Inconsistency in Series Naming

This was going to be long, but I’m going to try to make it short and maybe touch on the subject again at a later date. Really, I just think it’s weird how inconsistently many movie series, web series, and product series are named.

I’ve talked before about how the Alien movies went from numbers to weird subtitles for no good reason, and it only take a little bit of movie knowledge to know that Rambo completely changed its title: First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Rambo 3, and finally Rambo. Even more recently, the Fast and the Furious movies have been changing the name with every sequel. And I would make a joke about them being embarrassed they made so many, but I think that it’s true. At least they are putting numbers at the end of most of them.

Call of Duty got all kinds of screwed up because of “creative differences” in the direction they wanted to take the series, and adding more and more studios to the mix.
Product lines can also be weird. From fountain pens that are being re-issued, to different iterations of tools with improvements not being named differently, and finally to phones, where apparently naming things is just an exercise in making tech historians frustrated.

iPhone Series

Really, web series, whether in text, video, or audio form, are both the least impactful and the most annoying in this category, with many subtle changes to either the titles or formats being made without any explanation. Sure, that doesn’t really matter, but when I’m organizing them into a list or something (which I never do, so I’m not sure why it bothers me) it’s just kinda ugly to look at.

Granted, I’m sure I’ve made this mistake sometimes. But is a little more consistency really that hard? I can’t think that it is. Especially for the web shows and tech lines, who really have complete control over what the thing is being named. I understand that sometimes movies have different people making a name by committee, which is a bad way to do almost anything. But TV shows would have a similar problem, yet most of their names are consistent. I guess I just don’t understand how so many things, especially popular things, could just be so off in the naming consistency department.  Maybe someone should start a firm that’s in charge of that. No one would listen to them, though.