Are the Disney Cheapquels really that bad?

Counter to the Land Before Time Sequels thread.

From 1994-2008, Disney released tons of sequels to their movies, both in theaters and straight to video.

These movies are usually considered low quality and Fanon Discontinuity for the fans of the original. The major exceptions are The Lion King 2 Simbas Pride, The Return Of Jafar, and Aladdin And The King Of Thieves.

The others are mostly panned for bad animation, use of offspring as protagonists, and, of course, being cheap to produce while still making money. This lead to the term "Cheapquels".

But are the ones not mentioned in this post really that terrible? I enjoyed some of them when I was younger.

I didn't find Lion King 1 and a half all that bad(sue me).

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That one's quite the oddball. I consider it a...sidequel? of sorts. But yeah, I kinda liked it too.

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Thirding. That one seems to get a pass fairly often.

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The thing about Lion King 1 & 1/2 is that it knows full well it can never live up to the original and so does something different. The meta-humor throughout is amusing, and it nailed both the devotion and the wackiness of Timon and Pumbaa. I also think this scene is tremendously effective at being both funny and dramatic. Done too emotionally and the scene would feel corny and out of place. Done too irreverently and it wouldn't feel convincing or worth caring about.

The others, though... bleh. The Little Mermaid II especially strikes me as wasted potential.

edited 25th Oct '14 11:15:00 PM by Tuckerscreator

I appreciate Lion King 1 1/2 because I also adore Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and I think it takes some pretty cool inspiration from it. That Beauty and the Beast Christmas thing was okay, if only for an awesome Tim Curry villain song.

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To be honest, I'd always considered Lion King 1 1/2 to be The Movie version of Timon & Pumbaa instead of it just being "the third Lion King movie", but that's just me. And I loved it. I actually hated Simba's Pride when I saw it, but I'll probably need to watch it again.

Mulan II was also another sequel I didn't care for, although I can't quite remember why. All I recall is that it had something to do with how Mushu came off (I loved him in the original) and how by-the-numbers the plot seemed, even for a Disney sequel. The other movies I hadn't seen yet, but I'm interested in the Cinderella sequels the most.

edited 26th Oct '14 4:17:47 AM by Customer

most of them are terrible, yes. the hunchback of notre dame 2 in particular is fucking atrocious.

some of them are passable or even decent: cinderella 3 and return to neverland aren't actually that bad.

The last few I remember they tried for a bit higher quality or took different directions since they knew a proper follow up just wouldn't add up against the first. Bambi II was decent enough, and even had a good enough budget to earn a theatrical release in Europe.

edited 26th Oct '14 6:50:16 AM by Psi001

Animation-wise, they are all subpar. Bambi2, Return to Netherland, Jungle Book 2, Aladdin King of Thieves and the Winnie the Pooh movies had a slightly higher budget, because they got a limited theatrical release, but it was still a far cry from usual Disney quality.

As someone who bothered to watch all of them: They are not worth the time. Most of them are insultingly simple and show no understanding for what the original movie was about. The Beauty and the Beast sequels are especially insulting, because after all the effort put into the original movie to avoid the Stockholm Syndrome scenario, those are a full blown example of it. There is nothing left of Belle in those.

Return to Neverland, Bambi 2, Jungle Book 2 and Cinderella 3 had at the very least an interesting concept, but the execution is more than a little bit wonky.

Lion King 2 lives mostly from the not too bad music, but is such a major recon that it doesn't work from the get go for me.

The only sequels I didn't rue watching were the Aladdin ones. Return of Jafar is pretty bad, but if you see it more as pilot for the TV-show than as movie, it is okay. And King of Thieves is actually pretty good. The only sequel I ever watched multiple times. It offers an interesting storyline which does add to Aladdin's character, and is overall a nice little adventure.

I guess you can inflict some of the Winnie the Pooh movies on your children...but what far when there are already two far superior movies you can pick instead?

I used to watch pretty much every single Disney sequel in existence when I was younger. Looking back, a lot of them are pretty bad, mainly because of how simple they are.

Some aren't too bad (despite its painful plot structure, kronk's new groove was rather funny, and Bambi 2 certainly had its perks) but overall, their reputation as cheapquels is well-deserved.

Are we counting the Stitch movies? They are decent, even if Gantu's Badass Decay was downright painful and Hamsterviel himself was a pathetic villain.

