Spiritual Successor / Other

• The Adams and Bush families have very eerie similarities. Both John Adams and George H.W. Bush were born in Massachusetts and attended Ivy League schools. Both served for eight years under a popular president before being elected to the presidency afterwards. However, they were defeated after one term by a southerner with "Jefferson" in his name (that administration would also have the name "Clinton" involved). Their sons, who took their father's names, later ran for president against a Democrat from Tennessee; they lost the popular vote to the Tennesseean, but ultimately win the presidency after an inconclusive Electoral College result was ruled in their favor.
• [adult swim] to Toonami's "Midnight Run" block. Several anime series that aired on "Toonami" (originally a mainstream, family friendly^note Except for certain occasions when it wasn't. non-safe harbor block) ended up airing on Adult Swim during its first year. The fact that it is run by the same studio that ran Toonami, Williams Street, was a plus. These comparisons stopped, however, when [adult swim] (and Cartoon Network in general) underwent significant Network Decay.
  • And now "Toonami" is a spiritual successor to Adult Swim's early years in an ironic and cyclical way.
• After the demise of the Amiga, a number of users migrated to Linux. More so, the open source movement on the Amiga was quite strong before Linux appeared and some important Linux programs, like the VIM editor, started life on Amiga. The Apple Macintosh occupies the same niche for graphics, video and audio work that the Amiga did in the late '80s and early '90s.
  • The Amiga itself was the spiritual successor to the Atari 8-bit line, as it was developed by many of the same people with the same design philosophy. In a better world, it would have been made at Atari. Conversely, the Atari ST was the spiritual successor to the Commodore 64, as it came out after Jack Tramiel took over the company and was aggressively priced the way the C64 was. While the ST lacked the C64's sound chip, it also revolutionized computer music with its built-in MIDI interface.
• Arvato Digital Services can be considered this to Deluxe Media Services as far as video duplication is concerned due to operating the only Deluxe video duplication plant known to still be in operation.
• The Raspberry Pi computer, a $35 single-board Linux machine the size of a credit card, is meant as a successor to the BBC Micro, with its low cost and heavy emphasis on computer science education for children. The Raspberry Pi Foundation laments the change in emphasis from open computer platforms that encouraged experimentation and programming at an early age in the 80s, to using office software and depending on closed-source programs just to get basic computing done of the present day, and they hope the success of their product (which crashed the two stores that sold it on launch day and at one point was said to have received 700 orders per second) will bring about a renaissance of children tinkering with their computers' internals just like the heyday of the 8-bit computers. It goes so far as to have two models, a basic Model A and an enhanced Model B (now on sale, unlike the A), just like the BBC Micro did, and even sweetens the deal by having 1080p h.264 playback capability at 30 fps.
  • In some ways, specifically the fact it has rather unimpressive performance for its era but compensates with its simplicity and exceptionally low price, the RPi is more of a spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum.
  • Raspberry Pi has become incredibly popular with the retro-gaming scene as a cheap, dedicated hardware for emulation, and several projects like Retropie and Recalbox have popped up that can emulate pretty much any system made before 1996 that you can throw at them. Ironically, one of the few machines these projects can't seem to emulate properly is the none other than the BBC Micro!
• Cartoon Network Studios and Frederator Studios are both this to Hanna-Barbera, as both companies had their roots with H-B (Cartoon Network Studios originated as a subsidiary of Hanna-Barbera; and Fred Seibert, the founder of Frederator, created the What A Cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network before founding Frederator and then going on to make a similar anthology series once the company was officially founded).
• The Disney Theme Parks attraction Carousel of Progress, a look at the progression of technology through the eyes of a single family, got one in the form of Horizons at Epcot, which similarly looked at the history of futurism before making predictions of their own viewed through the lens of a similar family. The Carousel's theme song, "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" even makes an appearance in the ride.
  • The attraction Walt Disney: One Man's Dream at Disney's Hollywood Studios can be seen as one to the former Magic Kingdom attraction The Walt Disney Story.
  • Rivers of Light at Disney's Animal Kingdom is one to the Epcot Millennium Celebration shows Illuminations: Reflections of Earth and Tapestry of Nations, carrying on Illuminations's music driven and abstract style of storytelling with a focus on the natural world, while mirroring Tapestry's Sage of Time/Dreamseekers and festival structure with the elemental shamans and lantern festival pageant structure.
