4

Gilligan's Planet Was a Sequel to Gilligan's Island

Filmation/MGM Television

Those morons on Gilligan's Island eventually made it off the island. They then immediately crash-landed on an alien planet.

Gilligan's Island's ratings were never great by the standards of its era. It pulled in anywhere between 13 million to 11 million viewers per episode -- middling numbers for the '60s, but amazing by today's standards. It made up for its waning ratings by being a pop cultural success. Think of it as the 1960s version of Mad Men -- relatively low ratings, but a massive cultural footprint.

Gilligan Island's legacy carried on into the '80s, when an animated sequel series was produced. The Professor, who couldn't patch a hole in a boat, made a spaceship out of wood.

3

The Munsters Today Was a Sequel to The Munsters

NBCUniversal

If you like shows where the premise can be summed up as, "Because fuck you, that's why!" then you'll love The Munsters, a show that never once tried to explain why, in 1960's suburban California, a bunch of dead people were being witty like every other sitcom family, pretending being dead was cool but then wondering why normal humans would freak out when they saw a bunch of revived flesh and a werewolf boy walking around and talking like that shit was cool.

2

Extreme Ghostbusters Was a Sequel to The Real Ghostbusters

Sony Pictures Television

In the '80s, every popular movie got a cartoon spinoff. John Rambo sure does kill a lot of people in his movies. Get some Koreans to draw him and slap it on TV every Saturday.

Hey, in Robocop, wasn't a police officer gruesomely murdered by a gang of drugged-up psychos? Whatever. Make it a cartoon.

The Real Ghostbusters followed the same logic. The show kind of / sort of took place in the same universe as the movies, so it continued the adventures of the Ghostbusters team we already knew and loved. Though, good luck trying to convince six-year-old me that this Peter Venkman ...

Columbia TriStar Television/ Sony Pictures Television
Fun Fact: voiced by Dave Coulier in seasons three-seven.

1

Team Knight Rider and Knight Rider (2008) Were Sequels to Knight Rider (1982)

NBCUniversal

Just a few days before I began writing this entry, I caught a handful of episodes of the original Knight Rider series very late at night on a channel so obscure I think it might be broadcasting from an underground bunker in the past. The show has not aged well. Hasselhoff mugs with such porn star gusto after every line that it wouldn't be surprising if the conversation topic shifted to sausage and the camera panned down to show his cock sticking out of a pizza. It was terribly written, terribly acted, terribly directed, terribly lit, and terribly edited. I find it shocking that it was ever popular, and even more shocking that it spawned not one but two -- GODDAMN TWO -- sequel shows.

The first was Team Knight Rider. After over a decade off the air, a deranged idiot who lied his way into a TV executive job carried out the desires of the multitude of voices in his head that cried out for a sequel to Knight Rider. The show supposed that the Foundation for Law and Government (the shadowy organization that Michael Knight worked for in the original series) has expanded its operations from the back of an 18-wheeler in the original series to a high-tech military cargo jet.

Disney
Sorry. Wrong picture of a show about a shadowy government agency that uses a cargo plane as a home base.

Instead of one person driving a super-intelligent, crime-fighting talking car, it was five (in five separate vehicles; they weren't all crammed into one Trans Am). Five is precisely how many no-name actors it takes to fill the shoes of one David Hasselhoff.

Team Knight Rider lasted one season, and ended with a cliffhanger meant to signal the return of Hasselhoff as Michael Knight:

The second sequel was 2008's part sequel, part reboot series for NBC. Twenty-five years after the events of the original show, Michael Knight's son fills the indentation of his father's ass in K.I.T.T.'s driver seat. He and his team went on adventures and fought crime and did all manner of Knight Rider-y shit for 17 viewer-less episodes, before the show was canceled and the world collectively decided it was time to stop trying to revive the skeletal remains of an '80s show, which I am convinced people only watched to hear its dope-ass opening theme song.

In the end, the Knight Rider franchise has a lot in common with its star, David Hasselhoff: it's corny and not particularly good at what it tries to do, yet it keeps coming back in new, painfully embarrassing ways.

Luis wonders if any of you know the actor who played Clarissa's dad, and if he was indeed the person who helped a young Luis and his mom with a flat tire on the south-bound lane of I-95 after a trip to Universal Studios Orlando circa 1993. He swears it was him. You can find Luis on Twitter and Tumblr.

For more from Luis, check out 5 Actors Who Got Typecast in Bizarrely Specific Ways and The 3 Most Ridiculous VCR Board Games.

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