I have my doubts when looking at the box office numbers for GWTW, including its several re-releases when it was making more money than many new films. The Carol Burnett sketch was shortly after GWTW was televised for the first time in 1976, which made GWTW available to people who hadn’t been born when it was first released.
Possibly now that much of the original 1939 audience has died off, Carol Burnett might be getting close, but it’s not a sure thing. Worldwide, it might be a conservative guess that ~400 million people saw GWTW. Give it another few decades for old age to thin out that number a little more.
I don’t know how familiar Spike Jones is today, but his mid-1940s parody of “Cocktails for Two” is probably more famous than any of the original recordings of the song (which was introduced as a perfectly straight ballad in the 1934 film Murder at the Vanities).
A better example might be her “Nora Desmond” character. A lot of the younger audience who watched the show was probably not familiar with the film Sunset Boulevard. I’m sure a lot of people just thought she was playing a generic aging film star; and, FWIW, the “Nora Desmond” sketches do hold up on their own with that in mind.
It’s not exactly what the OP is looking for, but it keeps coming into my head: most people who see *The Wizard of Oz *don’t realize that the musical numbers the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion do are pretty straight-up Vaudeville softshoe numbers, and much of the dialogue among those characters is Vaudeville patter. My father was old enough to remember Vaudeville, and he always loved the movie for that reason.
Also, not parodies strictly, but ever since TV commercials started using classic songs, slightly altered, for jingles, millions of young people are more familiar with the jingle. The oldest example I can personally think of is a broker, or something, named Duane Dow, in Indiana (or maybe it was national, but I have a specific memory of hearing it when I visited my cousins), who used the song from* Bye, Bye Birdie*, to come up with “We love you Duane Dow, of yes we do,” etc. My brother also remembers “It’s Gonna be a Great Day” not as a religious song, but as a jingle for a kitchen cleaner, or Windex, or something. We actually had a conversation about this a couple years ago, because he had just heard the original song for the first time.
Oh, and Jewish kids learn the “Batman Smells” version of “Jingle Bells” before they learn the original.
Barbe Rougeis a series of Pirate adventure comics that ran in Pilotecomic along with the adventures of Asterix the Gaul. It’s little known outside France and Belgium. However, the red bearded pirate that Asterix sinks in most books has achieved international fame.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d wager more people remember Weird Al’s “Jurassic Park” song than the original “MacArthur Park.” And honestly, “MacArthur Park’s” lyrics are so weird to begin with that you might not be able to tell which is the original and which the parody.
Ah! Beat me to it! Thousands of Deadpool virgins people are getting their first exposure to the character this week and probably none of them realize he is a parody of a DC character.
Don’t call me Shirley!
Most young’uns now are probably more familiar with “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” than they are with the actual Arthurian legends or the knights of the round table.
Not quite what the OP had in mind, but I’d bet most people nowadays are much more familiar with the campy “Mommy Dearest” than they are with any of Joan Crawford’s actual movies.
Actor Kenny Delmar’s blowhard Southern politician {“Eliminate the North! Make the whole country South!”} Beauregard Claghorn was a popular character on Fred Allen’s 40s radio show, but has almost been forgotten now. Foghorn Leghorn, however, the cartoon rooster who began life as a parody of Claghorn, has lived on in fame and gone on to eclipse his progenitor.
Someone either really hates pouches, or really likes feet… :dubious:
But seriously, like half his Youngblood characters were ripoffs of his own New Mutants/X-Force characters.
There’s some entertaining “interweaving” in the Flashman novels: a few characters from Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays show up in them now and again, including Tom Brown himself.
Rather delightfully IMO, at the end of the Indian Mutiny (the novel Flashman In The Great Game), Flashy is congratulating himself on his having made it alive and in one piece, through sundry horrific perils in that conflict, when he receives a present sent out from England: the book Tom Brown’s Schooldays – historic-accurately, it had just been published then (late 1850s). It’s a gift from a bitter enemy of his, Lord Cardigan, which causes Harry F. to wonder what that’s all about. He soon finds out: it’s been sent to him exactly because of its very unflattering portrayal of him. He’s still relatively young and un-philosophical about things; he gets furiously angry at this bastard Thomas Hughes for describing him in his true colours, and for the harm that this is likely to do to his reputation.
In point of fact, before Hailey did the novel in '58, Zero Hour came out in '57; and before that, it was James Doohan at the controls but not yet over the war in '56, after the pilot and co-pilot and half the passengers had fish for the in-flight meal during the Flight Into Danger TV movie, which got the “Alcoa Hour” treatment as soon as the Americans realized those Canadians were on to something.
All still Hailey’s credit, of course – but screenplay before novel.