Discussion Main / DivorcedInstallment

I'm not sure if it counts, or if it can even been proven. However, Space Jam was going to have a potential sequel called Spy Jam, which was supposed to star Jackie Chan. While, it is said that the proposal later developed into Looney Tunes: Back in Action, there was another spy movie that came out a year before Back in Actions which starred Jack Chan, The Tuxedo

If I remember right, Star Wars was initially meant to be a Flash Gordon movie but when George Lucas couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, he creates Star Wars instead.

Don't know if it belongs here or somewhere else but the Power of The Dark Crystal comic was originally meant to be a movie sequel to The Dark Crystal. Likewise Jim Henson's A Tale Of Sand graphic novel was intended to be a movie but wasn't part of any franchise.

• Super Mario Bros. 2 is more famous for the opposite trope, but Doki Doki Panic actually started life as a Mario game from the beginning, only to be divorced from Mario when Fuji TV wanted a Licensed Game of their Yume Koujou promotional event. The event was a bit of a flop, and Nintendo of America needed a new Mario game since the original sequel had been given a no-go for being a Mission-Pack Sequel, so they reversed the process, divorcing it from Yume Koujou and dolling it back up into a Mario game.

I've removed this entry for the following reasons:

1: No source I could find definitrely states Doki Doki Panic! started as a Mario game. In a Game Informer itnerview, Kensuke Tanabe said he was asked to do a prototype for a "Mario-style platformer", but that's not quite the same thing.

2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL9o9zzCUsQ As this video shows], Doki Doki Panic features quite a lot of imagery from the events, which makes it unlikely it was a Mario game sprite-swapped at the last minute.

3: The statement that the " The event was a bit of a flop" is jsut wrong. It had a lot of attendance.

• Neil Gaiman originally pitched The Sandman to George R. R. Martin as part of the Wildcards universe. Martin passed because of Gaiman's lack of writing credits, and the idea was eventually revived at Vertigo Comics.

Hmm. As far as I can make out, what Neil pitched was "a character who lived in dreams". Now while that's certainly an idea that he developed into The Sandman, it's not The Sandman. And since he had no reason to develop his Wild Cards Dream Walker any further, we've no way of knowing how close to Morpheus the character would have been.

I was surprised not to see Big Trouble in Little China in the Film folder, since I was under the impression that it was originally written as a sequel to Buckaroo Banzai. However, I can find no mention of this in the Wikipedia articles for those movies. I guess it's just an urban legend!

UPDATE: I see that the Buckaroo Banzai FAQ specifically denies this.

The second paragraph of the description seems confusing to me:

This trope should only count for works that were finished or released in complete form before being altered. ... The important term here is "franchise"—works that aren't part of a series obviously have nothing to be "divorced" from.

How can something be "released in complete form" be an example barring licencing issues? Heck, "Licencing Issues" seems to be the primary cause of the Trope, as Cash-Cow Franchise is its opposite's chief enabler. Also, "Licencing Issues" can often happen while a work is in production/Beta stage, well before release. Where do we draw the line? (If it has to be released/finished first, then how can anything by adaptations be examples?)