Comic books fans are most familiar with this; Serialized comic stories go on for decades, and over the years there are some elements that you find. . . not so great. So you choose to ignore them. Sometimes, the company themselves chooses to ignore them, and you get events like Crisis On Infinite Earths, which wipes the slate clean (or, at the very least, attempts to). Then, there are the almost unnoticed retcons. How many random X-Men storylines have just been uncerimoniously dropped? Anyone heard from Maggot lately?

So, in that spirit, I would like to explore some of the continuity elements of different media that I just flat out refuse to acknowlege.

The ending of L.A. Confidential. The movie, not the book. Whenever I watch this film, I wait until the poster image, the perfect moment; A man on the ground, a badge held high, guns drawn, fade to black, and. . . stop the movie! Because after that, all I get is an expository wrap up scene for everyone who wasn’t following the film, and a ridiculous “love conquers all” coda that seems to come from another film entirely. Weak.

Bone claws. The golden age of X-Men comics, for me, was the Marc Silvestri/Jim Lee/Chris Claremont years. After Claremont left the writing duties to others, we ended up with the horrors of the nineties. One of the most horrifying elements of this was the revelation that Wolverine was not inserted with adamantium blades in his arms, but rather that the adamantium was coating retractable claws that were already there. That were made out of bone. This is something that was easy to ignore for awhile, until the Origins mini-series really solidified it. Lame.

The Star Wars Prequels. I’m not going to do an extensive list of every sequel to a great film that I choose to ignore (Godfather III), because that would just take forever. In this case, I just wanted to point out that while I actually enjoy the Star Wars Prequels on their own merits, I in no way think of them as being the precursers to my beloved original trilogy. Having watched them straight through, from episode 1 to episode 6, I came to the conclusion that the tonal shift is just too great between the two series, not to mention the continuity errors. Take this line of dialogue from the original film, for example; “This was your father’s lightsaber. He wanted you to have it, when you were old enough. Though your Uncle wouldn’t allow it. He thought you’d follow old Obi-Wan on some damn idealistic crusade, just like your father did”. What? I know, the whole “certain point of view” thing, but I really get the impression that Lucas didn’t have this mapped out as much as he would like us to think.

Series finales that don’t seem to get what made the show likeable in the first place. Extras. Seinfeld. This particularly goes out to the Sex and the City movie. You had a great show, which climaxed perfectly in a final episode directed by HBO regular Tim Van Patten. It’s porn for women, HBO knows that, and they delivered in spades. Then you had the movie, which was a ludicrously long, depressing mess which was not the payoff that the fans deserved. Memories, erased.

Maxwell Lord. Actually, screw it; All modern comic book continuity. I’m expecting Captain America to wake up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette any day now.