I’m not sure how many people these days remember the cheap straight to VHS Disney movies that were constantly popping up at the local Blockbuster when they were young, but to me, those were the bread and butter of my childhood.
See, when you’re young, anything that has cartoon characters, or bright colors was always in high regard. Like myself, some may even feel that these things are the foundation of a memory, maybe watching something with a family member, or some stuffed animal, even, from some movie you saw once when you were six.
It seems to be all fun and games in these things, that is, until you’re watching it as an adult one Wednesday evening, and you realize: this is something that I watched as a kid?
Before fully delving into the topic, I feel as though there are some good movie sequels out there. Some to note can be any of the Back to the Future movies, Toy Story Two, the Star Wars trilogy, but when I speak on bad sequels, I mean the movies that you’d find either at your grandmothers’ who picked it up at Goodwill for you as a kid, or even at the local flea market.
See, we always talk about the bad movies, but never the bad sequels. Often these seem to be forgotten, it some shape or form (excluding that occasional diehard fan of the media in general) or are considered more of the ‘ugly stepsister,’ so to speak, of the original source media. These are your movies with either the big ugly red ‘two’ on the front with the source media’s title, or have something along the lines of “the main character’s child!”, “the character has a pet now!” or even “the character has a girlfriend now!”.
Overall, each one is overdone, and usually follows the same formula of jokes used within the first movie: a cash grab of the same material put together over and over again until the numbers just don’t add up in the director’s pocketbook.
A lot of the time, the actor isn’t even the original actor. It’s someone who is a look-alike or may have a similar voice as a character– sometimes entire casts will change, depending on what it is, or might even have a new main character entirely, again, like a child or a girlfriend who is ‘vaguely connected’ to the original plotline.
With a lower budget than an original movie, a lot of the time, special effects can even come out worse off than intended (especially seen within the horror genre, to be specific).
So what gives? In five-hundred movies surveyed on Rotten Tomatoes under movies made in 2023, there in total were 27 movies that were found to be sequels that were released to the general public. While this is a low number, oftentimes, it is not the quantity that matters rather than the quality of the piece of media.
If you have a good memory about a piece of media, even if you may realize how corny it may be, it’s important to hold these things close to oneself, one way or another. Or, if you’re that person, they also sometimes can be just as good to laugh at.
