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Un-Reboot - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon Nov 26 2018

Un-Reboot (trope)

So, you have a classic film or series that is beloved by an entire generation. It has great critical acclaim, broke all sorts of box office records, and has a massively loyal and devoted fanbase. However, several years have now passed and someone decides that a remake of it is a good way to cash in on its success. By updating for a modern audience and adding references to the original, it seems like it could be successful.

Maybe the reboot doesn't quite work, proving to be an Audience-Alienating Premise to fans of the original and new viewers just aren't interested (again, for the same reasons). Perhaps the reboot is warmly received, but fans still want more from the original timeline. So, how do you rectify the situation?

A sequel set in the same continuity that goes back to the roots of the original, while forgetting the remake ever happened. You bring back the original cast and continue the story while making loving Continuity Nods to truly tap into nostalgia.

Forms of this include:

Examples:

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Anime and Manga 

Comic Books 

  • DC Comics:
    • DC Rebirth is considered as this due to the mediocre reception of its New 52 initiative. However, rather than saying nothing that happened since the last reboot counts, it's a soft un-reboot, "revealing" that some people and elements are more like their earlier selves than it appeared, and some characters formerly deemed not to exist just hadn't been encountered yet but are still there and also more like you remember than not.
    • Dark Nights: Death Metal and Infinite Frontier brought the Rebirth-era Myth Arc to a close and restored not just the pre-New 52 continuity to canon, but had it so that all past continuity was merged into one, with Broad Strokes employed to make it all work. Generally in practice, continuity tends to bow closer to pre-New 52, but with characters introduced in the New 52 era kept and their history tied into the pre-existing continuity.
  • John Byrne's run on Doom Patrol was notorious for being a full-on reboot that completely discarded the events of every preceding volume, Byrne's stated reason for this direction being due to concerns that relying too much on prior canon would alienate new readers who weren't up to speed on the previous comics. Reception wasn't great and led to the series being cancelled at 18 issues, afterwards Geoff Johns seized the opportunity to have the events of Infinite Crisis create a Cosmic Retcon that reinstated all the preceding Doom Patrol comics' events as canon, though this didn't completely discard the events of John Byrne's run, as Negative Man, the Chief and the finally resurrected Elasti-Girl as well as Nudge and Grunt (two of the additional teammates introduced in John Byrne's run) were retained afterwards (with Nudge and Grunt even returning at the beginning of Keith Giffen's subsequent run, albeit only to kill off Nudge and have Grunt run off with Nudge's body), which would indicate that the events of the John Byrne series still happened in some form.
  • The "Retroboot" of Legion of Super-Heroes, which not only returned to the original Legion continuity after two hard reboots, but also undid the softer reboot of the "Five Years Later" era to create something more like if the Bronze Age Legion had just kept happening and been modernized. For added measure, it kept the Reboot and Threeboot Legion continuities by explaining they actually occurred in alternate realities, the destroyed Earth-247 and the still existing Earth-Prime.
  • When Rogue Trooper was rebooted in 1990, he was replaced with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute named Friday, who survived a similar massacre of his fellow G.I.s. Things got really messy when both continuities were merged, which eventually led to the original Rogue being killed off. After Friday's story was finally concluded and the entire Tor Cyan solo stories that emerged from Spin-Off Mercy Heights were done, Gordon Rennie began penning new stories set during the original Rogue's hunt for the Traitor General.
  • Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman: "Vendetta" by Josh Elder seems to take place in a never reached point in the Wonder Woman (1987) (Post-Crisis) continuity, where Amazons Attack! (2007) never happened and instead things played out in a trajectory that made sense with the plot Greg Rucka had been building before the story got derailed by events outside of Wonder Woman's book.