  • The 3D show Mickeys Philhar Magic is one to the animatronic show The Mickey Mouse Revue; both star Mickey Mouse as an orchestra conductor and feature scenes based on classic Disney movies. It even takes place in the same theater that housed the original.
• After Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989, BBV Productions was founded by a group of Who fans to create new science fiction in the same spirit. (The extent to which they succeeded may be judged by the fact that one of their series of audio dramas got an official notice from the BBC for being too much like Doctor Who.) Many of the creatives behind BBV went on to work for the Big Finish Doctor Who line making straight-up Doctor Who stories.
• Nationwide Insurance has a series of live action commercials featuring actress Jana Kramer in a Spy Catsuit, replacing damaged and stolen items. The commercials seem to be a successor to Esurance's long-gone "Erin Esurance" commercials, which featured an animated character doing similar things.
• On the newspaper comics front, Bizarro seems to be the closest successor to The Far Side, as far as being a one-panel comic strip with surreal humor.
• Variety stores. While the era of the "five and dime" such as Woolworth is long gone, the general concept of a smallish store with a vast array of low-priced consumer goods lives on in the likes of dollar stores such as Family Dollar, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Five Below. The idea was also tweaked as early as The '60s with the rise of the discount department store, which combined elements of the big-scale department stores such as Sears or J. C. Penney with the characteristics of a dime store (Kmart, Walmart, and Target were all founded in 1962; in fact, Kmart was a spinoff of the also now-defunct dime store chain S. S. Kresge).
• Methamphetamine is a successor to moonshine, in some ways, as an illegal homemade addictive substance created at significant risk to both the producer via Stuff Blowing Up and the consumer via both regular old addiction and specific dangerous aspects that wouldn't be found in other drugs, mainly associated with lower-class white people.
• MotoIQ, a website dedicated to modified/modifying sports cars, is this to Sport Compact Car, known for being the only import-focused magazine to truly go in-depth into the various details involved in properly modifying cars for performance, rather than focusing on over-the-top show cars (At least, before it died; see Magazine Decay for details.) A few key SCC writers also contribute to the site.
• The Musketeer pretty much became the Spiritual Successor to the Knight in Shining Armor. Several factors include Adam Smith Hates Your Guts where to be a Knight you needed to be wealthy to afford and maintain your very expensive and heavy suit of armor and your warhorses whenever you go into battle. Knight charges were also easily countered newer military tactics like Pike and Shot or Hit-and-Run Tactics. And last but not least, as time went on firearms became more accurate with greater muzzle velocity making armor useless.
  • France's Musketeers of the Guard where not all that different from their Knight counterpart. Like Knights, the Musketeers where also from the nobility and were the Special Forces during their time. And the most famous musketeer of all, D'Artagnan, even had the title of Chevalier (French knight).
• Nintendo Power supposedly got one after its demise in the form of Nintendo Force.
  • Two more successors arose in the form of podcasts, the unofficial Power Pros Podcast and official Nintendo Power Podcast. Power Pros was originally created by former NP editors Chris Slate and Chris Hoffman, and after Slate left the show he was able to get an official podcast going at Nintendo...bringing this full-circle and making NPP itself a Spiritual Successor to Power Pros.
• This Vox article argues that North Korea is the spiritual successor to Imperial Japan with its quasi-deification of a dynastic leader, militaristic ideology and belief that North Koreans are "the cleanest race."
• Walt Disney Records Songs and Story series of CD's is essentially this to the "Storyteller"^note The albums weren't called by this name exactly. They were identified by having "ST" or even "Storyteller" as part of their catalog numbers. A number of them had titles usually beginning with "The Story of __" series of LP's released by their predecessor Disneyland Records.
• The "8 Minute New Core Series" of exercise videos was created by the same people who created the previous "8 Minute__"^note "8 Minute Abs", "8 Minute Legs", etc. series of exercise videos.
• Free/Open Source Software is often forked. This occurs when the mainline development slows down or some developers wish to try a different direction. In many cases this results in the original software project withering (if it wasn't already stagnating) as developers and users are attracted to the new project. There are such things as "friendly" and "hostile" forks.
