We’ve gone this far in and nobody’s mentioned the Alien franchise? In the first movie, we have virtually no background information on the xenomorph. Where did it come from? Who is the Space Jockey? Were the xenomorphs some sort of biological weapon he was delivering to the enemy? What did the Company know about the xenomorphs? Why did the Company knowingly send an ill prepared and grossly unqualifed crew to LV-426?
I don’t think we get any answers to those questions in the first four movies of the franchise but we do in the prequel episodes. In Prometheus, we learn that aliens we call the Engineers visited Earth, I think they created humanity, and left star maps behind that appear throughout several of our cultures. At the end of the movie we see an alien burst out of an Engineer that is suspiciously similar to our beloved xenomorph. In Covenant, we learn that the xenomorphs we’ve come to know and love were created by David’s experimentation with the Engineer’s black goo.
I thought JKR retconned that in the books pretty well - everyone thought the food in Hogwarts Great Hall was being created from nothing, but it turns out there were house elves in the basement kitchens making it all, and it was just being transported to the tables.
There’s a scene where soup is coming out of her wand into bowls that was retconned into her transporting the soup from the kettle. The reason I included it here was it seemed so kludgy in the last book as oh by the way we can’t make food that clearly JKR added the rule at that time.
Moriarty is almost always presented as a huge part of the Holmes canon, but he appears in one story and is alluded to in one (I think) other story - and his first appearance is quite late in the Holmes stories - after two novels and two collections worth of short stories. But in adaptations, Moriarty shows up very often
It’s part of the current thinking that every super smart detective needs a super smart recurring nemesis. Moriarty fills the bill for straight Holmes adaptations, but it was such a good idea (HA!) that Holmes in Elementary had THREE: Moriarty, her replacement Vikner, and Reichenbach.
Even Holmes-like detectives “must” have them, see L&O:CI’s Goren and Nicole Wallace.
I came here to mention Doctor Who as well. Namely that the concept of Time Lords having two hearts wasn’t introduced until the Troughton era, after Hartnell had referred to his own (singular) heart before that.
It was also in the fifth Doctor’s run when the limit of thirteen regenerations (or thirteen incarnations, muddling things further) is announced. I suppose they didn’t think the show could possibly have that much of a shelf life in 1982 or so. The eleventh gives Clyde Langer some ridiculously high number during his appearance on SJA, but then goes back to saying it’s thirteen in his final episode.
Originally Cobra was “Amway with guns!” CC was a disgruntled used car saleman who started a MLM company and then added more anti-establishment rhetoric to appeal to “that type” and it just escalated from there…
Now the parallels to modern American politics are like RIGHT THERE.
There was an unproduced script for I believe season 2 of the cartoon called “The Most Dangerous Man in the World” about the Karl Marx of Cobra. A philosopher who wrote the original manifesto that Cobra was based on… Cobra Commander stole the idea and then imprisoned the philosopher. The episode got shelved once the Cobra-La origin was added to the movie.
Sometimes he’s shoehorned into existing Holmes stories. A prime example is Murder at the Baskervilles, which, at heart, is s straight adaptation of “Silver Blaze,” with both Moriarty and the Baskervilles shoehorned in.
This may be explained in the books, but I only saw the movies.
In The Hunger Games, we learn that every year kids from each district go fight each other to the death on TV. The winners become national heroes and travel around the country judging county fairs and opening malls.
But then in the second movie, SURPRISE, now every 25 years the past winners have to go back in and fight it out again. You would think this would have come up during the first movie. “Congratulations on your win! See you next year!”
In the movie, there is a deleted scene where Plutarch breaks into the 3rd Quarter Quell vault and burns the actual rule replacing it with the rule that the tributes would be selected from past winners.
I didn’t think of that as a retcon, more like a clarification of something that had been intended all along.
Nitpick - it was the 4th Doctor story The Deadly Assassin.
Edit - As for Hunger Games, there is Something Special every 25 years, but it wouldn’t be announced in advance. For the 50th Games there was double the number of Tributes selected. I don’t recall what happened on the 25th. But the winners fight again had never happened before. The implication is thjat it was deliberately chosen to get Katnis for her defiance in the previous Games.
It was basically a new thing within the context of the story, not something that hadn’t been mentioned before.
They briefly explain it in the movies. It’s not that every 25 years all the past winners fight again, it’s that every 25 years the Hunger Games do something special. I think the last one was that there were twice as many contestants.
Was that a deleted scene from the first movie? If so then I stand corrected. If it was part of the sequel then my suggestion still meets the thread premise.
Everybody in the movie was surprised at that new rule (and some of them, like Joanna were incensed) - no one pretended that this was a long-standing rule that no one had mentioned before