The 10 Most Tenuously Connected Movie Sequels
One of the reasons this site has been a bit quiet recently has been that I was contacted by Cracked.com about writing some articles for them. I wrote one, and it’s now available on their site:
The 10 Most Tenuously Connected Movie Sequels.
I plan on writing more articles for Cracked.com. Whenever I do, I’ll post a link on this site, so if you are using the RSS feed you can be notified when a new Cracked article goes up.
When I was a kid, I had subscriptions to both Cracked and Mad, and I always viewed Cracked as a shitty rip-off of Mad. Their mascot was Sylvester Smythe, a janitor on something. Alfred E. Neuman could have kicked his ass. Mad had all the great cartoonists, and Cracked just got the rejects.
Then, as the years went by, it became increasingly obvious that magazines were a dying medium. Both magazines had to figure out what they were going to do to survive.
Mad became MadTV, deciding to make the jump to television, another dying medium (though they still publish a magazine that nobody reads). Cracked took to the internet as Cracked.com, the thing that was killing the magazine industry in the first place.
MadTV sucks monkey dicks. In much the same way as Cracked was a shitty rip-off of Mad, MadTV is a shitty rip-off of SNL. MadTV basically said “hey, SNL sometimes has skits that go on way too long, with characters that repeat annoying catchphrases over and over again in a vain attempt to make you think you’re watching comedy - we should do that!” Apparently, nobody explained to the MadTV producers that those skits on SNL are the ones that drag the show down, because every single MadTV sketch is a painful waste of time. The only purpose MadTV serves is to show everyone that, as bad as you think SNL has gotten since your favorite season, it could always be worse.
Cracked.com certainly has its ups and downs, but I run across Cracked articles on the front-page of Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us all the time. The Cracked.com logo looks like it was made in MS Paint, but a lot of the articles on the site have actually made me laugh, which is more than I can say for anything MadTV has ever done. It’s funny to see how the magazine I liked as a kid turned into unwatchable garbage on TV, while the magazine I hated as a kid turned into something significantly more enjoyable on the internet.
It’s been a blast writing for Cracked.com. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to write for Mad magazine, so this is pretty close. Anyway, send that link around, digg it, etc.
[…] Original post by Rod Hilton […]
October 25th, 2007 at 7:02 amHey, the first season of MadTV employed Mad magazine’s writers and was really snappy. Short skits, good punchlines…
October 25th, 2007 at 7:18 amSecond season they fired all those writers and made the skits overlong and it’s gotten worse since then. I miss the first season and will still watch it if an episode comes on.
Jennhi:
Yeah, the first season wasn’t awful. They had trouble transitioning the movie satires to television, and came up with the whole ‘combine two movies’ thing (Gump Fiction, Firday the Apollo 13, etc), but those were tolerable. A lot of good actors came out of that era of MadTV, and that season had Spy vs. Spy, so it wasn’t all bad I guess.
But yeah, by season 2 it was exactly as I described. ;)
October 25th, 2007 at 7:23 amTo be fair, Mad TV was excellent in their first couple of seasons, with Artie Lange and Orlando Jones and several other really talented sketch comedians who have since moved on to better things.
When it first came out it was much better than the product SNL was putting out. Sketches like “President Drunk Guy” and “Bob Dole Rocks Ass” top anything Lorne’s crew has done since before Adam Sandler joined the cast.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:25 am“Artie Lange” and “excellent” should never, ever be used in the same sentence.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:19 amHa @ Under Siege. I had known that Die Hard 3 was originally a Lethal Weapon script, but I hadn’t known about the rest of that ridiculous chain. Wonderful!
October 25th, 2007 at 10:52 amI’ve always imagined Speed 3 taking place on a skateboard, and the owner has to disarm the bomb via trick.
