Here’s What You Need To Remember About ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ Before You See The Sequel

Six years after the debut of the original, the Wreck-It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, is hitting theaters on Nov. 21 in time for Thanksgiving weekend. Viewers probably won't have a hard time following the new movie, but if you need a refresher on what happened in Wreck-It Ralph, the premise is pretty simple: It's a story of a bad man who wants to change his ways and of the friendship he makes along the way.

More specifically, Wreck-It Ralph is about a video game bad guy who gets sick of being the villain. The movie is similar to Monsters, Inc. in that it imagines the characters treating what they have to do in the human world (scare little kids, appear in video games) as their actual careers that come with the same stresses real people experience. Ralph's (John C. Reilly) job is to be part of an arcade game in which he has to... wreck things and get in the way of the hero, Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer). But, he leaves behind his fellow bad guys (Bowser, a Pac-Man ghost, etc.) to try out some other games.

It's in these other games that Ralph meets some new characters. In a shooter game called Hero's Duty, he encounters Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch). In this game, he is hoping to win a medal that will impress everyone and change his bad guy reputation. He also meets Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), who is part of a racing game, Sugar Rush, that looks like Candy Land. Ralph and Vanellope bond because she has a glitch that makes her an outcast in the world of her own game. He tries to help her win a race that will determine her fate in the game.

In the end, Vanellope is restored as a main character in Sugar Rush. As for Ralph, he wins over the respect of the good guys in his game and accepts his job as a bad guy, knowing it means he's not actually a bad person... or, rather, animated character.

In the new sequel, Ralph and Vanellope team up again. This time, they leave the video game world and hit up the internet. Their mission? The Sugar Rush arcade game needs a part replaced or it won't continue functioning. Like anyone else looking for an old part, they try to find it on eBay. There are a number of real websites mentioned in the film, and the move to the internet really works out wonderfully for Disney, which produced both movies, since Vanellope and Ralph get to encounter a ton of Disney-owned characters from stormtroopers to princesses. There are a few new actors joining the franchise for Ralph Breaks the Internet, including Taraji P. Henson, Gal Gadot, and Ali Wong.

It remains to be seen what will happen in the new movie — everything will probably be OK, whether or not they find that part — but viewers can expect lessons about friendship, jokes about the internet being ridiculous, and a ton of Disney references.