts on IRON MAN 3 and over 3,000 on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, which does seem to indicate a certain interest in sequels!]

 

[the G-man]

Case in point (and one I've used before): A lot of people forget that the original Rocky was a nuanced, Oscar winning film that had more in common with independent cinema than most of Stallone's films. They forget that in part because the sequels have caricatured the concept to the point where many people think every Rocky movie was a cartoonish fantasy and don't even realize he lost the first fight.

Well, I don't forget it - mostly because I don't watch the sequels. See, this isn't hard. You can enjoy the story on its own by not watching the others.

Yes, but not everyone is as smart as we are.

As mentioned before, my point was about public perception, not individual perception.

It would be nice if "people" didn't watch the crappy sequels, but sometimes they do. And that can lead to those people (or others) forgetting what was good about the original.

 

[Greg Cox]

APES mention had me thinking, Heston was right. Sequels suck. They shouldn't be made. Real film makers and serious actors don't do sequels.

Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme.

And, okay, I realize you were being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I can't let that go unchallenged:

"Sequels suck. They shouldn't be made.": Do you really think that we'd all be better off without The Bride of Frankenstein, A Shot in the Dark, some of the later Thin Man movies, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Godfather II, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, X2, and every Bond movie after Dr. No?

"Real film makers and serious actors don't do sequels": Okay, I'm not sure how we're defining "real" film makers, but just off the top of my head: James Whale, Francis Ford Coppola, Francois Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, Ray Harryhausen, Val Lewton, James Cameron, Sam Raimi, and, heck, let's throw in Alfred Hitchcock, who actually remade one of his own movies, as did Tod Browning .....

And if we start listing all the celebrated actors who did sequels we'd be here all day.

 

[Christopher]

Sequels are as old as literature. A lot of the great ancient myths were episodic, as their storytellers added new adventures to the lore of the great heroes their audiences loved to hear about. The Odyssey and the The Aeneid were both sequels to The Iliad. Jason and the Argonauts was the first great crossover epic, as bards catered to their regional audiences' tastes by folding their own mythic heroes into the Argo's crew, eventually accreting a crew that included just about all the great Greek heroes in a proto-Justice League/Avengers -- and even made it into a prequel for many of Herakles's adventures. And the episodic nature of all those epics probably demonstrates that they were accreted from various different adventure tales told about these heroes, making them essentially omnibus collections of ongoing series, the Classical equivalent of the modern DVD box set. Then in Greek drama you have things like Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy, Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, etc.

Heck, even the Bible is an anthology, a compilation of many different tales and writings accumulated over centuries. Plenty of its books and chapters would've originally been sequels to earlier works.

And the ubiquity of sequels continues as you get into more modern literature and drama. A lot of Shakespeare's historicals about the kings of England were 2-parters, or were sequels or prequels to plays about other kings. He used the Falstaff character in several of those plays and spun him off into an otherwise unrelated comedy. Dumas's The Three Musketeers is only the first book in a trilogy about D'Artagnan. And so on. Audiences have always craved more stories about characters they liked, and storytellers have always provided them.

 

[MacLeod]

In some respects it comes down to taste, In a triology a person may like 1 & 2 or 1 & 3, simply because they told the type of story that they preferred. Doesn't mean the other films where bad just not to their taste.

Pick a franchise, say X-men we've had 5 films thus far.

X-Men, X2 and X-Men: First Class are usually considered the best films in the franchise, they where the first second and fifth. Whilst X3 and Wolvereine are considered the weaker entries.

In terms of box office

Last Stand: US$459.4 (51/49)
X2: US$407.7 (53/47)
Wolverine: US$373m (48/52)
First Class: US$353.6 (41/59)
X-Men: US$296.3 (53/47)

So simply looking at the box office you get a different picture. Number in brackets is the split between the domestic and international. Aside from +/- a few percent it's a rough 505-50 split except for First Class which skews to the International Box Office.

 

[AvBaur]

I think whether a sequel/prequel can tarnish the original depends on how serialized the movie series is. While it's not very hard to forget/ignore Indiana Jones 4 or Superman 3 & 4, I doubt people would hold the first Lord of the Rings movie in such high regard had parts 2 & 3 sucked. If a movie is very open ended and obviously sets up the next chapter, a bad sequel can "ruin" it, while a great sequel can make the previous part seem even better.

 

[Derishton]

A trilogy - if it really is conceived as a trilogy from the start - or Shakespeare's "two-parters" aren't the same thing as sequels, in the modern definition (although that are sequential). The Henry IV plays are modelled on the old medieval biblical cycles, and are this conceived as a single work in multiple parts; properly speaking, sequels and prequels are later texts grafted onto an original. Before Watchmen is a prequel to Watchmen because it was not part of the original design. The Aeneid is a sequel to the Iliad because it as not part of the original design (although you could argue that cycles always already contain all possible variations). Empire Strikes Back is not a sequel because it was part of the original design. Aliens is a sequel. The Gospels might be considered sequels to the Old Testament (but many would argue they were part of the "original design").

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I'm of the opinion that a movie should stand on its own for its entertainment value. A sequel can tarnish a franchise, but not the original movie.

Pretty much.

