What are some of the worst/wierdest lesser-known "Official" sequels to popular works?

Cafe Society
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Inspired by another post about an official comic book sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit I’m curious about what are some of the lesser-known “official sequels” to popular works. Official sequels being something that is either produced or licensed by the official rights holders, or whom the creative staff had personal involvement in, but also must be still somewhat “canon” to the original work (so no What Ifs? or works that are In Name Only sequels or are spiritual successors) I always like sequels that try to explain things that were left ambiguous in the original work or the various retcons they do to the story, so I’m very much interested in the story changes these works bring to the world.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is the 2013 video game official sequel to 1982’s Aliens and is (was?) considered the canon sequel to the movie by 20th Century FOX. Taking place 17 weeks after the events of Aliens it deals with a new Colonial Marines battalion sent in to investigate the USS Sulaco and LV-426 after the previous Colonial Marine team disappeared without a trace. Of course all shit immediately hits the fan when the Marines encounter both the Xenomorphs as well as Weyland-Yutani mercenaries hired to salvage the wreck.

The game was legendarily bad, often appearing on “Worst Games of 2013” lists and had a very rocky production schedule involving lawsuits about how the developers were actually siphoning money off the project to develop a different game. However it does add a few weird canonical things.

  • The massive 40 megaton nuclear explosion at the end of Aliens apparently wasn’t that big, as the LV-426 colony is still relatively intact when the Marines explore it. Canonically this was explained as the megaton explosion was a “vertical explosion”, for whatever that’s worth.

  • The body in the start of Alien 3 wasn’t Hicks, rather Hicks was actually captured by Weyland-Yutani forces shortly before the events of Alien 3 and was being held for information by them. Hicks survives the game and thus is still technically alive in the Aliens universe as of Alien 3.

  • In the four months Weyland Yutani had between Aliens and the rescue mission they build a small base to study/grow more xenomorphs which the Colonial Marines stumble upon. Though this also is a bit confusing considering them trying to get the Queen embryo in Alien 3, since Colonial Marines takes place at the exact same time as 3 and in CM they already have a viable queen specimen.

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Have you ever wondered what happened after the ending of the The Thing (1982), more importantly who survived?

Well lucky for you we have two official works, a 1991 comic book and a 2001 video game.

The 1991 two issue comic book written by Hollywood writer Chuck Pfarrer known as The Thing From Another World (which has a few sequels written by different teams, though the first arc was the one pitched as a true movie sequel and John Carpenter himself said if he ever made a true sequel he would base it on that first comic arc) takes place 24 hours after the events of the first movie. Childs and MacReady attempt to make their way to safety in a blinding snowstorm when they reach a nearby Japanese whaling vessel. Childs leaves MacReady to be cared for by the ships Doctor while Childs goes back to finish off the remains of the Outpost. Not trusting Childs, MacReady steals the whaling ships helicopter and flies back to the Outpost not finding Childs there but instead decides to finish off the remaining corpses himself with kerosene. As he’s in the middle of this a Navy SEAL team surrounds him, having received a distress call from a passing aircraft of a burning building 48 hours ago. Thinking MacReady went crazy and murdered his colleagues the SEAL’s arrest him and take him to their nearby extraction helicopter, though one of the SEAL’s touches an alien corpse with a gloved hand not knowing what it is. Upon reaching the extraction chopper a few hours later the SEAL who touched the alien transforms and starts a firefight between the SEAL’s killing most of them and hitting the helicopter causing it to explode and fry the alien. MacReady, the SEAL Commander and two SEAL’s wounded by gun shots are all that’s left of the team. MacReady deliberately tells the SEAL’s wrong directions to a nearby Argentinean military outpost hoping to kill them all leading one of the SEAL’s to die of frost-bite and have the remaining two turn on him until a snowcat with Argentinian soldiers and Childs shows-up. Having told the Argentinians about the infection they take him back to their base and blood test all of them, MacReady and Childs are clean but the wounded SEAL transforms killing a few soldiers and runs off into the snow. MacReady and Childs along with some soldiers track it down and kill it, only to find the SEAL Commander had also been infected earlier and has already called in a Navy submarine to extract him using the base’s radio. The survivors reach the coordinates and kill the SEAL Commander only for the submarine to emerge from the nearby thin ice and the dying SEAL transforms and infects the landing party and jumps into the sub. MacReady and Childs along with some soldiers go into the sub after it and the sub dives. The survivors are picked off one by one and the submarine crash dives in the confusion. MacReady and Childs decide to scuttle the sub after they reach an escape pod on the sub, but Childs decides to detonate the explosives early to kill everyone and prevent the alien from escaping. MacReady is thrown from the ruptured submarine to the waters surface, last shown freezing to death on a lonely ice flo in the middle of the ocean.

