In retrospect, yesterday’s entry on the possibility of more Star Wars films got a little long and never came to as sharp a point as I hoped it would (much like the Star Wars prequels, actually), so my apologies if anyone was bored by my ramblings.

Perhaps it’s because I feel like I didn’t make much of a point that I’m still thinking about the subject this afternoon. Specifically, I’m wondering why it always seems so inevitable, so necessary, that any successful or much-loved story will give rise to sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Why are we — by which I mean our society, producers and consumers alike — not content to just let things be? Why do we have to keep worrying at our favorite tales like an eight-year-old with a loose tooth? In short, why do we always want more of a story instead of simply being satisfied with a well-told ending?

Consider the following:

Almost every movie with “franchise potential” has an open ending to allow for further adventures. Take, for example, any superhero movie made in the last fifteen years. They’re all intended to be the opening chapter of at least a trilogy, if not a longer series. This drive to set up sequels is sometimes to the detriment of the original film; some movies are only completely effective within the context of their respective series. (X-Men and Hellboy both suffer from the sense that the story is only getting started when the credits start to roll.)

Even those films that are reasonably self-contained or not especially successful (or both) are not immune. Case in point: the mediocre Ben Affleck vehicle Daredevil, which did only so-so at the box office and probably won’t get its own sequel, nevertheless is widely expected to launch a spin-off film about Jennifer Garner’s character Elektra. Garner’s Daredevil contract, signed before one frame of DD was exposed, apparently contained a promise of an Elektra movie.

The situation is no better on television, where every television series that has a loyal following seems to generate talk of a spin-off or a theatrical film. The X-Files spawned a movie and a short-lived spin-off, and as soon as Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which had already produced one moderately successful spin-off in the form of Angel — wrapped production a year ago, rumors started floating of another spin-off, or perhaps an animated series using the voices of the original cast, or a feature film about the character (ironic, since the TV series was itself based on a movie). There’s even talk of a feature film for The Simpsons, although I have yet to hear what advantages a theatrical presentation could hold for TV’s longest-running sitcom.

So far, I’ve only addressed new product based on old favorites. The discussion also has to include “director’s cuts,” slightly (or, more rarely, heavily) re-edited versions of old favorites that have become fairly common over the last decade. I include these as part of the sequel phenomenon because, when you think about it, the director’s cut and the sequel are basically the same thing, a repackaging of existing ideas. The Star Wars Special Editions are the best known (and worst done, in my opinion) examples of this trend, but there have also been recut versions of Alien, Blade Runner, E.T., and Apocalypse Now. (One interesting side note is that director’s cuts and sequelitis seem to afflict mostly genre films: science fiction, horror, and crime dramas. A topic to ponder another day…)

Not even literature is safe from this call for “more more more.” Literary fantasy has devolved from the self-contained Lord of the Rings — which was originally written as one massive novel, even if it was printed as a trilogy — into endless series that can run to twelve or more volumes. And the idea of the director’s cut has hit the bookshelf also, as evidenced by the recent revised edition of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Much like The Great Flanneled One tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy to make it look more like the prequels — I shudder to see what’s been changed for the upcoming DVDs! — King rewrote the first book of his Dark Tower cycle to make it more consistent with the rest of the series, with decidedly mixed results.

Mind you, I acknowledge that this sort of thing is nothing new. The Golden Age of Film produced many long-running movie series starring the same characters, especially in the detective genre (Charlie Chan and the delightful Thin Man movies come to mind), and many novelists have penned multiple adventures for their best-loved protagonists. But it seems to me that this way of doing business has become far more prevalent in recent years, almost replacing the idea of self-contained stories, at least in some genres. (You could also argue that older series, both cinematic and literary, differed from our current definition of “series” because the individual entries were all self-contained stories, with little or no continuity running between them. That’s often not the case nowadays.) And I still haven’t answered my original question: why does this sort of thing happen at all? Why keep revisiting the same characters or at least the same setting or formula?

From the producers’ perspective, the answer is simple: they make what they think people will buy, and people tend to buy more of something they liked before. Even if a given book or movie is not conceived with sequels in mind, success almost guarantees that the sequels will come. Take Back to the Future, for example. I would guess that most people today believe this film was always intended to be the first chapter of the trilogy that followed. It was not. BTTF was originally conceived as a “single-shot,” and the infamous non-conclusion (“Where we’re going, we don’t need any… roads”) simply seemed to be the best note on which to end. The blockbuster success of the film caught everyone who worked on it off-guard and the studio began pressuring the film’s creators for sequels because they wanted to milk that success. The creators didn’t have any ideas immediately in mind, which is why it took so long for the sequels to get made. To the credit of everyone involved, this was a rare case where the sequels meshed almost seamlessly with original and the audience was lucky enough to get three fully satisfying films.

