The 3 that come to mind for me are Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The Princess Bride. All three are poking fun at their respective genres but also are great examples of the genre. I’m curious if Lemmy has other such examples.
Galaxy Quest
There is a curse in the Star Trek movies where every other movie in the franchise is terrible. The first one is bad, the second is good, the third is bad, and so on. This almost fits perfectly, but it inverts from the 10th movie onwards. The 9th is bad, the 10th is bad, the 11th is decent, the 12th is bad…
However, if you add Galaxy Quest into the line up, then it’s the good Star Trek movie between the 9th and 10th, and the pattern holds.
TMP and Insurrection are great Star Trek films! Insurrection is arguably the most TNG of the TNG movies.
I prefer the explanation that the bad movies are those which are odd if you add up their digits. It would mean 19 and 20 should be both good.
It’s legitimately one of the best Star Trek movies.
I still say “Never give up! Never surrender!” occasionally to this day
Scream was incredibly meta. It references plenty of slasher films and even has one character talking about the rules of slasher films.
While it’s not exactly a parody, it does poke fun at its own genre a lot.
Scream is the perfect answer. It was a response to the waning 80s slasher boom, making it all more real, more visceral, and more of a threat to the savvy audience, while still being funny as hell. Comedy and horror go beautifully together. There’s a shared tension with the unknown.
Scream is the perfect answer because Scary Movie didn’t get the joke and assumed it was a normal slasher, so they tried to make a parody of it.
The Scream and Saw franchises were pretty groundbreaking at the time. They single-handedly redefined the entire horror movie genre.
While it’s not exactly a parody
It is. It is exactly a parody.
The Orville. Homage more than parody I’d say.
Better Star Trek than a lot of actual Star Trek
After watching Season 2 of The Orville I’m of the opinion that Seth MacFarlane should be put in charge of the next mainline Star Trek series. The man truly gets Roddenberry’s vision.
Damn, really?? I never watched it because I can’t stand McFarlane but I have loved trek my whole life. I figured it would be a family guy version of Star trek.
Seriously give it a chance. Awesome trek
It kinda starts out that way. People theorized that that’s what Seth needed to do to sell it. But by the end of Season 1 it becomes the Star Trek you’ve been wanting. Season 2 continues it and the last season absolutely kills!
Y’all getting me psyched now. I’m working out of town all next week so I’ll be in a hotel with nothing to do so I’m going to check it out for sure.
I’m excited for you, definitely the best show I had seen in a long time.
The humour in the first season can be a bit forced, and it can feel like they’re stopping the show for the scheduled joke, but it’s worth sticking with 👍
Season 1 leans into the comedy angle, Season 2 onwards is basically TNG. Seriously, its better than Discovery and Picard.
I didn’t like discovery or Picard, felt way off from Trek to me, but strange new worlds is amazing imo. I’ll check it out though, admittedly I never even gave it a chance.
Watch Picard Season 3, it’s probably the best Trek I’ve seen since Deep Space Nine’s final two seasons.
No, it’s like a love note to TOS. All of the Treks that followed were a bit more serious in tone, which is fine and dandy, but The Orville captures the spirit of the original series very well. Strange New Worlds is somewhat similar to the original series in tone, but doesn’t have that 60s campy feel.
Nah. I respect what MacFarlane is trying to do, but Orville is nowhere as good as TNG or SNW. It echoes TNG in a lot of ways but never rises above it. The writing is more heavy-handed and MacFarlane doesn’t have the gravitas or the acting chops to rise to these ambitions.
It was good while the only current Trek we had was Picard and the godawful Discovery, but I think the SNW creators got the Trek mainline back on the tracks.
On that vein: Galaxy Quest
Austin Powers was such a good spoof of the genre that it killed the genre it was spoofing (for a little while). It was also a great movie in its own right!
To this day I’ll say “There you are!” And if someone asks if they know me, or if I was looking for them, or any number of things, I’ll say, “No, but there you are! You’re there!”
Tucker and Dale vs Evil. Criminally underrated
That’s a great call. I forgot about that movie. That is a good take on a slasher while also making fun of the genre.
Totally different but the same description would work for it: Cabin in the Woods
The Incredibles
Watchmen too
So a deconstruction / reconstruction shuffle. A work picking apart the tropes of a genre, making you question them… and then putting them back together in ways suited to a self-aware audience.
One Punch Man looks like a decent example. The premise is a rebuke of who-is-stronger anime, like the endless power-level treadmill of Dragonball Z. The main dude is stronger. Next question. And the next question is, well, what does a setting with assorted superheroes and supervillains look like, if there’s some guy who is unbeatable 1v1, but is otherwise just some guy? Does society support him, after he’s basically relegated to an occasional “come save our asses” phone call? How do other supers proceed with their equally-cliche motivations, when SSJ4 Goku showed up in episode one?
Shaun Of The Dead is definitely a reconstruction of zombie tropes - timed right at the crest of the 2000s zombie-movie revival. But Hot Fuzz is a little odd to mention here because it’s actually three distinct genres. It goes from screwball comedy to murder mystery to blockbuster action without missing a beat. Ironically I’d say the weakest part is the screwball comedy at the beginning. It’s very sedate compared to what it almost was: there’s a deleted scene where Angel did Word-art banners for each department, ending on rainbow lettering reading “sexual assault.” The opening we got is held-back to ease the later shifts in theme. And while each of these shifts is truly masterful, I’m not sure I’d call the movie as a whole a great example of anything it riffed on.
