5 Little-Known Sequels That Ruined Iconic Stories
Sequels kind of get a bad rap. There are lots of sequels that go on to surpass the original in almost every way -- by now, no one cares about the first Mad Max, or the first Terminator, or Robert Downey Sr.
But then there are those sequels that seem like they were written by someone whose only knowledge of the original came from overhearing a drunk hobo explain the plot an hour before their assignment was due. Sequels so odd, the world has tried to bury their memory and pretend they never happened. But they did, and we're here to remind everyone about them so that this never, ever happens again.
101 Dalmatians' Sequel: The Starlight Barking
The Original:
The Hundred and One Dalmatians is the delightfully English children's story by Dodie Smith about a family of Dalmatians who are kidnapped by Cruella de Vil, the Hannibal Lecter of children's literature, who plans on skinning them along with a whole batch of other Dalmatians to make a coat from their fur.
Originally written in 1956, the book was made into an animated movie by Disney in 1961 and a live-action one in 1996. Disney has produced a whole bunch of sequels to their 101 Dalmatians movies, but none of them were based on the original author's actual novel sequel: The Starlight Barking. Why? Because it's an insane acid trip that slowly mutates into a David Bowie rock opera with an alien dog messiah in it.
The Little-Known Sequel That Ruins It:
Smith's sequel picks up where the first book left off, with the titular 101 Dalmatians now grown and living on their Dalmatian plantation. And then things get weird. They wake up one morning to discover that every non-dog on Earth has fallen asleep. This includes their former nemesis, Cruella de Vil, who is featured only in a tiny cameo. Reasonably weirded out, the dogs also realize that they are telepathic and no longer need to eat. Also they can fly. Everybody can fly now. And they can open doors with their minds, because why not. The last time someone sat down to write this particular brand of crazy stream-of-consciousness story, the Church of Scientology was founded.
The main character is Cadpig, one of Pongo and Missis Pongo's children, who has moved up in the world and become the English prime minister's mascot. Since the prime minister is indisposed, she becomes prime minister herself and forms an entire cabinet of dogs.
All the dogs of Earth are then called to Trafalgar Square, where they are greeted by Sirius, a dog space alien from Sirius the dog star, with a grave warning. It turns out Sirius is behind the sleepy Earthlings, the flying, and the telekinesis. He's concerned about the possibility of nuclear war on Earth and extends an invitation for all the dogs to join him in space. They eventually say no, because even the dogs know that's a wack idea for a book.
The Original:
King Kong is the simple story of one gorilla trying to make it in Manhattan. The original black-and-white film was produced in 1933, but since then, it has been remade a bunch of times. One of those remakes was the 1976 version produced by Dino De Laurentiis, which stuck pretty close to the basics of the original, give or take a few changes.
The Little-Known Sequel That Ruins It:
At some point, De Laurentiis must have realized that he missed a tremendous opportunity to expose the world to images of giant monkey lovin', so when he finally got around to producing a sequel to King Kong in 1986, he made sure to correct that.
This movie gets plenty of things wrong, starting right with its title: King Kong Lives. No, he doesn't. He dies. That's the whole point of King Kong. But here, it turns out that after falling off the Twin Towers at the end of the first movie, Kong actually ended up in a coma, and he's been held in an Atlanta university for the last 10 years.
After giving Kong an expensive artificial heart, they learn that he also needs a blood transfusion before he can be back to his destructive self. In a stroke of luck, a second Kong is found in Borneo. A hot female Kong. You know where this is going.
As soon as the lady Kong, imaginatively named Lady Kong, is brought onto university grounds, she and KK instantly feel each other's presence, like Highlanders. The pair escape to somewhere where they can have more privacy and proceed to get freaky.
Learning absolutely nothing from the last Kong rampage, the U.S. military tracks Kong and Lady Kong through the South. They're also followed by a pair of friendly scientists who want to help the giant apes. It's unclear why, since all King Kong does this time around is fuck and kill things, gleefully tearing people apart and eating them.
The movie ends with Kong battling the army and dying (again) as his pregnant wife gives birth in a barn to a severely premature baby Kong. Yeah, either Kongs have an extremely short gestation period or Lady just tried to hook another guy's kid on KK.
The Graduate's Sequel: Home School
The Original:
Even if you've never seen a movie in your life, you almost definitely know the ending to The Graduate, based on the novel by Charles Webb. In the most famous scene, young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) interrupts a wedding by yelling the name of the bride, "Elaine!" Once Elaine gets past the fact that Ben slept with her mother, the manipulative Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the two young people run away together.
As they sit on a bus, riding into an unknown future, they alternately laugh or just sit in uncomfortable silence, wondering what will come next.
The Little-Known Sequel That Ruins It:
In 2007, Webb returned to these characters in Home School, a novel that manages to ruin one of the most classic endings ever written by explaining exactly what Ben and Elaine have been up to. The answer is: not much. Ten years later, Ben and Elaine are married and have decided to pull their children out of school and teach them from home, which has proven controversial in their community of Westchester, New York.
When the Westchester school board threatens to outlaw home schooling, Ben hatches a scheme to enlist Mrs. Robinson to help them. In order to keep his kids at home, Ben convinces Mrs. Robinson to sleep with a local principal. By the way, the aging Mrs. Robinson now goes by the name "Nan," since she's the grandmother to Ben's children and all. Nan agrees to use her sexual charms for a good cause this time.
