Tangequels

(Tangential Sequels)
You film buffs will know that Hitch was fond of employing a device of his own invention which he called the "McGuffin". I was never a big Hitchcock fan, so I'm sure that there are better examples, but the one that comes to my mind was in one of his later flicks...maybe Family Plot...I'm not sure (this post is actually starting to sound McGuffinesque); to wit; We open on a street scene; the camera follows a man walking a dog...(Hitch himself if I recall in one of his walk-ons)...we've established that he's a character of interest...or is he?...No!, it's the guy that just fell to his death from the balcony in the BG...the man walking the dog was the McGuffin...a Red Herring by any other name...which brings me to the somewhat similar concept of Tangential Sequels...call them Tangequels (but remember I coined the term here first!)...a Tangequel takes a character, script reference (preferably, but not necessarily obscure), or related set of circumstances and goes off on a whole other tangent.

One possible Tangequel would be a Klingon adaptation from Shakespeare alluded to in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country...a text for a Klingon Hamlet exists, published as part of the Shakespeare Restoration Project, undertaken by a dedicated group of scholarly Trek and linguistics fans...

When I first saw Disney's Holes I thought that a Western based on the tale of the outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow would have made a great Tangequel...and vehicle for the oh so very lovely Patricia Arquette...

Remember all those humans who stepped off the Mothership in Close Encounters?...we see most of them in silhouette...no certainty as to how they're attired...what if one of them had been whisked away from Renaissance Europe and returned to modern Wyoming?...that'd be some debriefing and reaclimatisation...where and how and how long did they live on another planet?...living amongst strange creatures with a technology akin to sorcery...then returned to Earth to live amongst humans long settled in the "New World" , again with magical, but less sophisticated technology.

How about Ed Chigliaks movie?...Tangequel to the T.V. series Northern Exposure...maybe Woody Allen could co-direct it.

Last but not least where's the Wyld Stallyns album which features the cuts that finally brought peace to mankind...or the Rockumentary about Stallyns Bill and Ted?