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
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤔
Idiocracy has transitioned from pessimistic take to optimistic. At least in Idiocracy everybody listened to the smart one and enacted changes that helped.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.