I thought this was fairly well-known, if only for its “yes, this was a real thing!” title.
I may have even seen it. I saw at least one of the Gilligan’s Island movies when it was broadcast.
becuase it was a separate movie apparently they were going to make it an anthology :
I’ve read both, but didn’t much care for the sequel, because it has one of those features that I HATE when I find it in a book – “The bad guys (aliens in this case) can clearly get at us an knock us off one at a time any time they want, so we won’t even try to protect ourselves.”
What?
They deserve to be outta the gene pool.
T.H. White pulled this one in his mystery Darkness at Pemberley, which I hate for the same reason.
(Yes, the same guy who wrote The Once and Future King.)
Remember when Animal House spawned three different TV series - “Delta House” (the official version), “Brothers and Sisters” and “Co-ed Fever” - all of which failed, presumably because no one could figure out how to make “Animal House” humor fit into 1970s TV Standards and Practices…
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off begat two TV series: a direct FB spin-off which bombed, and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose which lasted three(?) seasons and was quite good (remember Mrs. Musso’s thumb?).
Freeway, an absolutely brilliant film, was followed by the direct-to-video Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby, which is … whatever the opposite of “brilliant” is. Both films were written and directed by the same person, so Freeway 2 doesn’t even have the excuse of being cranked out for a quick buck by hacks who didn’t get the previous film.
Freeway 2 isn’t even a real sequel; it doesn’t have any of the characters or actors from Freeway. They’re both modern retellings of fairy tales and feature foul-mouthed female protagonists, but otherwise the two films have nothing to do with each other.
Eerie, Indiana had a spin-off series on Fox Kids. Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension had an entirely different cast (necessary, since it was eight years later) but no imagination. It tried to be weird, but the writers had no feel for it.
For instance, they glossed over the cast change, basically ignoring it. The original would have made that the entire plot.
Marshall:. I keep telling you, we don’t look the same!
Mom: Of course we do, Marshall.
Oh My God. I just pissed my pants laughing at this!
Even better, it had Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Scatman Crothers and a very young Rosalind Chao as a desk clerk.
They were still trying to address the same issue twenty years later when ABC attempted to make an animated TV series out of the movie Clerks.
I loved the original *Eerie Indiana *. When I heard they were bringing it back I was ecstatic. Unfortunately the new series didn’t have any of the charm of the original.
I feel like they accidently sabotaged themselves by declaring at the end of the second episode that it was the last episode.
I love this show. Well, I did. Haven’t seen it for a while, but used to have a DVD set of the 6 episodes.
The thing with both traditional drawn animation and CGI is that there’s a heavy fixed cost investment in creating the graphics: in CGI (and computer assisted 2D animation) the character and animation database, and in traditional drawn animation the “learning curve” of how long it takes the artists to become familiar enough with the characters to be able to crank out cells speedily. Both favor being able to use the established graphics to churn out as many sequels as will sell since they’re comparatively faster and cheaper.
One of my favorite movies as a 13 year old was the 1982 cult classic The Sword and the Sorcerer. from the first time I saw it in the theatre, I had been waiting on the sequel that was teased in the end credits and I quote “Watch for Talon’s Next Adventure Tales of an Ancient Empire coming soon…”
28 years later, the sequel finally came… and it’s unwatchable. It did not come soon and it’s not even Talon’s next adventure… more like his last adventure, although apparently he spent the years travelling and fathering children all over the place which would probably have made a better film and had better acting.
There was “History of the World, Part 1” (1981), which has a teaser at the end for “Part 2”, which has never been released (probably was never planned to be released).
ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness wrote:
When Worlds Collide has the lesser-known sequel After Worlds Collide by the same authors. It’s the adventures of the teams that make it off of Earth as they explore the new planet. Very different tone from the apocalyptic first book. No George Pal movie either. I haven’t read either since I was 11, but I remember liking the sequel more, and thinking that the ending was obviously setting up another sequel, which as far as I know never happened. I wonder what I’d think of them now.
Harlan Ellison wrote an account of his involvement with a George Pal When Worlds Collide sequel pitch (I think the story was told in his brief Comics Journal column, “An Edge in My Voice,” but this would have been 40 years ago). Pal couldn’t get a meeting with the studio for his proposal, and he asked Ellison to intervene on his behalf. Ellison set up a meeting with a studio head and even attended it, to his regret. The studio executive, after listening to the pitch, said he’d consider it, but only if Ellison were attached as a screenwriter. Ellison couldn’t commit to it, and Pal, crushed, couldn’t prevail on Ellison to do any more. This ended Pal’s career and he died soon afterwards.
This story seems a little odd. Pal wasn’t destitute and out of work at the end of his life – he was actively working on an adaptation of another of Philip Wylie’s novels, The Disappearance. There were preproduction sketches published and everything (it would have been a real departure for Pal. The sketches were definitely at least R-rated). According to his Wikipedia page, he was also working on The Voyage of the Berg. This page says the film about the Berg was actually in production – FUN BREAKING NEWS: GEORGE PAL (ACTOR) . the Wikipedia page lists two other projects he was working on, including a sequel to The Time Machine.
Ellison’s account made it seem a lot more heartbreaking. I poked around and found a copy of An Edge in My Voice at openlibrary.net. Much of what I remembered from this story from 40 years ago was accurate, though it was from his personal recollections, not a well-documented or -researched news article. As rosy as his late career might look on WIKI and IMDB, Pal’s fortunes from 1968 were in decline. Doc Savage: Man of Bronze was supposed to be his comeback, and it was a huge flop. He was perceived as someone whose filmmaking skills peaked with When Worlds Collide (Ellison described Pal’s later career with phrases like “…couldn’t get arrested in this town” and “…had to hustle like a newcomer.”) I remembered the column as appearing in The Comics Journal, but it was actually the September 1980 issue of Future Life. I also remembered it as a sequel to When Worlds Collide; it was more like a remake. The other details were pretty accurate, and if you have access to An Edge in My Voice, the George Pal story is chapter two.