4d ago

What parody surpassed what it was trying to parody?

205 comments

the onion

Thagomizer, it’s the end of stegosaurus. There was no scientific name for the spiked end, the paleontology side decided the Farside comic called it Thagomizer so let’s use that

Idiocracy is at least more entertaining
- Remember when Idiocracy was a farce instead of a documentary?

The Onion is way better than real life, especially currently.

The venture Bros
- What were they parodying ?
  
  Saturday Morning cartoons, super heros and stuff.

FourStar Dragon Ball abridged parody

Amish paradise. I find the song better than the original(s)
- Man, thank you for adding that (s).
  Stinks that almost no one knows Gangster's Paradise is a remake.
- Nobody every mentions "I Think I'm a Clone Now".
  
  I can be at home while I'm out of town
- Also the Weird Al style parodies. Dog Eat Dog is one of the best Talking Heads songs ever.
- Also White And Nerdy

people keep saying Idiocracy but i wouldnt consider it a parody, but a satire, and also i cant help but complain that the film makes more of an accidental pro-eugenics statement than anything about authoritarian politics

As an animation nerd I gotta mention Shrek. As a parody of "Disney princess movies" it killed the entire genre dead.
The only time Disney tried to play the tropes somewhat straight again was the Princess and the Frog, and THAT was a major flop (though racism probably also played a part in that).
Since then Disney only made remakes or titles like Frozen that spend 70% of their runtime mugging at themselves and poking fun at their own tropes (... While still circling back to them anyway and failing to make any point or commentary)
On a less "this made a major cultural impact" note and more of a "this personally completely altered my entire sense of humour and replaced the original in my heart" -- SnapCube's Realtime Fandub Games Sonic Adventure 2
Oh oh ohohoh! Just remembered JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Very much a manga that was poking fun at contemporaries like Fist of the North Star... And while it didn't outlive or outdo them per se, it definitely gained a life of its own, continuing to this day and actually being quite influential in its own right.
- princess and the frog had no chance, disney wanted it to fail so they had an excuse to never go back to 2d animation again
  
  That part I didn't know but it doesn't surprise me either.
  Still, "Disney wanted to kill off their traditional animation department" might explain why every movie since has been CGI/Live Action. -- It does NOT explain why every movie since has been so metalinguistic and self-satirising. THAT can be laid at Dreamworks' feet entirely, with the influence of Shrek et. al. on the cultural zeitgeist.
- Hi, it's me, The Devil
  
  Wrong game, but I always appreciate SnapCube regardless.
- The only time Disney tried to play the tropes somewhat straight again was the Princess and the Frog, and THAT was a major flop (though racism probably also played a part in that).
  Probably, I watched because of my kid recently, and it striked me as one of the better Disney movies. In fact, it's a pretty awesome one compared to recent bigger hits like Frozen and etc.
  
  I also quite liked it. It feels like a 'classic' Disney movie.
  
  's a good movie. Predictable as those disney princess musicals tend to be--
  -- But still. It's pretty. It's entertaining. And the music sequences are awesome.

Blur - Song 2 was intended as a parody of American rock and is laden with nonsense lyrics. It's their most known song in America by a wide margin and might even be their most known song globally.
Woohoo
- This happens every time an artist does a parody of popular music, see also Smells Like Teen Spirit and You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party. Turns out music that's in a popular style tends to be popular 🤔
- You could say fans of the song might need to get thier head checked by a jumbo jet, even though it won't be easy.
  