  • LibreOffice to OpenOffice.org. First Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice office suite^note By their estimate it was cheaper to buy a company selling MS Office-compatible programs and refine it, than to buy a new version of MS Office for all their employees., and released its free/open source variant as OpenOffice.org to attract independent developers. The license allowed to distribute modified versions of OOo without Sun approval, but including changes in the mainline required (non-exclusive) transfer of copyright. A number of companies maintained a parallel project ooo-build later renamed to Go-oo, that took each new version of OOo and added their features. After Oracle bought Sun, the development of OOo effectively stopped. Much of the team left and together with Go-oo formed The Document Foundation. They tried asking Oracle for the OpenOffice.org trademark, since they wanted to be a regular successor, but ended up having to invent another name — LibreOffice — and going completely independent. The majority of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, eventually replaced OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice. This didn't change much, since they were using Go-oo anyway.
  • A year and a half later Oracle fired the rest of StarOffice department (those who haven't quit yet) and threw the code and trademarks at Apache OpenOffice at IBM's behest. AOO also claims to be the legitimate successor. LO has more development, AOO has more downloads. With licensing changes AOO isn't allowed to use LO code, and LO can, but won't use AOO code, as it fell far behind. Some forks are more bitter than others.
  • Another Oracle example was the OpenSolaris operating system, which was basically a free community-supported version of the paid Solaris OS. Shortly after buying over Sun and killing OpenOffice, Oracle also gave the finger to the OpenSolaris community by shutting down access to the source code and putting out a press release that barely hides their greed, claiming that OpenSolaris will be replaced with a crippled Solaris Express, while those who want a fully functional version will have to pay for the full Solaris OS. While the OpenSolaris community tried to be friendly with Oracle, that dick move by Oracle caused the community to fork the last version of OpenSolaris into illumos.
  • One more for Oracle: the acquisition of Sun also gave them access to the MySQL database engine, which is a direct competition to their flagship product. They proceeded to cripple MySQL so that it cannot fairly compete. The community responded by forking the last Sun-maintained version of MySQL into MariaDB.
  • Similarly, the Mozilla Suite, which was eventually split into the Mozilla Firefox Web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, are essentially spiritual successors to Netscape; originally Mozilla was intended to be a codebase for the proprietary Netscape suite, but Netscape was discontinued and Mozilla's projects continued development, with Firefox and Thunderbird being maintained by Mozilla subsidiaries and the Mozilla Suite was rebranded and continued as the community-maintained SeaMonkey suite, which in turn succeeded the entire Mozilla Suite rather than parts of it.
• Oreo cookies are the spiritual successor of Hydrox cookies.
• Hi-C created a flavor of their popular fruit-flavored drink called Ecto Cooler, combining orange and tangerine with a green color and putting Slimer on the package to tie it in with the then-popular The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, but it outlasted the show by several years before being discontinued due to losing the sponsorship and the rights to use Slimer's likeness. These days you can still find the stuff in certain mostly East Coast markets under the name "Screamin' Orange Tangergreen."
• In a way, Saban Brands is this to the old Saban Entertainment, although Haim Saban himself is not directly involved with the new company.
• The SAM Coupé computer was a spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum. It was created by former Sinclair Research employees, and was partly backwards-compatible while offering improved graphics and sound.
• Sentai Filmworks is the spiritual successor to ADV Films.
• This is starting to crop up in vehicle manufacturing.
  • Due to VW Beetle's popularity, Volkswagen built New Beetle as a spiritual successor to the original.
  • Toyota created the Toyota 86 (also known as the GT86, Scion FR-S, or Subaru BR-Z) specifically as a spiritual successor to the AE86 Corolla GT. This is probably due to the AE86's popularity among car enthusiasts, notably drifters, thanks to its use by Keiichi "Drift King" Tsuchiya and as the protagonist's car in Initial D. Less obviously, it's a spiritual successor to the Toyota 2000GT (a bit more obvious in territories where the GT86 brand is used).
  • Honda has produced the CR-Z, a spiritual successor of sorts to the CR-X.
  • The Nissan Skyline GT-R was never intended for sale outside Japan. Yet in The '90s it had such a following in the UK that the R32, R33, and R34 models had official limited export sales to the UK. As Nissan acknowledged this, they decided to make a spiritual successor which was Saved from Development Hell, without the name "Skyline" to separate it from the ordinary Skylines, which now rebadged as Infiniti Gs for exports.
  • The Nissan Skylines in general... The latest generation, V37 (known as Infiniti Q50 outside Japan), was never officially called as a Nissan or an Infiniti, just Skyline.^note The Nissan logo was absent from the V37 Skyline, only two Infiniti badges were spotted on the grille and on the steering wheel◊. It is both this and Continuity Reboot to the entire Nissan Skyline series of luxury sedans.