Shut up, you’d see it.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:44 pmBrilliant, Rod. Hope to see more of your peripheral word. Now, please do Michael Clayton.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:26 pm“If the guy who starred in a sequel to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure passes on a movie script, you probably want to stay the fuck away”
I fucking love it.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:33 pmI have to say I had a very hard time finding the “next page” button on that site. It was tiny, stuck underneath a bunch of other tiny worthless buttons, and it looked like a set of ratings buttons. For a while I thought you were saving the final 5 entries for next week or something.
October 25th, 2007 at 6:33 pmRyan - were you using Safari? Same thing happened to me. Get Firefox.
As for Madtv - Rod, your comments on that were at least as hilarious as your article was. I usually try to catch SNL whenever I’m not doing much, and when people start complaining about how it sucks since [insert their favorite cast member] left, I always remind them that we could be watching Madtv instead.
October 25th, 2007 at 6:34 pmOerr, am I the only one who *still* reads Mad magazine?
October 25th, 2007 at 9:16 pmAlex:
October 26th, 2007 at 5:54 amMe and you, buddy. The only two non-teenaged Mad readers, represent.
Glad to see “US Marshalls” on that list, though I was disappointed you didn’t trash it more. Of course, probably the main reason I don’t like it is because I liked The Fugitive so much, and US Marshalls felt like a crappy rip-off that demeaned the Sam Gerard character that Tommy Lee Jones played so well in the first film (didn’t he win an Oscar for that or something?). I mean, they could have at least come up with a new story. Apparently Sam Gerard now exclusively goes after criminals-who-are-not-really-criminals… or else he’s trying to prove once again that the justice system never, ever works. Like, ever.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:39 amI know you could go forever on that list if you included non-theater releases and B-movies, but I think this one still might have merited a mention: Shark Attack, Shark Attack 2, and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon have no characters or places in common, and there is no evidence that the two are part of the same or even slightly related universes, except that sharks are universally angry and make non-Shark noises when needlessly slaughtering people (bear growls, lion roars etc.). Furthermore, and what really sets this series apart, is that Shark Attack’s lead actress, Jennifer “Jenny” McShane, also stars in Shark Attack 3: Megalodon AS AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE CHARACTER.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:42 pmCongrats on the move mate. I’ve been reading Cracked since around the New Year and your stuff since The Phantom Menace Abridged appeared in Total Film. It’s a good match. You’ve got a gift for movie satirizing outside of scripts. Good luck with it.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:25 pmNo, I’m using Firefox. I think that site is just dumb.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:30 pmHey, good to see two of my favourite Internet comedy resources combining. Read the whole article before I realised it was Rod’s. Funny stuff.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:20 amMatt: Yeah, go Mad. Even though it kinda really sucks now. A lot.
Were any of the “Jaws” sequels in the article? I forget. At least the second “Jaws” still had Roy Scheider in it. The rest were just cack about killer sharks attacking careless swimmers and the ‘ard men who set out to kill them. I can’t believe Michael Caine did one.
Then also there were the “Kickboxer” sequels, following the trials and tribulations of David Sloan, a heretofore unseen Sloan Brother (Van Damme and the other guy having been killed by Tong Po between the first and second films).
And what about xXx 2? The only connection between it and the first film being Samuel L. Jackson playing the same baaadasss muthafucka he’s always played. It doesn’t even feature eXtreme sportZ or scantily clad babes.
Yes, I watch a lot of crap.
Rod’s article has opened up a can of worms labelled “99% of all sequels suck. Here’s why … “
October 28th, 2007 at 11:03 pmNo Rise of the Taj for us.
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 amWe made pagination suck a lot less on Cracked now.
Enjoy!
November 4th, 2007 at 6:05 amOkay cool. Now the worst that can happen is an article page ends with a big picture and someone thinks the page controls are for seeing more pictures.
November 4th, 2007 at 6:02 pmThat Cracked website sucks. Lists get boring pretty quickly. It reminded me of this Onion piece: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/32680
I’d rather stick to your excellent site.
November 7th, 2007 at 9:20 amIs it only me or the pagination is actually broken on that site?
November 9th, 2007 at 8:37 am