10 Movie Sequels That Completely Flipped The Original
4. An American Tail: Fievel Goes West Randomly Became A Western
Released in 1986, Don Bluth’s seminal family adventure An American Tail follows the loveable (if maybe a little bit incredibly whiny) Fievel, a young mouse trying to find his family in America after losing them during their emigration from the Imperial Russian territory of the Ukraine. Sounds about right for the director who brought you the anti-animal testing Secret of NIMH and would go on to create another “Russian family reunited through an adventure” story in 1998’s Anastasia.
But does that story sound a little less, er, kid friendly and fun than you remember?
If so, it’s probably because, like a lot of nineties kids, you’re thinking of the film’s sequel An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, which plays fast and loose with periods in American history in order to tell a wild west story using the same characters in a new setting.
How about a theatrical villain in the form of John Cleese playing a camp cat whose enforcer is a tarantula modelled after Yosemite Sam and voiced by Jon Lovitz? Or an aging canine mentor played by none other than Jimmy Stewart? Maybe a bordello run by a shapely cat, and a classic western showdown where the villains are run out of a dry dustbowl desert town?
If this sounds more recognizable, it’s because An American Tail’s sequel abandons its predecessor’s tone, story, and even time period completely, and in the process creates a canonically nonsensical but undeniably fun family classic.