  Nothing is
  
  I got my head shaved. It was easy though as I've done it countless times.
- American here. I first heard this in the soundtrack for FIFA 98 or 99

I think the Documentary Now! episode, "Juan Likes Rice and Chicken" is better than Jiro Dreams of Sushi
- https://youtu.be/Fo0sN872oH0
  Link for the lazy

Deadpool It was a parody of DCs Deathstroke, right down to the guy's name Slade/Wade.
- I always thought Deadpool and Deathstroke look eerily similar
- While that's true, it took a few writers before he really came into his own. It was the 2000s before he was the meta, witty, merc with a mouth. The parody was a lot more on the nose and it traded some of the parody for the meta, witty Wheaton-isms and pop culture references. Parody Deadpool and Deadpool Deadpool are arguably different characters.
  
  i am pretty sure he was called the merc with a mouth in his first appearance but someone who knows more about comic history can correct me

Pretty much everything from Weird Al.
- Word Crimes for taking a song about dubious consent and changing it into a legitimately educational song.
- Definitely White and Nerdy, and Like a Surgeon and Amish Paradise are on par.
- Amish Paradise came to me, even over White N' Nerdy

Idiocracy started as a parody, and is now becoming a reality.
- Idiocracy has transitioned from pessimistic take to optimistic. At least in Idiocracy everybody listened to the smart one and enacted changes that helped.
- Idiocracy is the only movie I’m aware of that was released as a comedy and became a horror movie.
- GhatGPT will save us

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is better than Hamlet. Sure, it had the benefit of an extra couple of centuries of progress in art, but I think it still counts.

Blazing Saddles. It killed the western genre for a long time because of how well it parodied them
- Austin Powers did nearly the same with Bond/spy flicks for a while. From Wikipedia:
  Daniel Craig, who portrayed James Bond on screen from 2006 to 2021, credited the Austin Powers franchise with the relatively serious tone of later Bond films. In a 2014 interview, Craig said, "We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us", making it "impossible" to do the gags of earlier Bond films which Austin Powers satirized.
  
  That's interesting. I always felt the newer Bond films were taking themselves a bit too seriously. I suppose this might be why.
- Truly understood the bleak outlook of a gunslinger

Galaxy Quest!
- Still the best star trek movie
  
  By Grabthar's Hammer...

Bugs Bunny far surpassed It Happened One Night. His manner of speaking, saying “doc,” and his obsession with carrots are a direct parody of Clark Gable’s character from that movie, but modern audiences don’t realize he’s a parody at all and instead assume the carrot thing it based on rabbits’ real dietary preferences.
- now i gotta go watch that movie. it apparently cause undershirt sales to sharply decline

Might not be exactly what you're asking for, but if you've seen ever seen Rocky and Bullwinkle, you'll know the villain "Boris Badenov," but you might not know his name is a pun of a historical figure, "Boris Godunov". Old cartoons like that are great because they're full of these super obscure references and jokes that completely fly past you until years later when you encounter something in a history class and suddenly burst out laughing. Another example I remember from that show is "The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam," a reference to "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."

Hot Fuzz is the best buddy cop movie I've ever seen.
- Hot Fuzz is one of the better examples in this thread, because it doesn't run solely on ribbing buddy cop films. If you've never seen a buddy cop film in your life, Hot Fuzz is still a perfectly good comedy with some surprisingly touching moments.
  Knowing what it parodies makes it better, of course, but it doesn't look down at them.
- Just as Shaun of the Dead is the best zombie movie (come fight me)
  
  Why would I fight you? I’ve got your back! Now, let’s go to the Winchester for a pint until this all blows over.
  
  And no one talks about the 3rd film

Airplane parodying the airliner movies like Zero Hour
Dr Strangelove parodying atomic terror movies like Fail Safe
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a parody of a book by Peter George called Red Alert.
  The book plays it perfectly straight. They started to adapt the book into a movie, but found they kept having to cut elements out to keep it from being absurd or funny because of the sheer...bullshit that is mutually assured destruction, so they leaned into it and made it a farce. And now just about no one is aware of Red Alert.
- Dr Strangelove parodying atomic terror movies like Fail Safe
  I legit didn't know it was parodying something else. I thought it was just gallows humour.
  Nobody watches the other airliner movies, but at least with Airplane! you know you're watching a parody.
  Edit: Per other people in this thread, apparently not.
- Fail-Safe is amazing though. And I actually prefer that it's a computer glitch, that no individual causes everything to go bad, because the problem is the system
- Dr. Strangelove was released before Fail Safe. The story goes that they were both being filmed around the same time and Kubrick used his pull with the studio to make sure Fail Safe was released later in the year.
  Seems a really odd thing to insist your parody is released before the movie it's parodying. And I don't think there were all that many movies about the terror of nuclear war until after the Cuban missile crisis. It takes a couple of years to make a movie and Dr. Strangelove came out less than two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it was pretty much the first of it's kind.
  Seems to me like Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy, not a parody.

