Had to go with Star Trek. Once they needed a temporal police force that was interfering in everything, everywhen..... well, I was done with Star Trek until the reboot.
Highlander would have been a solid choice, except in reality, there is just one movie and everything else is a myth perpetrated by evil men and women.
Since the entire point of the first two Terminator movies was obviated by the more recent two, I have declared those apocryphal as well, which leaves a happy 2-movie series that is fairly neatly tied up with a little bow.
I'm not going to vote, too many good (bad) choices! But its probably either the DC or Marvel universe, simply because they've been around considerably longer than any of the others.
Just thought it was worth explaining why I thought these were top candidates:
Star Trek: Animated Series, ST Phase II, Enterprise, non-canon novels, JJ Abrams reboot, "apocryphal" ST V, Star Fleet Battles
Star Wars: Disappointing prequels, Extended Universe, Star Wars Xmas Special, retconning with rerelease ("Han shot first")
Highlander: Has a sequel ever deviated more from the premise of the original?
Terminator: Time travel and many authors/directors = problems across four movies and a television series.
Transformers: Many various Japanese and American incarnations, including Michael Bey's summer explosion-fests.
Fallout: Change in setting and tone in Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, and to a lesser extent in Fallout 2, and the complete revamp of play style in Fallout 3, not to mention the cancelled Van Buren and sequels to BoS and Tactics.
Traveller: Rebellion and virus, not to mention several different systems including GURPS and D20.
Doctor Who: Some of the oldest episodes of this series no longer even EXIST, and how many iterations have we seen?
Marvel Universe: Suffers from alternate timelines, heroes who migrate through the years so that major events always happened "10 years ago," even if first mentioned in 1975, characters who appear and disappear, etc. Poster child for continuity questions: Spider-Man.
DC Universe: Same as with Marvel, but exacerbated by the fact that most of DC's major characters came from sources outside of a common continuity. Poster child for continuity questions: Green Lantern.
While Trek is notorius for a lack of strong continuity (and fans who get upset at perceived discontinuity), I wouldn't count Phase II as a part of the problem. Phase II is a show that never happened. Also, the new JJ Abrams film is "within" continuity, if only by creating an alternate timeline.
Star Wars: Disappointing prequels, Extended Universe, Star Wars Xmas Special, retconning with rerelease ("Han shot first")
While the prequels were disapointed to many, they weren't continuity problems. It's mostly early stuff that was created before LucasFilm became the master of continuity it is now. The Xmas special and early novels sometimes got iffy, but the majority of the Extended Universe is pretty consistent.
Highlander: Has a sequel ever deviated more from the premise of the original?
Other than the central theme of the original film, "There can be only one!", the later movies and tv series seemed pretty consistent to me . . . but then again, it's been over a decade since I've seen any of it.
Transformers: Many various Japanese and American incarnations, including Michael Bey's summer explosion-fests.
Each new Transformers cartoon series, and the movies, are a reimagining of the original concept. There is no discontinuity between series, as each series is "new". But when you look at the GI universe (original series plus licensed comics), there is plenty of wacky discontinuity. Not sure about the later series.
Marvel Universe: Suffers from alternate timelines, heroes who migrate through the years so that major events always happened "10 years ago," even if first mentioned in 1975, characters who appear and disappear, etc. Poster child for continuity questions: Spider-Man.
DC Universe: Same as with Marvel, but exacerbated by the fact that most of DC's major characters came from sources outside of a common continuity. Poster child for continuity questions: Green Lantern.
Isn't much of the seeming discontinuity explained through alternate universes and alternate timelines? Either way, it gets pretty damn confusing right quick. I watch a lot of the animated series based off of various Marvel and DC properties, and when I get interested in a specific character or team I look them up on Wikipedia. Trying to sort out some of the more convuluted characters is mind-numbingly crazy!
I think both companies should do five-year arcs for their major characters, and that each "arc" is a reboot with new stories. So the only continuity you have to worry about when reading the latest Superman comic is what has happened over the past 5 years or so!
