Humble Beginnings

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The original incarnation of what is now a multi-billion-dollar multimedia franchise juggernaut.

Works where the original was some gag idly doodled on cocktail napkins, and the "sequel" was a multi-million dollar Hollywood project.

These may be considered a Spiritual Successor, Surprisingly Improved Sequel, Adaptation Expansion or More Popular Spinoff, and cause Adaptation Displacement or Sequel Displacement, depending on what you consider a sequel, successor, adaptation, and original.

See also Ascended Fanfic.

Examples of Humble Beginnings include:

Comic Books

• The popular 2000 AD series DR and Quinch began as a one-off Future Shock.

Film

• Robert Rodriguez's Desperado, which was the remake/sequel of the film El Mariachi which he made on a $10,000 budget.

Live Action TV

• The Addams Family started as a loosely-connected set of cartoons by Charles Addams in The New Yorker with recurring unnamed character designs. Until the proposal to create a show based on them, Addams had never even thought of them as named individuals.
• The (mercifully) short-lived sitcom Cavemen based on the "So easy a caveman can do it" series of Geico insurance commercials.

Newspaper Comics

• Dilbert started out as a unnamed recurring character drawn on the whiteboard of Scott Adams' cubicle while working as an engineer at Pacific Bell.
• Garfield Minus Garfield, which started as a riff of a Memetic Mutation of Garfield (inspired in a thread on the Truth and Beauty Bombs forum about the Garfield Randomizer), and eventually got its own published book by the syndicate, with a commentary essay by Jim Davis.

Video Games

• Madballs In Babo Invasion: sequel to the one-man freeware program Babo Violent 2, which was itself the formalized version of a networking test.
• Similarly, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which was the Xbox Live Arcade version of an Easter Egg Mini Game from Project Gotham Racing originally created for testing the input system, and has since become a lucrative franchise in its own right.
• Alien Hominid and Meat Boy, originally just random Flash games on Newgrounds.
• Line Rider, a Flash toy with nothing more than drawing a line for a sled to ride on, which now has its own video game series and social networking website.
• Team Fortress 2, technically the sequel to a 2-or-3 man mod for Quake.
  • Not to mention interim games Counter-Strike and Day Of Defeat, which were both Half Life mods whose small dev teams were bought out by Valve, split into commercial packages, and followed with “Source” versions with a much-improved engine.
    • The initial development idea for Left 4 Dead came during the development of bots for Counter-Strike, where the developers found themselves having more fun by arming a legion of bots with only knives and then fighting them off like a zombie horde.
  • Garry's Mod, the ten dollar commercial version 10 of which has made Garry effectively a millionaire, was originally a quick hack to the leaked Half Life 2 source code to allow arbitrary rope creation posted on the Something Awful Forums.
• The game that preceded Portal, Narbacular Drop, was a school project at Digi Pen.
• Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft III map with its own work page, has inspired a top ten single charting theme song, three separate games (Demigod, Heroes of Newerth, and League of Legends'), and arguably its own genre, and scored its developer a position at Valve Software (they seem to have a thing for Ascended Fanboy developers).
• The idea for Katawa Shoujo began as a one-off joke on an Omake page of a manga. Later, some people saw it on an Image Board and decided to take a serious crack at making a Visual Novel featuring girls with disabilities.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner, which now has its own professional video game series and cameos ranging from songs in Guitar Hero to an Easter Egg cartoon in a Macromedia program, started as a children's book made in a college afternoon and put together at Kinko's (see here).

Web Comics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja started as Chris Hastings' user name on the Something Awful Forums, which he decided at the last moment to change from Dr. McNugget. He then drew a panel of what said doctor would look like, then used the doctor as the premise of a comic he drew for his art degree.
• Axe Cop is written by a six year old, but drawn by a professional.
• The Nuzlocke Comics originally started out as the sketchings of a Self-Imposed Challenge on a Pokémon run. It utilised stick figures with a storyline that didn't really deviate from the original game for the first season, but, come the next season, there's a noticeable improvement in the artwork and formatting, the storyline becomes much more substantial, and the Pokémon themselves were much better characterised. The challenge itself has also become extremely popular among others, inspiring many other Nuzlocke comics, prose and futher creative pursuits in turn.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons, originally a crudely-drawn series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, has gone on for 20 seasons to earn the Guinness World Record for the longest running animated show of all time, and has spawned a merchandising empire, several video games, The Movie and The Ride.
  • The characters themselves were knocked up in the waiting room where Matt Groening was going to meet with executives. Originally, he was going to pitch a show based upon his comic Life in Hell, but he realised at the last minute that he might lose the rights to his own characters, so he quickly sketched a family based upon his own family.
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone's first short "Jesus Vs. Frosty" was done as a student film. Their second short was made on a $2,000 budget for a Fox network executive... so he could use it as a video christmas card to send to his friends. After months of underground circulation via bootleg tapes and the Internet, Comedy Central decided to hire them to expand this into South Park.
• The genesis for Phineas and Ferb came one night when Dan Povenmire was at a restaurant and drew a triangle-headed boy and decided to build a show around him. It was sixteen years before the show actually got picked up.
• Beavis and Butthead was originally just a short on Liquid Television. Likewise Aeon Flux. Celebrity Deathmatch appeared on the show's Spiritual Successor Cartoon Sushi.

Other

• Adobe Flash, originally a small vector animation system, based off a tablet computer drawing program by an Aldus spinoff later acquired by Macromedia. With its browser-embeddable Flash (originally FutureSplash) player, the introduction of ActionScript (Javascript with the Serial Numbers Filed Off,) and especially its late addition of bitmapped video, by the time Macromedia was acquired for Adobe, Flash had become the most popular browser-based content delivery medium.
• Wiki Magic.
• Memetic Mutation.
• Yahoo!, which began in 1994 as a student project on the Stanford University site.
  • As did Google.
• The IMDb started as a list of actresses with pretty eyes.
• eBay began because the creator's girlfriend had some Pez dispensers whe wanted to sell.