There remain very few sequels that I've felt were really entirely satisfactory or that expanded on the original film in a worthwhile way. The Empire Strikes Back makes the list, but no later SW films do. TWOK, but no other TOS-based films; no sequels to Raiders Of The Lost Ark, no Planet Of The Apes sequels, no Superman sequels. Aliens, yes.

 

[davejames]

To be honest the only movies that have ever been "tarnished" in my mind were Star Wars and The Matrix.

I used to adore both movies and watch them repeatedly, but after the lackluster (and in some cases downright awful followups), I suddenly had no interest in watching them again.

The "magic" was gone, unfortunately.

It's hard to explain, and I don't know why it's only those two movies... but it is what it is.

 

[Christopher]

A trilogy - if it really is conceived as a trilogy from the start - or Shakespeare's "two-parters" aren't the same thing as sequels, in the modern definition (although that are sequential). The Henry IV plays are modelled on the old medieval biblical cycles, and are this conceived as a single work in multiple parts; properly speaking, sequels and prequels are later texts grafted onto an original.

But a single story told in three parts is not a trilogy by the proper definition. Formally, a trilogy is three separate but connected works. The Lord of the Rings is not technically a trilogy since it was meant as a single story and was published in three volumes for reasons of length. The Raimi Spider-Man films, say, are a trilogy, because each one is a separate story but they collectively form a larger arc.

So I don't agree that "original design" has anything to do with it. What you're saying only applies if it's a single story broken into pieces, but that's not the only kind of original design. One can certainly have the design to tell multiple distinct but connected stories, and it's perfectly valid to call those sequels.

So no, technically Henry IV Part 2 isn't a sequel to Part 1, but Part 1 is a sequel to Richard II and Henry V is a sequel to IV.

Before Watchmen is a prequel to Watchmen because it was not part of the original design.

No, it's a prequel only because it's not part of the same single work, which is a different thing. More basically, it's a "prequel" because it's a sequel (a work coming out later) that's set before the thing it's a sequel to. The term is basically a portmanteau for "preceding sequel."

Empire Strikes Back is not a sequel because it was part of the original design.

Both parts of that are wrong. First, it is a sequel because it's a distinct story; the previous film didn't end on a cliffhanger or in the middle of the particular tale it was telling. The two stories were parts of a larger arc, but each one had its own distinct arc. Second, it wasn't part of the original design. Lucas has grossly rewritten history in his claims about how much he had planned in advance. At the time he wrote and made the original film, he had no idea that Darth Vader would turn out to be Luke's father. Hell, he had no idea he'd even get to do a second movie at all, or that he'd have the budget to make anything remotely near as ambitious as TESB. He had Alan Dean Foster write the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye as the basis for a potential low-budget sequel, and it told a completely different story from TESB. It just doesn't make sense to talk about the original Star Wars trilogy as a single unified work. The prequels can be thought of in that way, but it's definitely untrue of the originals.

 

[Theodore Jay Miller]

Not in general for me; I wouldn't like a good movie less because of a bad prequel/sequel. I guess if a prequel or sequel changed the way the events of the original were interpreted, that could tarnish it for me. For example, if a sequel to Casablanca revealed that Ilsa and Victor's plane crashed soon after leaving Casablanca, meaning that Rick's sacrifice in telling Ilsa to get on the plane was not only pointless but actually got Ilsa killed, that might change the way the original movie feels.

 

[Derishton]

Christopher, we have a disagreement. Neither of us are necessarily wrong. (You may notice that I didn't declare you "wrong" about the Bible, only offering another take on it). Literary definitions are my professional bread and butter, and I am well aware that there are differences of opinion even on what seem like elementary terms. (Without even getting into how we might apply those terms to any given text.)

That being said, Empire gives us the greatest scope for disagreement, for the reasons you cite. I'm not certain where you're disagreeing with me concerning Shakespeare's Henry IV; what interests me there is that Henry V and Richard II (and Merry Wives of Windsor) are all clearly separate works, but they can be combined into a "new work" and performed in a single day, and scholars talk about these plays as the Henriad. Separate and not separate somehow. Nobody would think of calling Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra the "Caesariad". Star Wars seems to me to be closer to the Henriad in spirit.

I think this thread is under-estimating the utility of the terminology governing cycles (the Trojan War, King Arthur, the Star Wars universe, and the Big Two Comic universes) - they're actually much bigger than the terms sequel/prequel allow. Empire is clearly something more than a sequel, rather than less, and I think you're right to note that it isn't the same text either. A film everyone acknowledges as a sequel - say, Alien 3 - can be dismissed more easily than Phantom Menace can be dismissed in a Star Wars conversation, because their "sequelness" is different somehow. A "part" of a story can tarnish the whole with greater ease.

 

[Christopher]

Well, etymologically, the word "sequel" just means "following," as simple as that. The first definition in my dictionary is "Anything that follows; a continuation." So I think the word can be validly applied to any subsequent work in a series, whether it's part of the "original intent" or not, or even part of the same story. Probably 99 percent of people would say that Peter Jackson's The Two Towers is a sequel to his The Fellowship of the Ring, since it's a separate movie that came out later and continues the story. And I don't have a problem with that, since literally the word means "thing that follows" and nothing more. To me it makes more sense to recognize that there are various kinds of sequel than it does to say the word shouldn't be applied to a lot of the things that people apply it to.