Really - does it fit any movie marathon that would unironically include Point Break?
I like the way you’ve explained the concept! I never could find the right word for it, I always thought of it as “meta” media, though that never seemed 100% right. “Reconstruction” is much better, it implies a more thorough understanding (and appreciation!) of the source material than mere meta-jokes. My concept of meta would lump Shaun of the Dead in with shit like Disaster Movie, which are obviously leagues apart.
90s parody movies lean way too hard into deconstruction, and aren’t very good at it. They’re trying to say “here’s how that would really go” but lack the patience to be clever. E.g. Scary Movie 3 having a character square off against the scary girl from The Ring. That’s not a fully-formed joke. That’s a three-second cutaway gag in Family Guy.
The clearest line between deconstruction and reconstruction might be Neon Genesis Evangelion versus Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
Eva takes the cynicism and plausible physics of real-robot shows like Mobile Suit Gundam, and applies them to children piloting skyscraper-sized combat vehicles in monster-of-the-week battles. It doesn’t kill off characters left and right, and the action is rarely gory or played for shock value, but there’s a level of emotional violence that is unmatched outside of surrealism. It has an audience-insert protagonist specifically to go “this is you, and that is bad.” The last few episodes are infamously a sharp left turn into abstract philosophy and, like… giving characters therapy. On some level Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime series that actively despises its audience for enjoying mecha anime.
Gurren went “yeah that’s nice” and wrote a love letter to joyously stupid mecha anime. The universe literally runs on whatever sounds awesome. It is unselfconsciously goofy in a way that wraps back around to being cool as fuck. Now: it’s not unaware of criticism. It was made by the same studio as Evangelion. But the key figures would eventually split off into Studio Trigger, whose output is primarily reconstructions - shows rooted in asking “how would this insane premise really work?” and then building a fun story within that universe.
AYEEEEE fellow Otaku spotted 🎉. Well explained. Well done.
Everybody is talking about movies so here’s some books: Discworld by Terry Pratchett started as a parody of the fantasy genre but evolves into one of the richest fantasy worlds you’ll even have the pleasure to read.
I’ve been considering reading these books. This might just be the thing that pushes me to start.
Just to let you know, Pratchett’s writing improves massively over the series. This means, if you read it in chronological order, you start with the least good books (Colour of magic, and light fantastic).
There are multiple story arcs, however, that can be read semi-independently. The “Witches” arc, or “City guards” arc are an easier in point for many people.
I personally read them in chronological order. I knew the earliest books wouldn’t be as good, so got to watch his writing improve, and the world crystallise. I knew about the slow start however, and so wasn’t put off by the “average” level writing, at the start.
https://www.hookedtobooks.com/discworld-reading-order/
I’ve always read them in published order personally, books tend to reference earlier novels in the series and a lot of little in jokes appear as the series progresses.
The first 2 novels have a slightly different “feel” to the others, then he settles into a style that continues to the end.
The first thing I thought when reading this question! Discworld is amazing
For sure, it’s one of the greatest fantasy series ever written.
A bit older than the Orville, Red Dwarf was the original satire of Star Trek turned into a legitimate Sci-Fi show a la Star Trek.
I enjoyed it a lot, at least the original seasons. Never watched the later ones they added thirty or so years later.
I’ve seen season 10 and 11 and they weren’t half bad! IMO better than 7 or 8 which felt a little forced and definitely better than the Unspeakable Season.
My advice is to watch it up until they conclude the Ouroborous / OurRobOrRoss thing, and consider that the end (S7E3 I think).
…but what is it?
the original satire of Star Trek turned into a legitimate Sci-Fi show a la Star Trek.
…but what is it? 😉
Glee. It started out as a parody of musicals and high school dramas in Season 1. Then went on to be a musical high school drama for the rest of the show.
The Simpsons started out as a parody of sitcoms and has since become the longest running sitcom.
The 1960s Batman was a campy satire of comics and itself influenced comic adaptations for decades after.
Pretty much every Mel Brooks movie
I love Mel Brooks movies, but I think they’re just straight spoofs. For example Blazing Saddles while great and did such a great job skewering Westerns that it has been argued it killed the genre, it just isn’t a Western in it’s own right.
It’s been a while since I watched it, but I think Kingsman fits that description.
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It’s way weaker than the first, but… I still liked it.
James Bond. Ian Fleming wrote a series of novels parodying spy novels, and they’ve turned into one of the best spy movie franchises, with no hint of parody left.
Though when I go back and watch the Pierce Brosnan movies, it’s obvious they’re a parody.
What’s weird is how serious they seemed in the 90s when they came out. But they’re so silly.
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Moon Raker and From Russia with Love are so over the top
None of the Bond movies are serious, they’re all clearly campy and fun movies. Timothy Dalton is the closest to the Bond of the novels.
I’ll add Kick Ass and Starship Troopers. Although very different movies I feel like they both satirize their respective genres to great dramatic effect and stand out as some of my favorites.
Starship Troopers is weird because the book went full on in embracing the military-industrial complex and was kind of shit because of it. The movie made it a parody instead and it worked great!
…then they made a few sequels that yeah were more in line with the original book but in this case is that really a good thing?Thats just the curse of Paul Verhoeven, same thing happened with robocop
Starship Troopers is peak sci-fi in that it holds up a mirror for society to see the ugly bits.
Can’t believe I had to get this far down in the thread to find Starship Troopers…I’m doing my part!
Discworld
I came here to comment Sir Terry Pratchett’s works as well! They’re all really good while also poking fun at fantasy tropes
