If you’re talking books, then Jules Verne – who was obsessed with Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson-type stories, wrote a two-volume sequel to Swiss Family Robinson that is now invariably sold as a combined volume, The Castaways of the Flag (French title – Seconde patrie).
He also wrote a sequel – or a completion, depending upon how you look at it – to Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, entitled The Sphinx of the Ice Fields ( Le Sphinx des glaces ), although the usual English title is An Antarctic Mystery). I’ve read an abbreviated version in the Penguin edition of “Pym”, and am now reading the full translation. There’s also a link to H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. but not enough to call that a sequel.
High Noon (1952) had two lesser-known, made-for-TV sequels: High Noon: The Clock Strikes Noon Again (1966) and High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane (1980).
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) was a prequel to the TV series. It was certainly weird.
According to the Memory Beta Wiki “The Slaver Weapon” is considered non canon despite the fact that the Kzinti have appeared in several Star Trek spinoffs.
I might take some flak for putting this in a list of ‘popular’ works, but others have already cast shade at Highlander the Abomination, so I’ll throw out one of mine.
Weekend at Bernie’s II.
There, I said it. I admit, I always loved the first Weekend at Bernie’s, despite that fact that on the face of it, it’s a pretty terrible movie which is probably only saved by no one taking it seriously. It is still fun when I want something absurdist and slapstick.
Weekend at Bernie’s 2 on the other had, is pretty much at the level of the Mockbusters or movies that are trying to be ‘so bad it’s good’. It fails on all levels, not being funny, with a stupid rather than silly premise, and failing to realize that the original conceit barely carried a feature length movie - certainly not a sequel.
Disney’s 2006 film High School Musical was based on a 1999 script meant to be Grease 3. Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were wanted to play the children of Danny and Sandy.
What about all the direct-to-video sequels Disney released for their various franchises? I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen any of them, so I can’t say if they’re actually bad or not, but they always seemed like a way of extracting a little more money from parents with kids who are huge fans of a particular Disney character.
Verne also wrote a sequel to his Robur the Conqueror called Master of the World. The latter is not particularly good (Nothing much happens and the ending comes out of nowhere and is scientifically impossible).*
*Verne was even worse with geography, putting a volcanic cone in North Carolina and a giant deep lake in the middle of Nebraska.
That’s not unusual. Verne wrote several sequels to his own works (From the Earth to the Moon has two sequels) and runs some odd connections between his works. The Mysterious Island is, as is well known, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (although the timeline doesn’t really work), and both are connected through one character to The Children of Captain Grant/In search of the Castaways.
If you want something that’ll make you laugh until you cry, take a look at Ursula Vernon’s live tweeting her read of Swiss Family Robinson. Her comments about what Whyss got wrong are hysterical. (Hint: he got a whole lot wrong.)
That’s only to part 1, but I figure if you’re interested you’ll track down the rest.
It always intrigues me when sequels introduce a magical or fantastical element that wasn’t there before. WaB was silly and ridiculous, of course, but it nevertheless took place in something at least resembling the real world. In the sequel, Bernie becomes a zombie and walks around on his own. Totally different tone than the original.
In The Blues Brothers, we had a car that defied physics, and perhaps a bit of a spiritual element (“We’re on a mission from God.”), but nothing overtly magical. Blues Brothers 2000 featured levitation, mind-control, objects conjured from thin air, and people turning into rats.
I never saw it, but I recently learned here on the Dope that Jaws 4 involved a criminal using voodoo to control a shark to exact revenge on Chief Brody and his family.
In situations like these, it’s more than a little weird to watch the original and imagine it’s happening in a universe where such things are possible.
The 2009 Ghostbusters video game brought back nearly all the principle actors from the earlier films (Weaver & Moranis declined) and used parts of a script that Aykroyd and Ramis had been working on but never got off the ground. In an interview about the game, Aykroyd states:
Well, practically and realistically, I’ve been telling people that it’s very doubtful that there’s going to be a third movie. But now that I’ve seen the videogame and watched it progress, my rap now to people is: “This is essentially the third movie.” And it’s better than the third movie because it lasts longer and there’s more development of the characters. The guys have done a great job putting story layers in there that I can begin to embellish and work with. And I tell people this: “If you have an appetite for the third movie, then the videogame is it.” And I really do believe that at this point from having seen what they’ve done there.
Of course now there’ll be an official third movie in the original Ghostbusters universe but, if Aykroyd wants to call the 2009 video game the “third movie”, that’s official enough for me.
“Troll 2” is MST3K-territory so-bad-its-good, or at least I thought it was. It’s actually quite funny.
In 1981, there was an award-winning TV movie called “Bill”, starring Mickey Rooney as a mentally disabled man who was mistaken placed in an institution, and how he adjusted when he was let out into the “real” world.
Several years later, a sequel called “Bill: On His Own” came out. I never saw either of them until I got Netflix, and while the original was excellent, I couldn’t even get 10 minutes into the sequel.
Psycho (1960) began a run of sequels when later slasher movies like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) were hits. There was Psycho II (1983) and Psycho III (1986) which at least brought back Anthony Perkins and acknowledged that decades had passed since the original. Then there were a couple of made-for-TV sequels, Bates Motel (1987) and Psycho IV (1990). This was all before the 1998 remake, the 2012 movie about the making of Psycho, and the 2013-2017 TV series.
All the Tremors sequels, which took a comedic side character, Burt Gummer, and turned him into a Rambo leading man. I just watched the latest, Tremors: Shrieker Island (aka Tremors 7) on Netflix, and it seems to hold up pretty well in my opinion.
Very disappointed the Kevin Bacon Tremors reboot sequel that ignores everything but the first film never got made as it would have been interesting to see two completely different Tremors series one with Bacon lead and the other with Michael Gross lead.
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.
I loved the soundtrack too, but as a particularly snarky critic wrote: “You can’t make a cult hit, they just sort of happen.”