Footnote #56 - Prequels

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Inspired by the recent podcast episode discussing movie musical Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024), the first Fantasy/Animation Footnote of 2025 takes on the politics of film prequels, and how these curious entries into film series and the reflexive gestures that it often makes to earlier moments in a broader narrative offer up a way of understanding processes and theories of adaptation. Topics for this episode include the prequel’s relationship to sequels, midquels, and remakes, and its broader fascination with chronology, history, and origin; the commercial value of prequels and the threat of temporality; cultural transference and how such adaptations highlight differences between media products; and the prequel’s status as an evolving industrial category as much as a device used to tell a story.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Jess-Cooke, Carolyn. 2009. Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Jess-Cooke, Carolyn and Constantine Verevis, eds. 2010. Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel. Albany: State University of New York Press.

• Fleury, James, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Stephen Mamber. 2019. The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Henderson, Stuart. 2014. The Hollywood Sequel: History & Form, 1911-2010. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Ann Klein, Amanda and ‎R. Barton Palmer, eds. 2016. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press.

• Verevis, Constantine. “Remakes, Sequels, Prequels.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation, ed. Thomas M. Leitch, 267-284. Oxford: Oxford University Press.