I’m sure many, many, many more people know of Lady Mondegreen than of The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray
True, but a misheard word or phrase is not a parody.
Not to mention that Flashy had just (inevitably undeservedly) received his VC for his role in Mutiny. One has to wonder about the extent to which Fraser had this all planned out when he embarked on the series.
Since others have mentioned Foghorn Leghorn copying Kenny Delmar’s Senator Claghorn…
Today, Pepe LePew is probably better remembered than Charles Boyer or the dashing thief Pepe LeMoko that Boyer played.
I learnt the other day Monty Python didn’t originate the phrase “And now for something completely different”, it was originated by presenter Christopher trace on the BBC children’s program Blue Peter, and later half-inched by the Pythons.
This whole thread is obviously a parody of the lesser known original.
Ah, but decades from now, everyone will think of this thread, long after they’ve forgotten the original.
It’s posts like this that make me wish The Dope had a “Like” button.
Hah, two different threads which failed to mention the umpteen subtitled alternate takes (“parody” may not be the correct term) on the movie “Downfall”, of which this is the most notorious and best example. 
Here’s an example of a case of that that really bugs me:
In the movie ‘Downfall’ there is an underground bunker scene where Adolf Hitler, upon being told the truthful disappointing news of the true hopelessness of the German military situation by a group of his top officers, goes into an epic maniacal raving diatribe against his officers.
What bugs me is that that this scene is very often used by wags by substituting the original subtitles to ones used to carry some parodic humor about another subject. So much so that most people know that scene only as a stand-alone clip, and not that it's part of a great film. When told of the film, they're completely indifferent.Pretty cynical crowd here, we’d have to have a row of buttons:
◊ LIKE
◊ SMILING SARDONICALLY
◊ SMIRKING
◊ SNEERING AT
◊ DISLIKE
◊ DISLIKE THE POST BUT STILL HAVE A WARM SPOT FOR THE POSTER DUE TO A CAT THREAD IN MPSIMS
For a time in the mid-1980s, the TV ads (for the Yellow Pages?) with David Leisure (who also played “Joe Isuzu”) parodying Joe Friday were probably better known than *Dragnet *was.
Even as a first grader watching them on prime time, I always thought The Flintstones were a ripoff of The Honeymooners. Enough that I’d get mad and ask grownups why that was legal.
And I wondered that about Yogi Bear, too… and hey, a couple of articles think Yogi was based on Art Carney. Specifically, his Ed Norton character from…
The Honeymooners! Bam!(vintage 60s Magic Microphone drop…)
Oh, and I’d bet a lot more people know Edna Mode from The Incredibles (“NO CAPES!”) than designer Edith Head.
I guess it depends on how you mean it. While (for instance) I’ve never read any of the original Arthurian legends, their gist is a deeply embedded and well-known part of our culture. When Graham Chapman’s King Arthur in MP&HG tells Dennis the Peasant how “the Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in purest shimmering samite, held Excalibur aloft” and so forth, pretty much everybody knows what he’s referring to. Maybe we don’t know the dialogue of the original, but we know the gestalt of it.
Same with Young Frankenstein. Maybe we know it better than the specific Frankenstein movie that it was playing off of, but we all know Frankenstein’s monster (even if we think “Frankenstein” was the name of the monster, rather than that of his creator), whether we’ve ever seen Young Frankenstein or not. And we know of the monster due to the original movies. Young Frankenstein wouldn’t have even made sense if its audience hadn’t been at least somewhat versed in the original.
Good points, RT.
Susan Sontag coined the term* semiotics *to denote things we ALL seem to know. I’d love to see a breakdown by age/demographics as to who “just knows about” what things.
Quick tangent on semiotics, I worked in advertising, where we really rely on common ground with viewers. But when it doesn’t work, it’s hilarious…
*We take you now to the boss’s conference room… *
“No, this is a GREAT idea! See, it riffs off The Hour Of The Wolf. Ingmar Bergman? C’mon, it’s a classic! See, we shoot it on the same remote Scandinavian island… what? Why all the blank faces? It was THE movie of '68, everyone saw it! Max Von Sydow? Liv Ullman? You’ve seen it! So we build our tagline on the guttural Swedish monologue in the final scene, all my friends can quote it … Stop laughing, this’ll worrrrrk!”
So for a parody to work, enough people have to really know the original. Parodies that don’t work? They guessed wrong (or didn’t do their research).
wasn’t the tick ben endlunds middle finger to marvel and dc whom hed worked for at times?
I don’t remember those ads, but I’d not be particularly sure of that.
If it was contemporary to his time as Joe Isuzu, it would have also have been contemporary to the rather successful 1987 comedy movie version.
If it was earlier, it would have been in shouting distance of Jack Webb’s death, at which point the show was still well known enough that the LAPD honoured him by ‘retiring’ Joe Friday’s badge number. (And Webb had been working on another revival when he died.)
Similarly most people have heard of Don Quixote, but hardly anyone has heard of the dozens of Roland and his knights inspired stories that the book parodies.
Not sure if serious or joking…