It might be old news here on the Dope, but Die Hard was, in fact, intended to be a sequel to the 1968 Sinatra movie The Detective. I wouldn’t call it bad by any stretch, but it sure is lesser-known that it’s a sequel.
Charles Webb, the author of the novel that The Graduate was based on, wrote a sequel called Home School. Because of some unfortunate contractual loopholes, he couldn’t immediately publish it or sell the film rights. (The book was published in 2007.) Apparently, everything about The Graduate that was appealing came from either Buck Henry or Mike Nichols, so we should maybe count our blessings. Webb died earlier this year.
I’d argue that most of what was appealing about The Graduate came from it being 1967. Like Easy Rider, it’s a movie that fit its era but hasn’t aged well.
About a year after the first Star Wars movie, the authorized sequel novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye came out. It was written by Alan Dean Foster, who ghost-wrote the novelization of Star Wars. It involved an adventure with Luke & Leia and Darth Vader on a swamp planet. The interesting part was that for 90% of the novel Luke was secretly lusting after Leia, and they were in love and making out by the end of the novel.
Yeah, I read that. It was pretty clear at the time that Foster had written the Star Wars novelization*. In the Star Wars novelization, Emperor Palpatine is just a befuddled old practically senile man who gets used as a figurehead by the guys who want an Empire, not the evil Dark Lord of the Sith he would become in the films. They really had no idea where they were going with the characters, despite what Lucas claimed about it all being plotted out in advance.
*He was starting to become the King of Novelizations, with Dark Star and the Star Trek Logs already under his belt. And with his character Flinx who has similarities to Luke. Besides, the style’s the same in the two Star Wars books.
the now confusing as hell timeline of halloween there was 5 (number three was just a retitled movie that had nothing to do the series) movies that really stretched the story to the breaking point by the end
Well after 10 or so years after the last they revived the series and said ignore anything but the first 2 movies with “Halloween h20 and then ressercution”
and even later they had rob zombie remake the first two original …and then made last years movie which i haven’t seen…
King Kong (1933), a masterful classic, followed hastily by Son of Kong (late 1933), a pathetic effort. Not sure how “lesser known” SOK is, but it deserves to be forgotten.
There was a 1998 American direct-to-video animated, musical adaptation of King Kong titled The Mighty Kong. I actually just learned today about searching Wikipedia for information as well. (It might not be a sequel but it definitely seems weird and lesser known.)
[quote=“dorvann, post:33, topic:925029”]
The 1998 film Soldier starring Kurt Russell is set in the same universe as the 1982 film Blade Runner --it is not a sequel though, it is more of a spin-off. I don’t think most people know both films have that relation. [/quote]
That’s rather fascinating…
[quote=“gdave, post:34, topic:925029, full:true”]
As I understand it, Soldier ’s screen writer, David Peoples, who was also the co-writer of Blade Runner , has said that he intended it to be in the same universe, but there’s no actual official connection. [/quote]
My friends and I came out of Soldier and assumed it was a different kind of sequel.
We nicknamed it “Snake Pliskin returns in Escape from the Garbage Planet.”
As someone raised on the constant reshowings of Son of Kong on WOR TV out of New York* (long before they started the Thanksgiving Day Ape Marathons), I take exception to this.
RKO basically screwed over the production team by demanding that they put out a sequel on practically no budget and very little production time (and this while Cooper and many of the bunch were trying to put together their epic movie She). Stop-motion animation, in particular, takes time.
Nevertheless, they had their marching orders, and Ruth Rose quickly cobbled together a script that stretched the time between animated effects. they re-used sets and props from the previous film, and used dinosaurs whose scenes had been minimized or cur from Kong, while hastily throwing together new models for the Son of Kong and the two monsters that he fights 9the weird dragon-lizard and the Cave Bear). In the case of the new models, it shows – the Cave Gear, in particular, is awful.
But, if you can get past the padding, the effects are great and the movie is watchable. Hell, it’s a lot more watchable than that awful 1976 movie that Dino de Laurentiis promoted.
There was another notable sort-of remake of Kong that is practically unknown, using puppets! Some of the Kong team worked on it, and it featured a guy in a gorilla suit as Kong (I think it might even have been Charles Gemora – Hollywood’s go-to gorilla guy in the 1930s and 1940s). The Fayt Wray puppet was a Mae West copy. The film was partially made, but never finished. It was called The Lost Island.