In other words, the most fascinating character from the original book and movie is now reduced to a slutty grandma. Jesus, that was probably bound to happen anyway, but there's no reason why we needed to see it. Also, bear in mind that the last time Ben and Mrs. Robinson crossed paths, he had an affair with her, ruined her marriage, and crashed her daughter's wedding ... and now she's inexplicably lending herself to his ridiculous sex plot?
It's almost like these were completely different people and someone just pasted in the names of the characters from The Graduate to make it a sequel. Actually, that's exactly what happened: Webb admits that after coming up with the idea of having someone seduce someone else for a friend, he decided to cram his old characters into the new story. That's, uh, one way to write a sequel, we guess.
Casablanca's Sequel: As Time Goes By
The Original:
Casablanca is literally the Casablanca of movies. The film cemented Humphrey Bogart's status as a leading man and single-handedly convinced the American public that the Nazis are the bad guys. It also features possibly cinema's greatest ending, in which the cynical and enigmatic bar owner Rick Blaine (Bogart) selflessly gives up the love of his life, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), for a greater cause, that being "Seriously, though, fuck the Nazis."
The Little-Known Sequel That Ruins It:
Hollywood has been trying and failing to recapture the sense of action and white-hot sexual tension created by Bogey, Bergman, and Peter Lorre since day one: We've already told you about Brazzaville, the (terrible) planned movie sequel that was never made, but that's just one of the many failed projects to rape Casablanca's venerable corpse that never got off the ground.
And then, in 1998, they finally did it. Warner Bros. hired author Michael Walsh to write a book sequel called As Time Goes By, which picks up right where Casablanca left off. The end of the film implies that Rick and his new (beautiful) friend Captain Renault will join the French resistance. However, the book starts with Rick going, "You know what? Fuck that," and instead choosing to follow Ilsa and her husband to Lisbon.
Once in Lisbon, Rick joins a plan to assassinate a Nazi bigwig, but he's more concerned with secretly fucking Ilsa behind her husband's back, canceling out the original film's ending. Again, the entire point of the movie was that Rick gave up Ilsa. This is like doing a sequel to The Sixth Sense that starts with Bruce Willis finding out that he's alive and everyone was just ignoring him, or if Return of the Jedi had started with Darth Vader saying, "Just kidding, Luke. I say that to everyone."
The sequel also makes sure to kill whatever's left of Rick's aura of mystery by giving him a needlessly detailed backstory. Turns out Rick is actually a Jewish gangster born Yitzik Baline in East Harlem.
The East Harlem origin is meant to explain why "Rick" couldn't go back to America (the other gangsters wanted to kill him) and "... why Sam, his best friend, is a black man." Because when you watched Casablanca, the question you came away with was obviously "Why would Humphrey Bogart befriend anyone who isn't white?"
Leave It to Beaver's Sequel: Still the Beaver
The Original:
Leave It to Beaver is looked back on fondly by baby boomers who yearn for a simpler time when a young boy could be nicknamed after female genitalia without irony. A typical episode of this lighthearted sitcom followed the Beaver, the youngest son of a nice suburban family, getting into some sort of trouble and finally receiving a lesson from his father.
The Little-Known Sequel That Ruins It:
Leave It to Beaver ended in 1963, just when the kids were starting to get too old and the "gee whiz" innocence of the show was starting to feel out of place in the new decade. But what if the show had continued into the '80s and gotten exponentially more awkward each year? That's the question that the 1983 TV movie Still the Beaver sought to answer.
The special opens with the Beav (played by the same actor, now in his mid-30s) being thrown out of his house by his wife. His wife, by the way, is also his boss' daughter, so in addition to being alone and homeless, the formerly fun-lovin' Beaver is also automatically unemployed and miserable.
The other characters haven't fared much better. Eddie Haskell is a bumbling, weasely independent contractor. The Beaver's brother, Wally, is a successful attorney, but has spent over a year trying to get his wife pregnant, with no success (we're pretty sure they never did that storyline in the old show). And their old pal Larry Mondello is now a Hare Krishna named Vishnu.
What about the Beaver's wise and patient father? Yeah, he's dead. With the show's moral center in a grave, it's easy to see how the others ended up the way they did. The Beav moves back in with his widowed mother and inexplicably begins dressing like he's a 10-year-old in 1955 again as he's haunted by black-and-white flashbacks from his childhood.
It seems like only a matter of time until the Beaver's mom walks in to find him sticking his head in the oven, but he's probably too incompetent to figure out how an oven works. Somehow, the movie spun off into a new series called The New Leave It to Beaver, which ran for four fucking seasons.
Anthony Scibelli is a handsome stand-up comedian and comedy writer. You can follow him on Twitter or check out his website. Or both.
For more sequels that must've spawned from the originals' Cliff's Notes, check out 5 Sequels Made By People Who Must Not Have Seen the Original and 6 Insane Sequels That Almost Ruined Classic Movies.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The 3 Most Notorious Photobombers on the Internet (Part 2).
And stop by LinkSTORM to see what happens when DOB writes a sequel to Spider-Man.
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