Weird Al's White And Nerdy, so much better than Ridin Dirty.

r/TheDonald. If I remember right, it started as a meme sub before he actually ran, then it was overtaken by actual supporters.
- It was so weird watching that live.
  
  Any book written by future historians that accurately talks about this period of time will have a chapter devoted to Pepe the Frog and... God damnit it's all just so stupid.
  
  I'm sad I missed that, actually.
- or r/TheDarnold
  when sam darnold starting tearing up the league with the vikings it seemed that sub was right all along
  of course this is the vikings we're talking about so obviously it came crashing down

For my wife Spaceballs is the original and Star Wars is the spoof.
But more seriously, too many people didn't register that Scream was a parody. That way it managed to surpass older slashers.
- I wouldn't call Scream a parody. Scary Movie was the parody. Scream was just self aware that it was a scary movie in a universe where scary movies exist.
  
  I watched the original Scream years after seeing Scary Movie, and realized Scary Movie is just Scream on cocaine. A lot of the jokes are the same or just slightly different.
  What's the line between being self aware and a parody?
- I saw Spaceballs before I saw Star Wars. I cannot take any Star Wars movie seriously now.
  
  Imagine that.
  A movie set in the future with advanced space craft yet has guys dueling with pink glowsticks.
  I didn't need Spaceballs to come to that conclusion when I was about 9.
- Before Spaceballs, contemporaneous with Star Wars, we had "Hardware Wars":
  https://youtu.be/WUDEUQMCyKE
  
  You'll laugh!.You'll cry! You'll kiss three bucks goodbye!
- Can confirm scream was one of the first horror movies I watched and I just figured the rest were like that.
- My gf used to believe that Scary Movie was the original. She didn't had idea that there was an actual movie called Scream.

Yugi Oh The Abridged Series
- Sword Art Online Abridged.
- Same should be said for DBZ Abridged. I seriously do a double take every time I see an original episode now, as the voice actors and characterizations from Abridged have replaced the canon ones in my head.

On Cinema has better story telling and character development than most of Hollywood.

Naked Gun.
Austin Powers.
Team America: World Police
- The dicks, pussies, and assholes speech was based on an actual speech.
  
  by who? where can i read it? how did i not know this? this sounds fascinating!
- I'm Matt Damen!
- Gary?

Airplane! lapped Zero Hour! so hard most people don't know about the existence of the latter
- it also spawned the whole genre and although Leslie Nielsen made lots of movies before this, his legacy is this as well as the other parody movies
  
  It definitely remade Leslie Nielsen's career. He (along with Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges) were known as very serious drama actors, and the thing is, they play their roles as such. Although they may be absurd, they deliver their lines perfectly seriously.
  Leslie Nielson in particular was so hysterical his career shifted into comedy, starring in Police Squad! and The Naked Gun, and then a string of movies mostly not made by the ZAZ that used him wrong, frankly. Where they have him being silly and making funny faces...he was excellent at delivering an absurd line as if it was perfectly serious.
  
  Yeah they cast a lot of guys like Peter Graves and Robert Stack that normally appeared in the over-serious thriller type movies. So Leslie Nielsen was just one of that group of actors they cast to have guys deliver silly lines in that stern serious tone that they did in actual serious movies.
  But of course Leslie Nielsen was amazing at it, and didn't need to do those over-serious movies anymore. And don't call me Shirley!
- I've seen a lot of people mistake it for a parody of Airport, which...I think there's a reference or two in there but Airplane! is a parody of airline disaster thrillers in general and Zero Hour specifically. The sick kid and the stewardess singing with the guitar is actually a reference to Airport 1975.
  Airplane! II, The Sequel is a parody of Airport, with the whole bomb in the suitcase plot.
- TIL Airplane! is a parody.
  