It’s an interesting work, and fairly brave to kill off both survivors closing the ambiguity of the originals ending (though the success of the comic actually lead to sequels, which have MacReady and Childs improbably survive the ending of the comic and have a bunch of crazy adventures on an Argentinean island off the coast of the mainland) but the biggest and worst problem with it is the inciting incident of somehow a man’s gloved hand touching the frozen body of an alien is apparently enough to somehow transform him, no violence needed. If that was the case why couldn’t the alien just casually touch everyone in the Outpost to transform them? But I can definitely see how they could have made a movie sequel using the idea, since this one has a higher body count and a number of exciting chase sequences that would have worked well.

The second official sequel was 2002’s The Thing video game by Computer Artworks and published by Konami on PS2, Xbox and PC. This was also officially endorsed by John Carpenter and he even voices one of the characters. The plot is wackier and more action heavy then even the comic, though it has a similar start where a US Special Forces team lead by a Captain Blake is dispatched to investigate the lack of communication with the Outpost three months after the events of the movie. Upon landing they find the destroyed remains of the base, some journals detailing the events of the film, and the frozen body of Childs. They destroy the Outpost with C4 upon realizing something was up from reading the journals and head to the Norwegian outpost to do something similar there. Upon reaching the outpost they are attacked by the thawed remains of some aliens infecting most of the team. Blake and the survivors fight their way to another Norwegian outpost nearby discovering a warehouse and an air field that had been recently occupied. To Blake and his team’s shock a large underground research facility had been built under the Norwegian base funded by a private research company called Gen-Inc, as they had known of the UFO under the ice for quite a while and the Norwegian research base had just been a cover. At some point after thawing out the frozen alien to use for biological weapons experiments it had broken containment and killed/infected everyone in the base, leading to the initial Norwegian outpost disaster and later spreading to the American Outpost. Blake is surprised to find his Commanding Officer and the man who organized the mission Colonel Whitley (voiced by the Cigarette Smoking Man of X-Files fame) was in on it the whole thing, being in charge of the Gen-Inc research base and deliberately infected himself with the virus thinking it would cure his cancer, the rescue mission was just an excuse to get resources to get him off the base since he had secretly been inside the base the entire time. At the same time airplanes land on the nearby air strip and Black Ops teams are deployed to destroy the base as well as any US Army survivors to cover up the evidence. Fighting both human soldiers and aliens Blake and his team make it back to the airstrip where Whitley is planning on taking the Black Ops transport aircraft and filling them with aliens and flying them to the nearest inhabitable land masses to spread the alien virus across the entire planet. Blake blows up the aircraft and the remaining aliens retreat to the crashed UFO from the original film. Now being the lone survivor of his team Blake confronts Whitley on top of the UFO. Whitley transforms and absorbs the biomasse of all the remaining things becoming a giant alien tentacle the size of a three story building. At the same time one of the armed Black Ops choppers lands near Blake and the pilot tells him to get aboard and use the mounted machine gun to shoot the scuttling charges the Blacks Ops teams had placed on the UFO earlier. After enough gun fire and explosions the giant alien and the UFO itself as destroyed. With the threat now gone Blake asks the pilot for his name, the pilot responds " R.J. MacReady of US Outpost 31" and the helicopter flies off into the sunrise.

Being a video game it can be expected for the plot to be significantly actioned up but it’s very obvious the game was very inspired by Half-Life, right down to the secret government research base and Black Ops teams you’re forced to fight. The large underground research base you spend most of your time at makes very little sense considering the timeline of the movie (even with six months to a year I can’t see a large underground base that size being built in the Antarctic) and the out of nowhere unexplained appearance of MacReady at the very end also doesn’t really make much sense considering the three months between the movie and the game. It should be noted the later 2011 The Thing prequel film does share that same general idea that the Norwegians knew of the buried UFO for quite a while before the events of the first film and had been planning on researching it for themselves. Despite John Carpenters involvement it really does seem like a completely unnecessary addition to the story in every possible way.

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Not weird or really bad (though nowhere near as good as the original) was More American Graffiti. The focus was on members of the ensemble other than Curt, Laurie, and Steve (Richard Dreyfus, Cindy Williams, and Ron Howard), none of whom were in the movie. For example, we saw what happened to Terry and Joe (Charles Martin Smith and Bo Hopkins) in Vietnam, and how John (Paul Le Mat) met his end on New Year’s Eve.

As I say, it wasn’t as good as the original, which is one of my top five movies, but I enjoyed it and it held my interest for two hours.

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The Black Bird was a direct sequel to The Maltese Falcon, with Lee Patrick and Elisha Cook, Jr. reprising their roles from the original over twenty years earlier. It was a fairly innocuous comedy based on the premise that the statue actually was the genuine Falcon. Sam Spade’s son (George Segak) goes searching for it.

