GHOSTBUSTERS II
With Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis.
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Of course, some of the appeal is little more than the reassurance of brand names. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is only the most extreme example, the screen fairly bursting with highly marketable signs, insignia, and symbols. In fact, the Star Trek series is an elementary semiological wonderland whose crudity is only compensated for by its fecundity, an everlasting rondelet of reflexive remarks.
Of course the Bond films, strictly speaking, aren’t sequels; they are parts of a series, though a highly formulaic one. Without getting all academic about it, the difference between a series and a sequel (or, to get perfectly befuddled, a series of sequels) is that a series is character-driven (even if the characters tend to do the same things over and over again) and sequels are event- or incident-driven (even if the events are performed by the same people over and over again). Thus, the Bonds and the Treks are more properly series; the Indiana Jones films sequels. The Dirty Harry movies make up a series; the Star Wars pictures are sequels.
I once read an interview with one of the directors of the Abbott and Costello films–it was either Arthur Lubin or Charles Lamont. He recalled that it was very easy to film the pair because they only required a script about half the average length. As the comedy team roamed the set and came across a prop, say a tree, one would remark to the other, “Let’s do the tree bit here.” Years of burlesque had left the two with an inexhaustible supply of routines they could insert into the action to fill out the movie. The relevance of the bit to the action was a function of the duo’s kooky response to the world at large, their ability to comically transform reality into their own fantasy.
