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Ruined by sequels?

Ordinarily I'd have to mention Galactica 1980 as a sequel with ruinous tendencies, but I'm not doing that. For two reasons:

- Any series with an episode like "The Return of Starbuck" can't be all bad.

- If Richard Hatch had gotten the chance to get The Second Coming off the ground...

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s8heJPX8xk[/yt]

...they would have presented G1980 as a virtual reality simulation of "first contact gone wrong", so we don't even have to count it in continuity anyway. So there's no ruination there.
 
I really don't let sequels ruin the original for me.

If a sequel outdoes its sire in every way, then it doesn't mean that the original was bad. It just meant that the writer and producers found out how to make better on the original premise.

If a sequel sucks, well, then it just means the original movie/story was better and that time, lightning in a bottle could not be caught again.

Overall, I watch sequels to see how they contribute to the overall story.

Now, there are movies with their stand alone sequels (usually slasher flicks like Jason, Freddy, Michael, etc) that don't necessarily have a great, overreaching arc. Those are easy to accept or dismiss based on their indivudual stories.

The movies with an overreaching arc (Star Wars, some of Star Trek, The Godfather, ALIEN, etc.) are the ones where, when I watch them, I see how the follow up stories contribute to the overall tale. If they have a stinker or two, well, it's not like I completely dismiss them....unless they were raunchfests like Starship Troopers 2 and 3, or the Highlander flicks. (When it comes to Starship Troopers, then for me, there is only Starship Troopers and the animated sequel "Invasion" which blows away the two live action, DTV stinkers).
 
Starship Troopers had an animated series for a bit. I can remember it being...okay. I was pretty young when I saw it, but I'm fairly certain it cut all the satire out and hewed closer to the novel.
 
Re: Starship Troopers

Yeah, I recall a couple animated stories. In which it was easy to depict the fantastic, compared to the difficulties of live action. :)
 
Yeah....that was Starship Troopers: Roughnecks. It was pretty decent.
I think it tried to cover more stuff from the novel.... the tall slim aliens that I think they were fighting in the novel....one of them was a turncoat colonel that took the fireteam some time to get to trust.
 
Also I have to preserve my enjoyment of the three true Star Wars films by not counting the prequels toward the story. The backstory implied by the originals is better than the one provided by the prequels.

Dexter's later seasons ruined the earlier seasons for me.
 
Also I have to preserve my enjoyment of the three true Star Wars films by not counting the prequels toward the story. The backstory implied by the originals is better than the one provided by the prequels.

Dexter's later seasons ruined the earlier seasons for me.

I admit I would like one more DEXTER miniseries just to give the series a better ending.
 
I really don't let sequels ruin the original for me.
This.

For me the Robocop franchise begins and ends with that exellent 1987 movie. Anything else really isn't very good, but that doesn't detract whatsoever from the original film.
 
I really don't let sequels ruin the original for me.
This.

For me the Robocop franchise begins and ends with that exellent 1987 movie. Anything else really isn't very good, but that doesn't detract whatsoever from the original film.

RoboCop 2 wasn't too bad, but RoboCop 3....well...yeah, 'twas a stinker, but agreed....it doesn't sully the original.

I also enjoyed the recent RoboCop remake. I think the one thing that it missed was the satirical nature of the original, but other than that it was pretty cool. :)

On another note...

The Star Wars prequels didn't ruin a damned thing for me. Episode III is (currently) my favorite Star Wars movie, just barely (ever so barely) edging out The Empire Strikes Back. We'll see what happens when Episode VII hits.

Admittedly, Episode I felt more like a footnote rather than an episode. And while I love the action in Episode II (especially the epic ground battle on Geonosis), I can agree that perhaps the movie as a whole feels a bit over long.

But Good Lord, they weren't so horrible. It's also safe to say that while I love the original cuts of the Original Trilogy, I prefer the special editions. However, for nostalgia's (and completion's) sake, I do have the original versions of the OT on DVD.
 
The Star Wars prequels didn't ruin a damned thing for me. Episode III is (currently) my favorite Star Wars movie, just barely (ever so barely) edging out The Empire Strikes Back. We'll see what happens when Episode VII hits.

Admittedly, Episode I felt more like a footnote rather than an episode. And while I love the action in Episode II (especially the epic ground battle on Geonosis), I can agree that perhaps the movie as a whole feels a bit over long.

But Good Lord, they weren't so horrible.

This, this, a thousand times this. I enjoyed the OT when it came out, but I vastly prefer the PT. I have mixed feelings about the ST (that's what we're calling it, right? Sequel Trilogy? :) ), but I'll keep an open mind.

It's also safe to say that while I love the original cuts of the Original Trilogy, I prefer the special editions.

