Zoals we de afgelopen jaren wel gemerkt hebben heeft Hollywood er een handje van om Prequels te maken van grote hit films. Goede voorbeelden hier van zijn Hanibal en Star Wars (die ook in het artikel een goed pak slaag krijgt), want deze voegen eigenlijk maar bar weinig toe aan het originele verhaal of de karakters. De website Cracked.com heeft dit artikel geschreven, en daarbij kwam ik tot de ontdekking dat Temple of Doom (1984) geen vervolg op Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was, maar een prequel *nerd confusion*.

#5.
The Past Was Better Before We Saw It Happen

Hannibal Lecter became a pop culture icon in part because he was gleefully engaged in the taboo act of cannibalism without any specific reason motivating him to be such an evil bastard. 2007 brought us Hannibal Rising, which explained that Lecter was a tortured youth during WWII who got tricked into eating his dead sister.

If we're going to call the young Vito Corleone scenes in The Godfather Part II a prequel, we'll go ahead and bestow the same status on the first 30 or so minutes of Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's Halloween. The film delves into the childhood of Michael Myers, making crystal clear exactly how a young boy could commit such brutal murders. The short version is "He grew up in an abusive environment surrounded by a bunch of shitty rednecks."


Of course, this completely undermines exactly what was so scary about Michael Meyers. Carpenter went to great lengths to make Meyers straddle the line between inhuman nightmare cipher, and guy next door. He grounds everything in the real world by giving him a name, and putting him in a mental institution. But then he gives him a mask and motives that are intentionally vague. Carpenter knew that the blank mask allowed us to project whatever we wanted onto the character and that this is what we found scary. Rob Zombie apparently knew a few things he picked up about human psychology while watching Law and Order: SVU.

But the grand prize for supplying information that the audience doesn't need or want goes to the Star Wars prequels. The very thing that made the original films cool was that they combined Eastern mysticism with the typically dry sci-fi genre. Well, it turns out that all that mysticism was an accident. As the prequels explain, the Force was grounded in science, not mysticism. It's a bacterial infection.