What I mean is… has there ever been a movie or a tv show that came back years later with the same cast, or mostly the same cast, and accounted for the missed time? To use a cartoon as an example, say the Simpsons went off the air, then came back in 15 years and did a new show with the same characters, all 15 years older.
I know that the Brady Bunch Movie had Florence Henderson, but she was the only one, the kids were all still the same age, and she played the grandmother, not the mother. That kind of thing doesn’t count.
The criteria is that at least a significant portion of the cast has to be the same actors, and that the ages of the characters have advanced by a similar amount of years to the actual new age of the actors.
How about Still the Beaver, the '80s sequel to Leave it to Beaver? It starred all the same actors (except the late Hugh Beaumont) playing Beaver, Wally, June Cleaver, Lumpy, etc. There were several new characters, of course, since the kids from the original show now had families of their own. But that’s the closet thing to the OP’s concept that I can think of.
How about the Godfather films? After all, they follow several members of the cast through about 40 years of their lives.
Just the lead, not the whole cast, but The Two Jakes picks up the life of private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) about 15 years after the events of Chinatown.
“Family Guy” sort of accounted for the time it was off the air in its first new episode. It opened with peter telling the family the show had been cancelled because there was no room on Fox’s schedule for it with all the quality programming. He then listed off all the shows that Fox had killed between FG’s first cancellation and the return, closing with something like “if all those shows get cancelled maybe we can come back.”
“Gidget” came back in syndication years after it was cancelled, with Moondoggie all growed up and running for Congress or something and with Gidget and Moondoggie having a kid of their own.
The New WKRP was the same station (with a few of the original cast) years after the original show ended.
Same with AfterMASH and Trapper John M.D. - Both followed characters after the end of MASH - One immediately following and one following one character with passing references to the original.
Also, Lou Grant and the Mary Tyler Moore show. Frasier and Cheers (considering Frasier had freuqent Cheers guest stars.)
And the weirdest - All in the family had a spin-off called something like 1202 Houser Street, which followed what happened to the house after the Bunkers left.
There seem to be som many examples, maybe I’m missing something in the OP.
You’re all missing the most obvious one. “What’s Happening” and “What’s Happening Now.”
“What’s Happening Now” had all the same cast except for Momma. Rog and his family even lived in the same house. And they all still hung out at Shelia’s.
There was a Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV movie that picked up with returning characters from the series, and set the appropriate number of years later. The Rochford Files TV-movies did the same thing, reuniting the characters from the original series, and setting them in what was then present-day L.A., accounting for the intervening years.
