Born Losers + Billy Jack: different worlds?

I actually purchased the entire Billy Jack Box Set at Best Buy the other week. I had never seen the movies but had heard about them and love the old genre laden drive-in flicks from the 60's and 70's and it is a pretty good bargain if you can still find it (20 bucks for four movies is always a good deal to me). I can't give an indepth response to your query yet because I have only watched The Born Losers so far, but I think I may be able to provide some insight just off of general movie knowledge.

First off, in response to the Rob Zombie reference, if you look up some of the things he said regarding HOATC and TDR, he pretty much said he did it in the thread of movies like this. Particularly, he referencs the deleted scene in TDR where Dr. Satan was in the hospital after the raid as having too much connection with HOATC and how TDR was meant to be a different type of movie, but only using the same characters.

That being said, the correlation with that and Billy Jack is a lot like other movies of the time (e.g. the Burt Reynolds drive-in classics "White Ligthening and "Gator") where a poplular character would be used in another movie just for appeal. Where Billy Jack was a martial arts/vigilante type fighting for the people when the law can't or won't, he's used much like a cowboy gunslinger character was used in the old western serials where they would appear in other movies with no particular reference to their back story in previous movies, much like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from the Sergio Leone westerns. Though it is supposed to be the same character so to speak, they just move on to new adventures that aren't necessarily sequels to the previous films.

It seems like a bit of a stretch and goes outside of the modern cinematic need for continuity, but appears to be a common device of the movies from those times. Hope that helps you a bit. Let me know if it does or just confuses the situatoin more so. lol

While Billy Jack isn't exactly a direct sequel to Born Losers as the rest of the films are there is nothing contradictory in the films. I always look at it as Billy Jack first returned home to California after Vietnam were Losers took place, sometime after that film finding he couldn't find peace he moved to Arizona to work with the Native America community and medicine man.