Prompted by the fun being had here: I started thinking about it and I can’t recall a good prequel.
The Phantom <UB is soundly smacked off the stage>
Godfather II is a pretty good one.
Temple of Doom was entertaining enough.
I rather enjoyed Wicked, even if it is a pale shadow.
Could Casino Royale count? Or are reboots off the table?
The second season of Sledge Hammer.
Yes.
As Crotalus mentioned above, The Godfather, Part II is pretty much the definitive answer to this question (though, of course, it’s part prequel, part sequel).
Of course, if the prequels you’re primarily thinking of are the godawful Star Wars prequels, then I can certainly understand why you’d think there was a paucity of good prequels.
Yeah, but only a small amount of the screen time is devoted to the prequel part. I’m guessing 45 minutes of a long movie. Of course, that part is very good and works as a short prequel to the previous movie. The sequel part, which is much bigger, is excellent too.
How long is the prequel portion of the movie?
Temple of Doom is a prequel, but it doesn’t make a big deal of being a prequel, meaning they could have made it a sequel, but chose not to for some reason. Why did they do that? So, it’s a prequel, but only because the opening date in the movie shows it to be. In fact, I think a lot of average movie watchers don’t even think of it as a prequel.
I wouldn’t count re-boots, either, since they break from continuity.
I can’t think of any prequel that was very good, come to mention it.
plenty of good prequel books – C.S. Forester went back and filled in Horatio Hornblower’s past in several books decades after the character first appeared. L/ frank Baum went baclk and explained how the Cowardly Lion happened to be in Oz. I thought Harry Turtledove did a decent prequel to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories in Conan of Venarium.
And the opening section of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a pretty good Indiana Jones prequel, explaining several of Jones’ features. (I didn’t see the Indiana Jones Chronicles, so I can’t speak about those.)
The opening bit is in Shanghai. Maybe they wanted to avoid the Japanese occupation of China?
EDIT: Here’s what it says in Wikipedia: “Lucas made the film a prequel as he did not want the Nazis to be the villains once more.”
All of Gregory Maguire’s fantasy prequels are amazing works.
I love the “Cordelia Naismith meets Aral Vorkosigan” books; Falling Free is also quite interesting although I don’t think it would have turned me into an instant Lois McMaster Bujold fan if it had been the first book I’d read by her (that was Ethan of Athos). All three count as prequels to Miles Vorkosigan’s antics.
I heard that *Temple *was a prequel because they originally intended to re-use Belloq as an antagonist, although he died in Raiders. He was dropped in re-writes, but they still kept the earlier date.
Star Trek: Enterprise.
Star Wars Episodes I-III.
I liked the Young Indiana Jones show, too.
I think a lot of prequels suck because they basically just reiterate an already established back-story rather then exploring some new facet. The Star Wars prequels, Enterprise and the Underworld prequel whose name I can’t remember all fall into this trap. The endings are all predetermined, few new interesting items are introduced, and its basically a lazy rehash.
Xmen origins: wolverine was a pretty forgettable movie, but the did do a good job of covering his back-story.
Batman Begins
I forgot about the *Underworld *prequel. I actually liked that one a lot. (Rise of the Lycans, by the way.)
All prequels suffer from the problem of predetermination. Especially if there are characters from the original in the prequel. You just *know *he can’t die this time around, or he wouldn’t be there when needed in the original story.
What’s it a prequel to?
I haven’t seen it, but I bet Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (set a century before the events in the first three films, with Michael Gross playing an ancestor of his established Tremors character) has a few laughs in it.