#requels

Ghostbusters Afterlife —

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire —

I've previously written on this blog about the unfortunate legacy of The Force Awakens and how its massive success paved the way for a veritable buttload of legacy sequels that made similar mistakes.

One example I cited was Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Among the things I hated there was the declaration that no ghosts had shown up anywhere for approximately 30 years, effectively negating any EU lore or personal imaginings of interim adventures. Instead, we're made to believe that ghosts ONLY appear when an apocalyptic threat is making them emerge.

This year's direct sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, just completely ignores all that. Ghosts can appear anywhere and any time regardless of whether a major threat is coming to somehow spawn them. In fact, we even see the library ghost from the opening of the original 1984 Ghostbusters has apparently just been floating around freely EVER SINCE THEN. She's just stayed in the New York Public Library the whole friggin' time! (Which is kind of ridiculous all by itself, but whatever.)

So that's certainly ONE way to deal with dumb/bad ideas introduced in legacy sequels; just kind of pretend the idea was wrong or that you never said it, and don't bother explaining yourself when you show the opposite to be true. :P I... kind of love that??? But I feel like I probably shouldn't, because they should probably have to justify why they claimed that stuff in the first place.

But can you imagine if the Star Wars sequels pulled this kind of thing?

The Rise of Skywalker certainly does take pains to undo some of The Last Jedi, but it also feels the need to acknowledge what that movie said and did. Like "Oh Rey — it IS true that your parents were nobodies, but your grandpa is still somebody." Imagine instead if The Rise of Skywalker had just treated it like "OF COURSE Luke never thought the Jedi were a mistake, and of course he didn't run away to die! He was on that planet to build a new Jedi Academy, silly! Didn't you notice?" And then they just never explained the discrepancy.