Films — Live-Action 

Live-Action TV 

  • Battlestar Galactica creator Glen Larson wanted to make a second season that would start with Starbuck waking up from a dream where Galactica 1980 happened.
  • The Chucky series shares continuity with the original Child's Play movies and not the 2019 remake.
  • Cobra Kai is a Distant Sequel to the original The Karate Kid. The creators have confirmed that all four of the original films are part of its canon, but The Karate Kid (2010) is not. However, this is longer the case as of 2025 due to the release of Karate Kid: Legends, a crossover movie in which Ralph Macchio from the original films and Jackie Chan from the reboot meet (with its story establishing that Mr. Han from the 2010 film knew Mr. Miyagi from the originals whereas The Karate Kid (2010) was originally a completely standalone entry).
  • Evil Dead: Several years after Army of Darkness, the series got a reboot with an all new cast starting the story from scratch... or so we thought. The cameo by Bruce Campbell's Ash at the end kinda leaves it all up in the air. However, a few years later, the story returned to series protagonist Ash Williams with the TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, which featured none of the characters or scenarios from the remake film. Word of God always said the remake was a Stealth Sequel and there were hopes of a crossover movie where Mia met Ash or having her appear in the TV series but they never came to pass. Evil Dead Rise also featured a new cast but heavily implied that both the original trilogy and TV show and the 2013 film are still canon to it.
  • Seven years after the original Perry Mason series starring Raymond Burr ended its run, The New Perry Mason, starring Monte Markham in the title role, had an unspectacular run of fifteen episodes from 1973-74. Over a decade later came the made-for-TV-movie Perry Mason Returns, which brought back the surviving cast of the original series (including, above all, Raymond Burr) while disregarding the New reboot.
  • Star Trek: The 2009 reboot creates a new parallel timeline of Kirk-era movies (officially the "Kelvin timeline" but sometimes called the "Abramsverse"), but is still a very loose continuation of the events of the original timeline in the sense that the divergent timeline was created by the actions of time travelers from the original one. Come 2017, the sixth live-action series of the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery, is also set in the Kirk era but in the original "prime" timeline. Star Trek: Picard, debuting in 2020, is set in the prime timeline as well, although it's a sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation, not a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series like Discovery — and it does take into account what the 2009 film said about Romulus having been destroyed in the prime timeline (an event that led into the Time Travel that created the Abramsverse). Discovery would later confirm that the Abramsverse still exists alongside the Primeverse, with at least one crossing between the 'verses having occurred as part of the Temporal Wars.

Tabletop Games 

  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • When Wizards of the Coast launched Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, in addition to an assortment of drastic rules changes, the decision was also made to effectively turn the edition into the Ultimate Universe of Dungeons and Dragons: the "base" setting was switched from Greyhawk, which had been the presumed core of both editions of Advanced D&D through to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, to a completely new setting called the Nentir Vale; The Multiverse of the Great Wheel was replaced by the new World Axis cosmology; and in general the game's lore was rewritten to sharing only Broad Strokes with what came before, as opposed to the "build up, expand and sometimes Retcon" approach that had characterized the lore shifts from 1st to 2nd to 3rd edition. Individual settings were also re-written to conform to this general structure, even the more unique Eberron setting, which now included Baator and the Abyss despite how ill they fit its established lore. The result was incredibly controversial, and the subsequent Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition actively marketed itself as a return to the original lore, which made it hugely successful... although, ironically, it would also begin heavily retconning its own lore after its initial debut, and by the end of 2021 would be as different from 3rd edition as 4th edition had been when it came to lore.
    • The Forgotten Realms setting underwent a drastic lore shakeup during the shift from 3rd edition to 4th edition. The timeframe was advanced to a full century after a magical apocalypse known as the Spellplague drastically altered the cosmology and the landscape. This proved so unpopular that a new magical catastrophe called the Sundering was introduced to effectively retcon the setting back to being as close to what it looked like in 3rd edition as possible for 5th edition.
  • In 2004, the World of Darkness franchise was rebooted with a new series of games set in a new continuity. However, in 2011 the original setting was given a new lease on life in the form of the 20th anniversary editions of Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension and Wraith: The Oblivion, which were later expanded upon with entirely new supplements. This proved so successful that in 2015 they not only announced that Vampire: The Masquerade would be getting a 5th edition, but that the rebooted setting would have its name changed from World of Darkness to Chronicles of Darkness to distinguish the two. Not quite a straight example, though, since Chronicles of Darkness remains its own distinct continuity and continues to get support alongside the Classic World of Darkness.
  • In 2014, Warhammer got a Soft Reboot in the form of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar but the original setting got a new lease on life thanks to Total War: Warhammer. This eventually led to the announcement of Warhammer: The Old World in 2019, though Age of Sigmar would continue to be expanded upon after.

Video Games 

Visual Novel 

Western Animation 

  • Downplayed with Blinky Bill; the 1990s animated series got a CGI reboot in 2015, with a new TV series the following year. Despite the reboot's sizeable marketing push, the new movie and series angered many fans of the original, so modern merchandise later went back to using the more widely accepted 1990s designs of the characters.
  • The critical and financial failure of The Powerpuff Girls (2016) led to the new continuity it established (which saw the girls being recast among other controversial changes) being discontinued following its conclusion in 2019. Further depictions of the eponymous Powerpuff Girls since then (such as in Multi Versus) have been based on the original 1998 versions, complete with bringing back the original voices.
  • After the 2014 Rainbow Brite series failed to make an impression due to poor marketing, later merchandise for the franchise went back to the more-well known 1980s designs for the characters.
  • After the critical failure of VeggieTales spin-off/reboot series VeggieTales in the House (which made a number of changes to the show that nobody, especially the show's fanbase, appreciated), the series was rebooted a second time in the form of The VeggieTales Show, which scrapped the characters' controversial redesigns in favor of updated versions of their more familiar "classic" designs and ignored the changes made in In the House in favor of going back to the original show's roots. The only references to In the House that have been made since have been the occasional cameo of characters introduced during that show (and even then they have pointedly never been any of In the House's many Scrappies), redesigned to match the show's normal art style.