  It’s such a close parody that they actually secured the rights to remake it. Much of the dialogue is exactly the same.

Spaceballs.
- Merchandising! Merchandising! Spaceballs the t-shirt! Spaceballs the lunchbox! Spaceballs the FLAMETHROWER!!! The kids love this one.

The best parodies are humorous takes that treat the source material with repect.
Shaun of the Dead
Galaxy Quest
Army of Darkness (person out of time becomes a leader against evil)
- Galaxy Quest belongs at the top of any such list. It's widely considered to be one of the best Star Trek movies.
  
  By Grabthar's hammer, what a movie.
  
  Yeah! The wild part is that many hardcore Trek fans - myself included, of course - just take it for granted that Galaxy Quest will be included, and toward the top end, of any ranking of Trek films.
- Army of Darkness (person out of time becomes a leader against evil)
  So an isekai
  
  How dare you‽ You're right, but how dare you‽
  
  thanks i hate it
- I guess Army of Darkness is an indirect parody of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?
  
  I am sure that is one of the inspirations.
- Hot Fuzz is up there for me too

Cunk - parodying Attenborough and cosmos style docs
Starship troopers - more of an active ignorance of source material
Happy Gilmore
- Starship troopers - more of an active ignorance of source material
  It can be pretty telling how someone reacts to Starship Troopers being what it is, and I love it for that.
  
  Gotta squash them bugs

Spinal Tap. The reactions to it are telling enough: allegedly Steven Tyler didn’t think it was funny, and the Edge just wept.
- getting lost backstage is a joke ozzy didnt like because it happened to him so many times 😂
- They were just jealous they couldn't go to 11.
- Steven Tyler didn’t think it was funny
  This Is Spinal Tap should have had one of the band members with a pre-pubescent girlfriend, but I guess that would have been too over the top even for them.
  In case anybody doesn't know this, '70s rockers were notorious for their consumption of literally underaged girls. Tyler in particular even assumed legal guardianship of his bit of jailbait so he could take her on tour with him.

The Orville
- I don't even consider that show parody, I consider it Star Trek with a different brand name
  
  Season 1 was basically Seth MacFarlane's TNG fan scripts... it's a Star Trek series through and through.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
You'll never look at a music docu-drama the same.
- It basically killed music biopics for 10 years or so.
  
  It should've buried the genre entirely imho. So many inaccurate biopics got released since, with that Queen one being one of the worst offenders (breaks the real world timeline of events for dramatic story telling reasons, clearly biased from one member's perspective, and with piss poor editing throughout).
- One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Dan Bern, wrote many of the songs for that movie. Just an extra reason for me to love it.

Kung pow: enter the fist
- Steve Oedekerk, the writer/star of King pow: enter the fist, is amazing in every way - especially if you were consuming media in the 90s. He
  wrote and directed when nature calls
  cowrote the nutty professor
  wrote including Patch Adams
  wrote Nutty Professor II: The Klumps - wrote and directed Bruce Almighty
  created thumbnation
  executive produced Jimmy Neutron and his studio gave us two Jimmy Neutron movies
  
  Kung pow is one of my favorites. Ironically my wife hates it, but loves when nature calls.
  
  I weirdly dislike most of these things. Nature calls was fine.
  Still glad people found joy in his work though. Obviously talented.

The minecraft parody songs. Iconic

Idiocracy.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally a parody of Daredevil. I think they have surpassed it in popularity.
- They were a parody of other comics as well, notably X-Men (hence the "teenage mutant" part) and Howard the Duck.
- I had no idea, that's awesome!
  
  The Foot Clan vs The Hand is a solid example. The turtles getting oozed spilled on them to give them advanced powers while Matt Murdock was doused with chemicals giving him his sensory powers is another good example.

Does idiocracy count?
- No, it's satire. Or it used to be anyway. But it's not a parody of anything.
- I think we're seeing things happen that not even Idiocracy could predict.
- It’s not a parody it’s a documentary so no.

