A bunch of examples entered my awareness this week so I turned it into a thread:
On LOGO the other night I saw It’s Still Elementary, which looks back on the impact of the groundbreaking documentary/educational film It’s Elementary. I seem to recall there also being (unrelated except for theme) some documentary series which followed people from a young age, and then would revisit them every ten years or so.
Another recent thread mentions Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (9 year gap).
The Last Picture Show and Texasville (33 year gap).
Donnie Darko and S. Darko (8 year gap, Daveigh Chase reprising her role as Donnie’s sister).
I think the latter is particularly remarkable since the actress was a pre-teen in the original, and they still chose to keep the same actress 8 years later.
Any other examples, favorites, comments on whether the idea of doing that is good or bad?
TV series reunions are fair game too! I was looking forward to the Growing Pains reunion but wasn’t entirely happy with it. Maybe because of the Kirk Cameron weirdness and the political stuff.
To add another spin to this thread, I have to ask if any filmmaker has, rather than make more than one film years apart with the same actors, instead intentionally halted production on a single film for many years and waited for the actors to age naturally before resuming production?
I’ve thought this might be an interesting way to film adaptations for novels such as The Man Who Folded Himself, which take place over the span of a person’s lifetime.
First thought was Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine in Return of the Jedi and then the Prequels (and I suppose the guys playing C-3PO and R2-D2 as well.)
It seems to becoming more common recently, with Rocky Balboa, Rambo 4, Indiana Jones 4, and Wall Street 2. And Wienstein/Miramax started talking about making a lot of sequels to older movies.
The BBC just had a new season of Upstairs Downstairs, starring Jean Marsh in the same role. Even though it was set only 15 years later, it was actually 35 years since the original series ended.
A Man and a Woman and a Man and a Woman, 20 Years Later, which has the same actors reprising their roles, well, 20 years later.
The Murder, She Wrote episode “The Days Dwindle Down” , aired in 1987 had Harry Morgan, Jeffry Lynn, and Martha Scott reprising their roles from the 1949 film Strange Bargain (clips of which were incorporated into the show as flashbacks), a gap of 38 years.
That’s Michael Apted’s still-ongoing “Up” series: Seven Up, Seven Plus 7, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up and 49 Up.
The Black Bird is a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, 34 years later. While Sam Spade is dead, both Wilmer Cook and Effie from the original are around. It’s a pretty lame comedy other than that, though.
They have actually lost people along the way, those who don’t want to continue being examined every 7 years. However, they have been able to stick with most of them and it is fascinating.
Even though the people are all older than me, I think of them as kids because I’ve watched the movies and seen them group up from age 7. How differently would we view those older than us if we had seen them as kids?
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission, made in 1985, starred Lee Marvin, Richard Jaeckal, and Ernest Borgnine, all of whom where in the original The Dirty Dozen shot in 1967 - 18 years apart.
Charles Laughton won an Oscar for “Henry the VIII” in 1933 and reprised the role 20 years later for “Young Bess”.
Jack Webb had two separate runs as Joe Friday in “Dragnet” TV series in the early 1950s and late 1960s when LSD eating Blue Boys threatened the youth. He had a lot of character actors return from the first series such as Virginia Gregg. He’d have brought back Ben Alexander too but he had another series "Felony Squad. So he had to get Harry Morgan as the slightly eccentric partner always telling Joe to get married. Amazingly Morgan is still alive at 95 hen a lot of people from that show died in their late 50s/early 60s. Getting supplied with free cigarettes by their sponsor Chesterfield in the 1950s didn’t help.
Raymond Burr as Perry Mason with Barbara Hale as Della Street as TV series mid 50s-mid 60s and a bunch of TV movies from mid 80s to Burr’s death.
Eric Lloyd, who is currently twenty-four, played Charlie Calvin in The Santa Clause (1994) when he was eight, The Santa Clause 2 (2002) when he was sixteen, and The Santa Clause 3 (2006) when he was twenty. And in the latter two movies, four years apart, they kept the same child actress (Liliana Mumy) as his younger half-sister too.
I do agree, though, it’s more impressive if the actor who retains the role in a later sequel was a child in the first appearance considering it’s rarer.
Star Trek ended 10 years before the first film was released, with all staring characters reprising their roles, and continuing to do so for the subsequent films.