Fallout: Change in setting and tone in Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, and to a lesser extent in Fallout 2, and the complete revamp of play style in Fallout 3, not to mention the cancelled Van Buren and sequels to BoS and Tactics.
I don't think a change in game style is any way related to problems with continuity. It's just a different game set in the same universe.
Continuity errors would be things like (Star Wars) Han Solo claiming to not believe in the force despite the fact Jedi were prevalent in the universe he grew up in. To further the lack of continuity, Chewbacca was sitting right next to him and should have b-slapped him for being an idiot after explaining he ran around with Yoda on his back.
Star Trek isn't too bad continuity-wise. STV is canon, silly as hell, but still considered canon regardless of Roddenberry's views. Enterprise was not that big a problem to overall continuity, and is also canon. The reboot is probably considered canon, but I haven't seen it yet, and I don't what it did to continuity yet. TAS is an iffy case. It mostly wasn't considered canon, but then Paramount released the series to DVD, and the official website includes data points from the show. Still, it probably doesn't violate too much canon.
Phase II I assume is the fan production? That, the novels, SFB, and other games, comics, books, whatever are not canon in any way and do not affect continuity unless an element from them are imported into canon. Trek canon is pretty much anything that was aired on TV or a movie and that's it. I'd say there's holes in Trek's continuity, but probably not as bad as they could be.
Star Wars: Disappointing prequels, Extended Universe, Star Wars Xmas Special, retconning with rerelease ("Han shot first")
Star Wars may not have huge continuity problems. The biggest overall problem to continuity was Lucas' decision to make the Jedi a celibate order in the prequels. This contradicts some earlier EU material which assumed the Jedi had families, since there was no hint in Jedi that Luke and Leia were the result of a forbidden relationship. There might be a few other small details, but otherwise not a big problem, largely because the prequel era was originally off-limits until all the movies were released. Now the EU may have many more errors given the sheer amount of material but I don't think overall continuity is badly compromised.
Highlander: Has a sequel ever deviated more from the premise of the original?
Ah Highlander, there was more than one. Wouldn't be a big problem if the second and third movies were the only addition to the franchise because everyone just ignores them. But then there's the TV series, which later spun off two more movies and a second series. The TV series has its own group of fans which complicates matters, and the show itself was pretty good. The fourth movie tried to bridge the movies and the TV series, but didn't work as well as it could. And the fifth movie was a horrible low-budget mess that sacrificed just about all the cool stuff in the TV series for a lot of really pointless action scense. Made worse by the fact that said movie was produced by the same people who did the show.
Terminator: Time travel and many authors/directors = problems across four movies and a television series.
Don't really know here. Really, T2 should have ended it, given that it resolved the whole situation with Skynet.
Fallout: Change in setting and tone in Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, and to a lesser extent in Fallout 2, and the complete revamp of play style in Fallout 3, not to mention the cancelled Van Buren and sequels to BoS and Tactics.
Not really familiar with Doctor Who, but each new Doctor doesn't really violate continuity, right? As a Time Lord he has 13 lives, and there've only been 9 Doctors IIRC.
Marvel Universe: Suffers from alternate timelines, heroes who migrate through the years so that major events always happened "10 years ago," even if first mentioned in 1975, characters who appear and disappear, etc. Poster child for continuity questions: Spider-Man.
DC Universe: Same as with Marvel, but exacerbated by the fact that most of DC's major characters came from sources outside of a common continuity. Poster child for continuity questions: Green Lantern.
Phase II I assume is the fan production? That, the novels, SFB, and other games, comics, books, whatever are not canon in any way and do not affect continuity unless an element from them are imported into canon. Trek canon is pretty much anything that was aired on TV or a movie and that's it. I'd say there's holes in Trek's continuity, but probably not as bad as they could be.
Phase II is not a fan production, but rather was a planned TV series that would have been a sequel to the original series with the original cast (or most of them, at least). It obviously didn't happen, but many of its ideas were recycled into the first Star Trek movie.
A book was published years ago on the subject with concept drawings and excerpts from the series "bible" and so on, so despite the fact the tv show never happened, there is a lot known about "what could have been".
