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.
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
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.
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.