Sometimes the Simpsons parodied things so well, that it's only later on in life that I realize iconic and hilarious Simpson moments were actually parodies.
The Cape Fear episode. The Citizen Kane episode. The Thelma and Louise episode. The Planet of the Apes musical.
fuckin' classics
- The Planet of the Apes musical.
  This one threw my head for a spin. Had to take a deep dive to disentangle what was original and what the Simpsons added.
  And frankly, some of the Simpsons musical numbers would have done the original films credit.
  
  Dr. Zaisu song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2E1m90YSpA

Dragon Ball Abridged
- Muffin button!
  
  I hate that joke with a passion because one of the members of our D&D group said it constantly in game and it never worked with the scenes. One of the many reasons the group "disbanded" but still met without him.
- I need an adult.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfLHfzrV-zU
  
  Man if only we got a full Buu saga
- I'm gonna deck you in the snoz

It's been a while, but as far as I can remember, I liked Hot Shots way better than Top Gun.
- Yes, and Valeria Golino > Kelly McGillis.

Does it count if I only read summaries of both works, not the works itself?
"A true story" is a parody on the "travelogue" that were popular in ancient Greece, like Homer's Odyssey and Illiad. 800 years later, they had a resurgence in the Roman Empire, like when Virgil wrote the Aeneid. Still 200 years later, A True Story was written by Lucian.
In the preface, Lucian complains that the genre was ruined by authors making up unbelievable tales to trick their dumb readership. So he thinks it better to just admit that all he says is a lie.
The story goes on how Lucian then set sail across the Atlantic, got caught in a storm so terrible it blew him to outer space, and meet the all-male civilisation that lives on the moon, who carry their children through the calf of their leg.
Lucian and his crew return to Earth, get swallowed by a whale, explore the Islands of the blessed, see the Sinners being punished (the ones who lied in their stories being punished the hardest) and reach a distant continent. Lucian says what happened there will be shared in the sequel, which a comment describes as the biggest lie of all.

Discworld

I have not seen the original, but Airplane! for sure.
- There's a great video on YouTube where some of the relevant scenes from the original, Zero Hour, are played alongside their equivalents in Airplane!. Some of it is basically word for word the same. Will try and find it and add as an edit...
  Turns out there are lots of such videos! Not sure if this is the one I saw or not, but it's very similar, if not, https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs

Don Quixote
The Princess Bride
Cold Comfort Farm

Steamboat Willie was a parody of Steamboat Bill Jr., a Buster Keaton film.
- ...no kidding?
  
  No kidding.

This does not fit the criteria so im sorry in advance, but it reminded me of the "Somebody That I Used To Know" song and that there is a really cool "5 people 1 guitar" cover that has 200M views which is a good 8% of the original video with 2.4B views.
They actually use 9 hands on that guitar (10 if you consider the one holding the top end)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9NF2edxy-M
- There's a difference between a parody and a cover. Weird Al does parodies, this is a cover.

I think a lot of Whitest Kid's U Know stuff genuinely transcends the topics its mocking by how good it is.
For example: WKUK - Kennedy Assasination
That song at 3:41 swims into my head from time to time, when I'm feeling stressed or overworked or uncertain about the future:
Somewhere out in space there is a place,
Where I can do what I want to,
And all at my own pace.
Somewhere out of time I hope I'll find,
A place where I can just unwind,
And work on my own mind.
Oh send me a signal, oh give me a prayer,
I just need to know that there's some spot out there,
Where I could be me and you could be you...
Just a pure sentiment longing for free time, personal agency, co-existence, brotherhood, and harmony -- which I think are topics everyone can click with.
- I've spent the last couple of hours re-watching WKUK skits because of you.
  Man those guys are funny.
  
  Great actors too, Trevor himself had just such a way with expression delivering lines both wacky and straight
- RIP local sexpot.

Gintama.
Took me a while to realize the whole post-war samurai living in an era of peace premise was just Kenshin but with aliens.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is a satire of Gothic novels in general, and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe in particular. Several others are referenced by name in the story and for many of them it's probably the only reason they are even remembered today.

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