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.
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.
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.
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.
Before Spaceballs, contemporaneous with Star Wars, we had “Hardware Wars”:
You’ll laugh!.You’ll cry! You’ll kiss three bucks goodbye!
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.
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?
What’s the line between being self aware and a parody?
I feel like this would require a Venn diagram. Not so much a “this crosses the line” but some movies are parody, some are self aware, some are both and some are neither.
Funnily enough, I looked up self awareness vs parody, and the first movie based article specifically addressed those two movies.
To summarize, parodies show why those things being parodied are dumb, while self awareness is embracing the tropes while not taking itself seriously. Which answers my question.
Amish paradise. I find the song better than the original(s)
Also the Weird Al style parodies. Dog Eat Dog is one of the best Talking Heads songs ever.
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 White And Nerdy
Weird Al’s White And Nerdy, so much better than Ridin Dirty.
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)
Army of Darkness (person out of time becomes a leader against evil)
So an isekai
thanks i hate it
How dare you‽ You’re right, but how dare you‽
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.
WHAT’S MY LAST NAME??!?
…Maybe I’m the plucky comic relief…
“Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy” is still low-key one of my favourite lines.
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.
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.
I mean I’m trying to wrap my head around what work it would be a parody of. like, Hot Shots! is primarily a parody of Top Gun with some scenes parodying other films.
Evil Dead 1 was a horror film. It’s not a parody, or a comedy, it’s a horror film. Evil Dead 2…defies definition. It’s as much a remake as it is a sequel, it’s still a horror movie though it leans more on comedy. Army of Darkness, better known by its actual title “The Studio Wouldn’t Let Us Call It Evil Dead 3” is a horror themed action comedy. It’s not really making fun of an existing work the way Hot Shots! or Airplane! does.
He is an overpowered white guy in a new land like John Carter adventure type stories. He is a chosen one the prophecy foretold! Person out of time who brings knowledge from the future to win war against evil. The deadite army is a comedic take on the stop motion armies of the dead from B movies. He even fights his evil twin!
It is a parody of a genre, not a single movie or series.
I remain unconvinced that Army of Darkness is a parody. A comedy yes, but…Sam Raimi didn’t set out to say anything about the genre, he’ll tell you he just wanted to entertain his audience. A fun setting to throw your protagonist into to see what breaks isn’t necessarily a parody.
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.
Also Matt’s mentor is called Stick, and the turtles have Splinter
That’s Master Splinter to you
Pretty much everything from Weird Al.
Word Crimes for taking a song about dubious consent and changing it into a legitimately educational song.
Amish Paradise came to me, even over White N’ Nerdy
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)
And no one talks about the 3rd film
I honestly couldn’t get into it, I find it less endearing. Maybe should give it a rewatch
I thought it was ok, but not even close to the other two.
Same. It was ultimately pretty forgettable except for the bathroom fight scene, which is literally all I remember of it.
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.
Hahah, such an iconic line
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
The Onion is way better than real life, especially currently.
On Cinema has better story telling and character development than most of Hollywood.
FourStar Dragon Ball abridged parody
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.
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.
'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.
I also quite liked it. It feels like a ‘classic’ Disney movie.
Hi, it’s me, The Devil
Wrong game, but I always appreciate SnapCube regardless.
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
woohoo!
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
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.
And then they made Blofeld to be James Bond’s brother which was never a thing in any Bond movie before. That was just a thing they did in Austin Powers.
Austin pretty much forced them to play it straight. It’s was a stupidly huge movie back when it came out.
