Coming Soon: ‘Antigone Goes to Atlanta’

As a follow-up (and we love follow-ups!) to the outrageously unfair fusillade of bad reviews that Alexandra Ripley has faced for her ground-rebreaking update of “Gone With the Wind,” we at the American Sequel Society--a multimedia conglomerate founded earlier this year to “restore the sequel to its rightful place in the cultural pantheon”--are forced once again to restate our case.

We can’t understand why Part IIs, sons of, returns of and revenges of--not to mention prequels, spin-offs, photo-novelizations, themed attractions and licensed merchandise--have fallen into such disrepute. Sequels have had a hallowed place in history dating back to the 9th Century BC, when the beloved poet Homer, who penned the first known novel, “The Iliad,” was confronted with the choice of what the second known novel should be. Homer didn’t hesitate. “It should be a sequel,” he said to himself, and he turned out “The Odyssey.” A fine sequel it was, too!

And thus a great cultural tradition was born. Sophocles followed his trend-setting tragedy “Oedipus Rex” with the equally acclaimed “Oedipus at Colonus” and “Antigone”--plays which, it has been suggested, he might well have called “Oedipus II” and “Oedipus III,” had he known about Roman numerals. John Milton’s celebrated “Paradise Regained” was a triumphant return to the territory so memorably explored in “Paradise Lost.” And the great bard himself, William Shakespeare, wrote innumerable sequels, including “Henry IV, Part II,” “Henry V,” “Henry VI, Part I,” “Henry VI, Part II,” and “Henry VI, Part III.”

We owe these great sequelizers an eternal debt--a debt that the American Sequel Society has already begun to repay by commissioning a host of classic sequels of its own, including “Pride and Extreme Prejudice,” “Brideshead Revisited Revisited,” “Solitude: The Next One Hundred Years,” “I Was a Teen-age Beowulf” and “The Egyptian Flip Book of the Dead.” We also have a major real-estate sequel project under way: a glitzy (but distinguished) new theme park based on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which we’re calling Wasteland.

However, we would like to categorize as “largely inaccurate” reports to the effect that the American Sequel Society is planning to cash in on Ms. Ripley’s incredible financial success by producing a quickie sequel to “Scarlett.” But we might consider such a project in the future. Suffice it to say that the society’s motto is: “The day after tomorrow is another day, too.”