A less satisfactory situation is the Terminator series. The original movie was entirely self-contained, with a tight, recursive plot that bent backwards on itself and left no room to wonder what happens after the end credits. We know what happens, because we’ve been told. I was amazed when plans were announced for Terminator 2 because I honestly didn’t see where the story could go (I would still argue that it didn’t really go anywhere and that both sequels are utterly pointless repetitions of the first film). Didn’t matter, though. The first one made dough, so a sequel was guaranteed. Number 2 made mega-dough, so Number 3 was also a lock. If Arnold’s political career fizzles after one term as “The Governator,” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fourth one come along.

So, the producers keep making sequels because they want to wring every penny out of every idea. But why do consumers continue to fall for this? Everyone I know says that sequels are never as good as the first one, that they get sick of reading Robert Jordan’s never-ending story, and they generally feel exploited by publishers and movie studios and TV companies that keep feeding them inferior copies of things that we all loved the first two or three times. But we just keep buying, don’t we?

The obvious explanation is that people just love certain characters or scenarios so much that they want to revisit them time and time again. To be fair, I know a lot of people who are actually looking forward to a fourth Indiana Jones film (not me!), and my girlfriend Anne enjoys the Alien movies pretty much without reservation (she even likes Alien3 and Alien Resurrection, films that I think I’ve only seen one time each because they disappointed me; her opinion of Alien Vs. Predator is documented right here on Simple Tricks).

Even I am not immune to this syndrome. I’m not too proud to admit that I experienced a mild form of insanity back in ’99 when The Phantom Menace was coming out. I was giddy with anticipation, and fairly obsessive about all things Star Wars. I was motivated by the irrational hope that I would be able to recapture a taste of the euphoria I remember feeling when I saw the original Star Wars at the age of seven. The first time I saw TPM, I did. But the feeling faded, and I ultimately ended up feeling burned. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t dismiss the prequels altogether, but there is a very large part of me that wishes they’d never been made and that the original films had been left alone.

I feel that way about most movies, TV shows and novels that spawn sequels, actually. Okay, Spider-Man 2 was the exception, but for the most part, I’d be perfectly content to have had only one Star Wars trilogy, only one Star Trek series (well, maybe allowing Next Gen and Deep Space Nine, but no more), only one Highlander film (plus the TV series, which was largely unrelated to the movie)… I’m waffling a bit there, aren’t I? Well, I did admit that I’m not immune to the desire of seeing more adventures of my fictional friends. But I do grow weary of the tendency to beat every idea to death. Often that final trip back to the well doesn’t just come up empty, it actually makes you sick, and then you start to regret that you ever took that first sweet sip at all. It’s happened to Star Wars, which has been somewhat soured in my mind by the prequels and the backlash against them. It happened to Highlander: The Series, which used to be my favorite TV show but which went on for one season too many and then jumped to the big screen and became the execrable Highlander: Endgame. It happened to Buffy, which should’ve ended at season five instead of going on for two more years, during which everyone involved in its production became visibly, painfully bored with it. It’s almost as if Americans just don’t know when to call it a day.

By way of contrast, the British seem to be much better at knowing when (and how) to stop. I’ve always enjoyed the British sitcoms that run on PBS on Sunday nights, and many of the dramas as well, and I’ve noticed that most of them have definite endings. I’m not always sure that they’re planned that way to begin with, but when the shows end, they end. Definitively and decisively. And I find this very satisfying. It’s like coming to the end of a good novel, turning that final page, and setting the book gently down on the nightstand while you ponder what you’ve just read.

I guess the book metaphor encapsulates a lot of how I feel on this subject. It is possible to revisit beloved characters or universes, even without new stories about them. Especially now, in the age of DVD, it’s an easy matter to see a movie again, and obviously you can always re-read a book. Most of the time, that’s far more satisfying to me than any sequel, and you don’t run the risk of the original being tainted by an inferior copy.

My final thought on this subject is that maybe we all had the right idea as kids, when all of our stories ended with, “and they lived happily ever after.” We didn’t ask for sequels back then. We just asked if we could read the story again…