2020 has been a big year for reboots of beloved franchises. The Hunger Games
finally got a new book a full decade after the last book in the series came
out, and don't worry I'm not going to give you any spoilers about it here
because I haven't read it yet. It's called The Ballad of Songbirds and
Snakes and it's a prequel, it's a villain origin story for
President Snow, and I have had to mute so many words on Twitter to avoid spoilers,
I don't know how much longer I can keep getting away with it. You've probably
also heard that Twilight is getting a follow-up, twelve years after the last
book in that series, Breaking Dawn, came out, though only five years since
Stephenie Meyer released her gender swapped Twilight reimagining, Life and
Death, that came out in 2015. But now Stephenie Meyer is finally publishing
Midnight Sun. And those of you who were hardcore Twilight fans back in the day,
as I very much was, will remember that Midnight Sun was going to be a
reimagining of Twilight from Edwards' perspective, but after the first chapter
got leaked online, Stephenie Meyer abandoned the project, and we were all
heartbroken. And now it's finally coming out. And outside the book world, it's also
just been announced that we are getting another Legally Blonde sequel. So like I
said 2020 is the year of the reboots. But in this video I wanted to ask your
thoughts on whether you think that book reboots ever actually live up to the
original. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this so please let's get
debating in the comments. So for example a really hyped reboot from last year was
of course the Testaments, Margaret Atwood's follow-up to The Handmaid's
Tale, a massive 34 years after that original book came out. And it was really
well received. So it had this really exciting publicity campaign that started
when Vintage just shared solid green blocks across all their social media to
hint that something was coming, and the excitement just kept building, nobody
could stop talking about this book, and it did of course go on to jointly win
the Booker Prize, with Girl, Woman, Other. So a massive success. And another really
famously well-received one is Dr. Sleep, which is Stephen King's follow-up to The
Shining, 36 years after he published that book. And this one is about Danny, the
child from the original The Shining, now as this psychologically traumatised
adult with psychic abilities. The book shot to the top of the New York
Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2013 Bram Stoker award for Best
Novel in the horror genre. A more controversial reboot happened in 2015
when Go Set a Watchman came out by Harper Lee, 55 years after To Kill a
Mockingbird. And the controversy here was whether or not the book was in fact a
sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird or actually more of a first draft with a
lot of things significantly changed. Either way Go Set a Watchman is a really
interesting novel that's largely about race, though fans of To Kill a
Mockingbird did find it quite hard to read because the character of Atticus
Finch is really different in this novel. This version is a much more racist
character, he associates with the KKK, he could not be more different than the
beloved version of Atticus Finch who made it into To Kill a Mockingbird.
Something else really fun is when a sequel or reinterpretation of a book is
written by a brand new author. So Beyond Platform 13 in by Sibeal Pounder is a
really good example of this. This one is a lovely children's adventure story
that's written as a sequel to the original Secret of Platform 13 by Eva
Ibbotson, and written by an author who is herself a massive fan of Eva Ibbotson, so
it's kind of this celebration of 25 years since the original. For an even
bigger time gap, Dracula Undead was written a hundred and twelve years after
the original Dracula, and again there's a close connection between the authors.
Dracula Undead was written by Dacre Stoker who is the great grandson of Bram
Stoker. Dracula Undead is the official sequel to Dracula, endorsed by the Stoker
family, but Dacre Stoker also went on to write a book called Dracul which is the
prequel to Dracula. But then sometimes when the rebooted books are written by a
new author they can be a bit more critical of the original. So a really
famous and really good example here is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
This is a feminist, anti-colonial response to Jane Eyre, written 119 years
after the original. This book retells the story of Mr. Rochester's mad wife Bertha.
Here we meet her as a Creole heiress named Antoinette who ends up in this
unhappy marriage with an Englishman who renames her Bertha, declares her mad,
and well, we know the rest. And then the final type of
reboot I wants to talk about is when a series gets rebooted a few times in
different ways. So for a great example of this let's look at Bridget Jones by
Helen Fielding. So this actually started life as a newspaper column written by
Helen Fielding but without a byline, so it was seemingly these real stories
of a young single woman in her thirties called Bridget Jones. And the column was
so successful that Helen Fielding then turned it into two novels: Bridget
Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason. And sidenote, if we're being
really pernickety, the books themselves are actually reimaginations
of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion respectively, so they're kind of
already reboots. But anyway these books were super popular,
they were both turned into movies, and then a few years later Helen Fielding
rebooted her newspaper column, but this time diverging from the happy ending of
the books and placing Bridget right back in the centre of a love triangle with
Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver. Then there was another eight year gap before Hele
Fielding released a new Bridget Jones novel, Mad About the Boy, which basically ignored
the intermediate newspaper column and worked as a straight sequel from the
books, with Bridget Jones now being in her 50s. And then finally there was the
third movie, Bridget Jones's Baby which was mostly an adaptation of those
intermediate newspaper columns, but with a few things changed all over again. So
some of that is a bit confusing but I think it's really fun being able to
follow a beloved character like Bridget Jones in slightly different scenarios
and see how differently her life might have turned out in each one. And I would
love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Do book reboots ever live up to the
original for you? Can sometimes a reinterpretation written later down the
line actually be even better, or is it never quite the same as that
first time you read it? And which are your favourite reboots or sequels? I
would love to hear all of this, do let us know and then click through to browse
our playlists full of videos all about classic books. Which ones of these do you
think now need a reboot? See you next time.