[ul]
[li]Last of the Mohicans is the second book of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series. Nowadays almost no one remembers the others, including the first in the series, The Pioneers.[/li][li]Little House on the Prairie is the third in the Little House series, following Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy. These predecessors are not widely known today, even though narratively Prairie is a direct continuation of Big Woods.[/li][/ul]
To the above one might add The Da Vinci Code and The Silence of the Lambs, which were both the second books in their respective series. But their sequelhood is much better known now that their predecessors have got their own films (Angels & Demons and Red Dragon, respectively).
Can anyone think of any other examples, maybe from TV or cinema?
Mentioned by a couple people in the ‘only seen the sequel’ thread…
Mad Max - The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome are both, IME, much better known than the original (at least in North America), and are certainly far more influential.
As I remarked in another thread, I suspect Rambo: First Blood Part II is better known than First Blood, despite that being in its title.
Silence of the Labs is certainly better known than the film Manhunter. That’s a bit tricky, because, although SotL is based on the book that’s the sequel to the source of Manhunter (Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon), the one film isn’t meant to be the sequel to the other, being made by different folks entirely.
If you want everything to be kep[t neat and tidy, though, the film Red Dragon, based on the same book, and made by the people who made SotL, is less well-known that Silence of the Lambs.
Oh, I just thought of another example, this time from the world of computer gaming. Wolfenstein 3D, which in 1992 almost singlehandedly popularized the first-person shooter genre, is much better known than 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein and 1984’s Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. 3D isn’t strictly a sequel (though it was initially conceived of that way) but it retains the name and many aspects of the plot and gameplay, and so can be seen as a sort of spiritual successor.
When Disney made an animated movie from the Prydain books, they named the movie after the second one, The Black Cauldron, not the first, The Book of Three (though the movie includes elements of both). So people who know of the books only from the movie will know the sequel better than the original.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnmight be better known than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, though most folks know of both.
And both Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness have had a lot more impact on the popular consciousness than the original Evil Dead. Anyone who’s actually seen the later movies probably knows they’re sequels, but plenty of folks reference them without having seen them.
If you’re comparing it to The Hobbit, then I’d say probably not; most people who know of one probably know of the other, especially now that both have been adapted into major live-action motion pictures… But if you’re counting it as a sequel to The Silmarillion (which was written before Lord of the Rings but published after), then I’d say you’re spot on.
That’s a good one, and one which I’m ashamed I did not remember to include in my OP, seeing as I just saw the film a few weeks ago and spent a lot of time reading up on its history.
It took a while for The Pink Panther movies to hit their stride. I don’t know if there’s one film that’s best known, but most of the hallmarks of the series (Clouseau’s bumbling and accent, Dreyfus’s hatred of Clouseau, and Kato’s ambushes) started with A Shot in the Dark, which was the first sequel.
The New Testament vs. The Old Testament. And I think more people have seen Jesus Christ Superstar than its “prequel” Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Most Americans associate The Avengers with Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg).
That was actually the fourth season. Less well-known are the second and third seasons, which had Cathy Gale (played by Honor Blackman) and a couple of others.
Most Americans are unaware of the first season, in which John Steed was the sidekick, and the leading role was David Keel (played by Ian Hendry).
Most people are aware that the 1932 film The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, started the Universal Studios mummy franchise. But most of the tropes in the genre come from the reboot series in the 1940s, with Tom Tyler and Lon Chaney Jr.
Likewise, up until the revival series, Tom Baker was the best-known Doctor (of Doctor Who) in the US, even though he was the fourth person to play the role in the series.
I’m not sure about this one, but I think that the Voltron that was most familiar to American audiences, the one with the five lions, was Voltron 3, and the one with the twenty assorted vehicles was actually Voltron 1. But don’t ask me where I ever heard those numbers attached to them.
And the Ultima computer games became a lot more popular with Ultima 2: Exodus and (especially) Ultima 3: Quest of the Avatar, both of which had releases on the NES. I couldn’t even tell you anything about the first one.
You’ve got an off-by-one error there. Exodus was the third in the series (originally branded as “Exodus: Ultima III”), and Quest of the Avatar was Ultima IV.