Another way in which we agree. :techman:

And while I still, after all this time, don't understand why it's such a big fucking deal whether or not Han shot first, I agree that it's a bad change that the SE made in that scene, but only because it was simply badly edited.
 
^Agreed. When I first saw Greedo shooting first, I really couldn't figure out what was happening. The 2004 special edition improved on the 1997 special edition by making it more of a quickdraw situation but it was still unnecessary.

And I'm another fan who is sick of everyone else badmouthing the prequels! (A pastime that has become even more popular since Episode VII was announced. :rolleyes: ) While the dialogue is frequently weak and The Phantom Menace is mostly irrelevant, the films are frequently bursting with visual inventiveness. When I rank the films, Revenge of the Sith & Attack of the Clones are #1 & #2, respectively.

Highlander anyone?

The follow-ups were a mixed bag. The sequel movies were pretty bad, but the spin-off TV series actually did a pretty good job of making the basic immortals concept pretty consistent and even added some good, interesting pieces to the mythos (the Watchers, Methos). Then came the final straight-to-video movie that dumped it all into the trash again...

I was never really able to get into the TV series but I loved Highlander: Endgame. Highlander II has a lot of backstory that totally doesn't match with the first movie but has some brilliant set pieces. It's ingeniously insane! Highlander: The Final Dimension is a depressing rehash of the first movie. Highlander: The Source is worse than you could possibly imagine. It's so forgettable that it ends with a flashback recapping the movie that you just watched. (Thankfully, Highlander: The Source doesn't count because it went straight to video and because it's villain doesn't have a "K" name. ;) )

I can think of something kind of like that. I went and saw 'Love Never Dies' with my mother when it was in Sydney, and she had never seen or read any incarnation of the Phantom of the Opera. A while later, I watched a recording of the musical POTO with her, and during the finale (where the Phantom is trying to lynch his romantic rival whilst the heroine bawls) I started going 'Look mum, he's her true love!' whilst she sat there looking shocked.

Though I wouldn't say that 'ruined' POTO for me.

I'd seen Phantom of the Opera a couple times but I'd never heard about what happened to Love Never Dies after they first announced it. I just read the synopsis on Wikipedia and GOOD LORD, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!

A sequel being bad doesn't ruin the original, but a sequel can undo the ending of the original or change the fate of the characters and that can ruin the original.

Like, Terminator 3 reverses the ending of 2 to justify itself.

Of course, Terminator 2 already reversed the perfect predestination paradox that was The Terminator. Or at least it tried to. In my head-canon, the 1st 4 films are all part of a single closed loop. I just ignore the details that don't fit, like different dates for Judgment Day or the T-X successfully killing some of John Connor's lieutenants. (Since they all seemed to live in metro L.A. at the time, how did they survive Judgment Day in the original timeline?)

But just imagine how the fandom would have exploded had they gone with one of the earlier endings for Terminator Salvation. (John Connor dies and Marcus Wright takes his identity as leader of the resistance.)

An even better example: Does anyone really think that the original JAWS was "ruined" by JAWS: THE REVENGE? :)

No, but Jaws 19 did! What a piece of shit! The shark still looks fake. :p

The opposite happens more frequently for me. Despite it being his most popular work, Gremlins is not my favorite Joe Dante movie, but the sequel being such inspired lunacy that does riff on the original quite a bit makes me like it more than I probably otherwise would.

Similarly, the live action Addams Family movie has a great cast but a so-so script. Addams Family Values on the other hand is one of my favorite comedies of its era, and enhances my view of the original by its connection to it.

Agreed. On the list of sequels that vastly improve upon the originals, Addams Family Values & Gremlins 2 are at the top of the list.

I can't really recall sequels that "ruined" the originals for me. The one that came closest was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The way it left things with the Will/Elizabeth romance was a major bummer and Jack losing the Black Pearl again was a disappointment. Add in the unnecessary deaths of Governor Swan & Admiral Norrington and it seemed like just about everyone other than Barbosa ended up in a worse place at the end of At World's End than they were at the end of The Curse of the Black Pearl.

It was kind of a bummer that they kept killing off beloved characters in the Rocky sequels-- first Mickey in Rocky III, then Apollo Creed in Rocky IV, then Adrian during the gap between Rocky V & Rocky Balboa.

I can recall some lackluster sequels that severely dampened my enthusiasm for the franchises. I haven't been nearly as interested in Star Trek ever since J.J. Abrams' time travel reboots. Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes movies made a fatal mistake when they killed off Irene Adler at the beginning of the 2nd film. (If they make another one, I keep hoping it's either a prequel or that they reveal that Col. Moran helped Irene fake her death.)
 
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