I remember seeing return to neverland so many times back on Disney Channel.Its okay,I guess.

I also enjoyed Extremely Goofy Movie,not as much as the original but I thought it had good merits(the biggest problem I had with it was getting rid of Max's love interest).

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I've seen:

Lady and the Tramp 2

Lion King 2 and 1 1/2

Stitch the Movie

Return to Neverland

I like Simba's Pride and Return, haven't seen the rest in years

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I don't count the Goofy movies as cheapquels. They are "movies to the TV show". That's hardly the same as making a cheap knock-off of a cinematic masterpiece.

I saw Extremely Goofy movie a few years back, but I don't count THAT as a cheapquel.

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Short answer: yes, most of them are, but sometimes you strike gold and get a good one.

It was a sequel to a movie that was released in theaters on the better side of ten years ago. That qualifies as a cheapquel, even if it is pretty good.

edited 10th Oct '16 6:11:43 PM by Smasher

Some of them were okay, but most weren't worth rewatching. AEGM doesn't count since it was made by the same studio as the original and both were The Film of the Series.

Mulan II is the only one I remember very well, and I remember liking parts of it but really not being okay with the way the characters were acting.

I wonder if you could count any of the Winnie-the-Pooh movies as "movies of the TV show" due to the timing of their production, especially since the original movie(s) were approximately TV-length shorts anyway. I remember Pooh's Grand Adventure being pretty cool, but I didn't get to see any of the ones that were named after different characters until they got all the way down to British Heffalumps.

I think the period typically thought of as the cheapquel era is 2000 to around 2008. That is, "The Little Mermaid 2" (or, arguably, "An Extremely Goofy Movie") to "Ariel's Beginning."

Not every sequel made in that time is a cheapquel, and not every cheapquel is bad ("An Extremely Goofy Movie" is pretty good, but then it was made before things started getting really bad, anyway), but pretty much all of the movies considered cheapquels were made in that time frame.

Neither the Aladdin sequels nor The Lion King 2 are part of the rush of cheapquels from that era and don't have the same cash cow kind of vibe, and (for whatever flaws they have) feel a bit more organic for it. And I guess Milo's Return shouldn't count either, given that it wasn't supposed to be a sequel in the first place (it's the first few episodes / pilot of a failed tv adaptation hastily bunched together into a movie).

Of them all, the one that I feel is absolutely in no uncertain terms the worst is "The Jungle Book 2," but most of them are just varying degrees of average. Definitely not good, but while near all of them have a lot to be criticized for they're for the most part not entirely terrible either. They would be just more of those otherwise unremarkable bland made for tv / video animated movies if they weren't Disney productions (albeit, all from some substudio or another) about Disney characters who were usually a lot less bland.

The best of the lot is the Peter Pan sequel, which is fun for me since I hate Peter Pan .

edited 26th Oct '14 4:29:26 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

I feel Winnie The Pooh worked since it's original premise was just a bunch of short laid back stories, the original film was pretty much just a compilation of short cartoons. As such doing more just complimented that premise really. It helped that most of the people that work on Pooh seem to understand the franchise rather well. I've rarely seen Character Derailment or premise altering in it's multiple works (unless you count some of the more oddball episodes of the TV series).

I kinda liked how each movie gave focus to a different character as well. Where was the Eeyore movie though?

edited 26th Oct '14 6:00:11 PM by Psi001

Meh. Many of them are unwatchable, but they're pretty harmless. Jungle Book 2 comes to mind when I think of terrible sequels. Colors, voices, etc. Bleh!

edited 26th Oct '14 8:01:55 PM by teddy

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It seems that quite a few of them, like 'Lady and the Tramp 2' and 'Little Mermaid 2' generally have the same basic plot of the main characters from the first movie having children who are totally rebellious, and their parents are trying to keep them away from trouble related to their pasts.

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The Jungle Book 2 I remember just being mediocre for how completely superfluous it was. They had many other books to look into for material (no matter how loosely), and even an early script from the 60s they used for an old LP. Hell they maybe even could have done something with it's Tale Spin links (screw that, an actual Talespin movie likely would have been more fun).

Instead we get what is practically a low quality remake of the original. It seemed so wasteful, especially since the first film felt more like a portfolio of amusing characters that could have been used more.

edited 26th Oct '14 6:50:05 PM by Psi001