Annie: A Royal Adventure! is a Made-for-TV Movie that premiered on ABC in 1995. It is presumably a sequel to the 1982 film Annie (at least that's how IMDb recognizes it), but it has none of the same cast and is not a musical (unless you count a single reprise of "Tomorrow" at the end). The film has a Sequel Goes Foreign plot in which Annie, Warbucks, and company travel to England with Joan Collins playing a Rich Bitch villainess. Features Ian McDiarmid as an Absent-Minded Professor and a carrot-top Ashley Johnson as the title character, but Grace Farrell neither appears nor is mentioned.
This film provides examples of:
- Abusive Mom: Lady Hogbottom is this to Rupert, albeit mildly.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Eonite. It's originally from the comic strip, as is its inventor Professor Eli Eon.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: Lady Hogbottom, played by Joan Collins.
- Artistic License – Engineering: Rupert and Murphy are on the deck of an ocean liner but they need to hide, so they slip through a conveniently open door into a darkened room. Rupert turns on the light and they realise that they're in the ship's meat locker, hung with sides of beef. Because the meat locker of an ocean liner is accessible through an unlocked door which leads onto the promenade deck.
- Artistic License – History:
- Upon arriving in Britain, Warbucks meets with Winston Churchill, who is identified as the Prime Minister. Churchill did not become Prime Minister until 1940, yet the setting is clearly pre-World War II. Furthermore, the first movie was set in 1933 and Annie was ten then, so if it's 1940 then she should be seventeen by now, but she's obviously not.
- When Annie is working as a newspaper girl in the opening scenes, the headline (which she reads aloud for us) is "world population soars to 2.5 billion". That didn't happen until about 1950. (Although given the preponderance of 1950s automobiles, maybe they just changed the setting from the 1930s to the 1950s for some reason. That would account for Churchill being Prime Minister.)
- Fortune Teller: Annie meets one near the beginning of the movie, who makes some ominous predictions. It seems a little surprising at first that Warbucks takes these predictions seriously... but then you remember this is the same universe where Punjab can makes things float in midair and such. Either that or he's just humoring Annie.
- Genre Shift: Not a musical and solidly in the Snooping Little Kid genre.
- High-Class Gloves: Lady Hogbottom wears elbow-length (or even longer) gloves in almost every scene she appears in.
- Historical Domain Character: Since the original featured Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, let's have Churchill and the British king this time! That leaves Stalin and Hitler as the most obvious options for a threequel!
- I Just Want to Be Free: Rupert would rather run away with Charity as his bride rather than co-operate in his mother’s scheme to reclaim her birthright.
- It Will Never Catch On: Inverted:Warbucks: Yes, my advice would be, you reach a lot of people by radio, but television is the future.
- Kidnapped Scientist: Professor Eon, in the last act.
- Little Stowaway: Annie and Hannah smuggle Molly along on their voyage to England. Miss Hannigan finds out and runs after the ship as it departs, yelling "Stowaway! Stowaway!" Annie manages to convince Warbucks that she's saying "Stay awhile! Stay awhile!"
- Made-for-TV Movie
- Remember the New Guy?: You remember Annie's best friend Hannah from the first movie, right? Hannah even "remembers" being in Miss Hannigan's orphanage with Annie, so she can't be someone Annie met later.
- Sequel Escalation: The original movie was about Annie being adopted by Warbucks. In this movie, they save England from a James Bond villain-type plot.
- Sequel Goes Foreign: Annie goes to England!
- Sequel Non-Entity: Grace is gone, with no explanation. Also, all the other orphans except for Molly. Rooster and Lily are presumably still rotting in jail, so they have an excuse for not being mentioned.
- Surrounded by Idiots: Like so many other family-friendly villains, Lady Hogbottom has to put up with her spineless son Rupert, her dim-witted henchman Murphy, her kleptomaniac maid Charity and her narcoleptic butler Darwood, who are nowhere near as menacing as she is.
- Tempting Fate:
- Annie: [doing homework on castles] Dungeons and secret passageways. Why do we have to study this anyway? Who puts people in dungeons anymore?
- Later, while imprisoned in said dungeon:Annie: I'm sure there are no snakes.
- Unexpected Successor: Lady Hogbottom wants to blow up Buckingham Palace in order to become this trope.