  • The now-discontinued Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG takes lots of design cues from the legendary 300SL, which in turn was also inspired by the 300SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe. The most-common trait is the gullwing doors.
  • The Mazda MX-5 is considered the Japanese spiritual successor to the classic British 1950s and 1960s two seat sports car, especially the Lotus Elan. Jeremy Clarkson named the MX-5 as the best "British" sports car ever- in a show about British sports cars.
  • Ruf Automobile created CTR3, an original supercar that succeeded and inherited the naming nomenclature of Porsche 911-based CTR Yellowbird and CTR2.
  • Motorcycle manufacturer Triumph created the Thruxton as both a spiritual successor to its Bonneville and a throwback to old café racers. It even has a fake carburetor that houses the fuel injector to keep the classic look.
• Windows NT, and by extension, all modern versions of Windows, is the spiritual successor to both OS/2 and VMS. NT was originally slated to be another version of OS/2 before Microsoft's split from IBM, and Microsoft hired a number of key DEC employees, including Dave Cutler, to work on it.
  • Windows itself in whole seemed to be a greatly improved successor to the MSX video gaming computer system. While MSX was popular in Japan, some few European and South American countries, it never reached North America. At that time, Windows was also in development when MSX was released, in which both were built from the MS-DOS^note MSX-DOS is a variant of MS-DOS for MSX computers. Although MSX was not a global standard like it was intended, Windows fixed the shortcomings MSX had faced, and eventually surpassed it to became Microsoft's main operating system and enjoyed much wider global success. While Windows was initially designed for the business market, it became a de facto standard for home computers in the late '80s and early '90s, taking the role that MSX did in the mid '80s.
  • As with the Amiga, a number of OS/2 users migrated to Linux as that became the alternative, "techie" OS on the PC.
• Both Linux and the BSDs are spiritual successors to UNIX.
• Vortexx, a Saturday-Morning Cartoon block on The CW, can be seen as one for both Fox Kids and Kids' WB!. This is helped by the fact owner Saban Brands' predecessor Saban Entertainment co-owned the former.
  • New block KidsClick is this to Vortexx.
• In recent years, British television channels Pop and Pop Max (formerly of Sony Pictures) have become this to the UK version of Fox Kids/Jetix along with being this to pre-2010 Cartoon Network, due to the fact that Pop now airs Power Rangers along with airing content that used to be shown on these channels.
  • Not just that but Pop is also this to The Children's Channel, due to the fact that the channel previously aired content that used to air on the defunct channel that existed from 1984 to 1998.
• Fox Entertainment is this to 20th Century Fox Television, which was the former production arm of the Fox network. Ever since that unit was sold to Disney and subsequently renamed back to 20th Television (which it used from 1992 to 1994), Fox Entertainment has handled all the network's programming duties, primarily partnering with non-network affiliated studios to fill the void left by 20th's retreat (on the reality TV front, Fox Entertainment handles content almost entirely in-house; the only reality program 20th had involvement in prior to the Disney sale was The Simple Life).
• Veterans Day can be this to Memorial Day in the US. Both days involve honoring veterans of the military. The only difference is that Memorial Day honors those who died while in service, while Veterans Day honors those who have served, both living and deceased.^* Technically, there is no federal holiday honoring those currently serving in the military. The day specifically set aside to honor current military members, Armed Forces Day, falls on a Saturday and thus is rarely observed outside the military. That said, most of the general public will include current service members in their Veterans Day celebrations.
• Fox is considered to be this to DuMont. It helps the fact that DuMont's legal successor Metromedia was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to set up the network.
• Sprout to Noggin. Sesame Workshop co-founded both channels, which both had hosted links in between shows and preschool-like interstitials, but owned by separate companies.
  • Also this to the British version of Playhouse Disney with its hosted segments and programming blocks (such as The Good Night Show and the live Sunny Side Up Show, which is surprising given Andrew Beecham, the senior vice president of programming at Sprout, created the host segments used by Playhouse Disney in the UK and other international markets.
• YouTube is arguably the spiritual successor to public access television. In a nutshell, public-access stations allow private citizens, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and others produce television content for a nominal fee and with minimal regulation. These stations are run on the municipal level, and programming can include church services, elementary school music recitals, or a Drag Queen calling the city council a bunch of assholes. There were also scripted independent series as well, many of whom developed a local following. While public access tv still exists, it has largely been superseded by the rise of social media, especially YouTube.