It’s not a bad film, but nothing memorable.

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If you are lucky you will never see the movie Savage Sam, a sequel to Old Yeller. It is also a book sequel to Old Yeller, but I’ve never run across it so can’t comment on the intent there. Howeve, the movie is an abomination and will destroy any nostalgic feelings you have for the original should for some reason you be forced to watch it.

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See if YOU can make any sense of this:

The movie The Poseidon Adventure bears passing resemblance to the novel it was based on. It made a ton of money. Paul Gallico was asked to write a sequel novel to the movie. His version had the survivors from the film returning to the capsized liner for reasons. Bologna ensues. Boat sinks at the end. Fin. Gallico died before finishing the novel; I have no idea who completed it or how much was his work.

The movie Beyond the Poseidon Adventure is dreck. Not even good baloney. The survivors of the first film helicopter away and a salvage crew claims the wreck and fight with another salvage crew (read: pirates) over who gets to keep “valuables” somewhere in the hulk. At the end, the ship explodes. It made back less than 1/5th its production costs of $10 million. Sally Field recovered.

I gotta go lie down.

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El Topo (1970) had a sequel, Los hijos del Topo, released in 2016 in comic book form. It is no weirder than the original, though :slight_smile:

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The 1982 Don Bluth movie The Secret of NIMH has a horrible direct to video sequel released in 1998 made without Bluth’s involvement or input –The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue.

Come to think of it the 1971 Newberry Award winning novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien had two sequels written by his daughter – Racso and the Rats of NIMH in 1986 and R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH in 1990.

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Exorcist II was really bad, I saw it. There is a story that the author of first book, William Blatty, broke out in laughter in the theater.

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Then Blatty himself wrote and directed The Exorcist III so he has no one else to blame for how horrible that was.

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As I’ve pointed out before, the 1957 movie The Invisible Boy is a somehow sequel to Forbidden Planet, starring Robby the Robot. The Robot, it’s clearly stated in TIB, comes from the stars, although FP is set in the future and TIB in the 1950s. Wikipedia suggests “some sort of time travel” is involved, but it’s never explicitly stated.Robby has the same voice and the same personality in TIB as in FP, unlike the robot’s later appearances on TV shows. Both films had the same producer.

The titular Invisible Boy was played by Richard Eyer, who went to to play the Genie in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

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Shock Treatment, the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is totally weird and not in a good way.
I like the music, though, and Jessica Harper is always a delight.

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Highlander 2 would be the weirdest if:

  1. It didn’t exist.
  2. It was less well known.

It screams “made my an entirely different group of people who never saw the first movie”…but it wasn’t. Same director. I guess he never watched his own movie?

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The Sting II(aka How To Desecrate A Corpse), with Jackie Gleason taking over for Paul Newman, and Mac Davis taking over for Robert Redford.

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Zathura (2005), the spin-off to the 1995 Jumanji. It’s pretty flat, which is wild considering it’s directed by Jon Favreau, has Josh Hutcherson (Hunger Games), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Dax Shepard (Idiocracy) and Tim Robbins (Shawshank Redemption).

Both are based on books, and the author planned to do three, one jungle adventure, one space adventure, one wild west adventure. He never wrote the third, or perhaps hasn’t written it yet. Zathura came out 22 years after Jumanji.

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Samuel Jackson’s Shaft is not a re-boot, but a sequel. Samuel Jackson’s character is the nephew of Richard Roundtree’s character.

The Wild Geese was based on Daniel Carney’s novel The Thin White Line. When the movie became a hit, director Euan Lloyd wanted Carney to write a sequel. He even suggested the story premise. He kept badgering Carney until he wrote The Square Circle, which became the movie Wild Geese II.

Richard Burton had planned to reprise his role, but he died while the film was still in pre-production. Edward Fox played the brother of Burton’s character.

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Uh, 10 years. It came out 10 years after Jumanji. 1995 for Jumanji. 2005 for Zathara.

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Jumanji, the book, was published in 1981. Zathura, the book, was published in 2002. So, 21 years.

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I don’t know why, but I thought we were focused on movies. You are quite right.

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There are two different sequels to Gone with the Wind in novel form, both authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, that are totally different from each other continuity wise.
The Mitchell estate tried unsuccessfully in the '70s and '80s to get a film sequel to Gone with the Wind into production, and.when that fell through it authorized a sequel in novel form which resulted in the 1991 Alexandra Ripley novel Scarlett. Even though it sold well and was adapted into a TV miniseries, it seemed to be hated by pretty much everyone including the estate, so in 2007 we got a “reboot” sequel called Rhett Butler’s People which ignores the first sequel.