So I’m reading “Ever Since Carrie”, about Broadway flops. It’s interesting, because some of the productions while taken seriously by the creators, are pretty much indistinguishable from deadpan parodies of the genre. Something like Chu Chem, a musical about Jews set in China just seems too off kilter not to be a parody.
Any suggestions of works that are parodies without intending to be?
The Battlefield Earth movie almost looks like it is making fun of the source material and cheesy scifi movies in general. It turns out they were serious and it is just that bad of a movie.
I’ve heard it argued that Heinlein’s Number of the Beast was intentionally and self-referentially bad, written for the exact purpose of providing other authors with examples of what not to do. But for me to evaluate those arguments would require re-reading it, and that’s really hard to justify.
My father’s been ill and I’ve been spending a lot of time with him lately. As a result, I’ve been watching a lot more daytime TV than I normally do.
It’s not all bad. I find I actually enjoy old episodes of Gunsmoke and The Andy Griffith Show.
But my father was flicking through the channels yesterday and he decided to watch a show called Worst Bakers in America. And I refuse to believe these people are real. They must be actors portraying a collection of idiots.
Apparently, bananas are designed by God for the benefit of humans. First time I saw it I thought it was a comedy sketch mocking creationists. No, it’s real.
I find this really hard to believe. But then again, I find just about all the theories I’ve read about Number of the Beast to be hard to believe. NotB was the first Heinlein that I read when it was brand new, and I felt seriously annoyed that it turned out to be such an awful book. I did re-read it a few years ago, and I still feel that way. I think people keep trying to make excuses for it because they can’t believe Heinlein would turn out something so bad.
Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with that. It’d be one thing if Heinlein’s second-worst book were only as bad as, say, Time for the Stars. In that case, Number of the Beast would be an aberration, in need of explanation. But he actually had a whole lot of books covering a wide span of quality, with some others nearly as bad as Number of the Beast, or arguably even worse. And furthermore, the bad ones (including Number) are mostly clustered together in time, and bookended by a traumatic brain affliction. The simplest explanation is just that, yes, it really is that bad.
I have heard that Neil Young’s album Rust Never Sleeps was one side of material that Neil liked, and one side of deliberately bad songs that he expected people to like. Then he could laugh at his audience’s stupidity. I guess. Neil never really did like his fans, after all.
While I don’t know if that’s true, there is a difference in tone between the two sides. And for what it’s worth, I like the “bad” side better. So either I’m stupid, or Neil isn’t very good at making deliberately bad songs.
A few years back I wrote movie/DVD reviews for an Asian movie fan website. One of the films I reviewed was A Chinese Tall Story. On the face of it, it’s a retelling of the Chinese mythological epic adventure “Journey to the West,” written about 500 years ago. There have been several well-known film adaptations.
But I could not believe this jumbled mess. My review was about 6,000 words of dismay, but I’ll only cut a couple of pertinent passages.
So I honestly believe it was supposed to present as a straight-up fantastical, epic, rousing action/adventure comedy. But it sure came across to me as bad parody.
Starship Troopers. The movie. Afterwards, people involved claimed it was a parody, but it’s clear they didn’t know what the word meant when they made it.
Note that a different version of NotB will be released late this year https://www.arcmanorbooks.com/heinlein
Going the other direction, Scream was (to me, transparently) a parody-and-tribute to a zillion teenage horror flicks. But apparently some people didn’t get it as such and composed Scary Movie which tries to be a parody of Scream.
This thread reminds me of one time in probably the early to mid 1990s, long enough ago that MTV was still primarily focused on showing music videos. I was channel surfing one weekend morning and stumbled upon a show on MTV hosted by Weird Al, in which he would show a music video and then his parody of that video. When he played the video for “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies I honestly wasn’t sure if that wasn’t the parody video.
Back when Mad Magazine first started running paid ads in their magazine some of the time I couldn’t tell what was a Mad parody and what was an actual product because this was the early 00’s and all the ads were for xtreme kids stuff like green ketchup and spicy fruit juice.
“This Is Spinal Tap” has the same problem, but from the other direction. It’s a parody that’s so spot-on that many thought it was a real documentary. This is exacerbated by the fact that much of the heavy metal world is so over the top that you sometimes think they’re a parody.
Are you familiar with Chinese culture or mythology? Because Journey to the West is just old popular story, most, if not everyone in China knows the character and the plot already. Some of their stories have turn into idioms in the Chinese language. So in a lot of these adaptations, you can just drop the characters in without needing any explanation.
I haven’t seen your movie, but I can already tell you the the backstory behind the ever-morphing magic golden staff (a major weapon of the Monkey King, you rarely see him depicted without it).
All the other characters that mystify you are also part of the Chinese folktale/mythos:
The Four Heavenly Knights, you’ll see them at the entrance in the majority of Buddhist temples in China. No explanation needed, we know who they are, and their powers are.
An underground Tree God? There are Chinese love stories featuring man falling in love with various Tree/flower gods.
In Chinese folklore, fox demon, spider demon, snake demon, Moon goddess, water spirits are commonly featured. Since Journey to the West is based on Chinese folklore, a lot of these characters are not that weird in context.
The wormhole in space though, I’ll admit is just weird.
If I hadn’t already known who Rob Reiner, Patrick McNee, Billy Crystal and Howard Hessman were, I could have believed it was real, too. Some of my friends thought it was real.
The album did fool me. I saw the album in the college bookstore before I’d heard of the movie, and marveled at the cover. I loved the usage of the heavy metal umlaut in the band name. Of the cover, I thought, “this is the logical end of evolution of heavy metal album covers. Just solid black. Where else can you go after that?” I did NOT add “none more black”, I admit. 
Well, yes. That’s what I get for cutting like 5 sentences out of a 6,000 word review. My first paragraph is, word-for-word:
It just seemed too much in the weeds for the point I was trying to make, so I didn’t go all into that. This movie has robots and lasers and spaceships. And Spider-man. That’s what mystifies me. NOT the traditional characters. My point was not that the traditional Chinese mythology and folklore was weird, but that what this movie did to it was so weird it seemed to be bordering on parody.
I would invite you to see the movie to get where I’m coming from, but I’m not that sadistic.
I think this is a related phenomenon.
Hank Wangford was kinda betwixt and between. Those guys really were big Country Music fans, but at the time (1970’s) you just couldn’t be English and be a country band. So the whole thing was undercut with parody (songs: Cowboys Stay On Longer; Jogging For Jesus; Never Wear Mascara If You Love A Married Man etc). But they played it properly. I mean, if you weren’t listening too closely you would never know.
The Darknesswere more puzzling. In the beginning they were trailed as parody. The idea of a “real life” parody heavy metal band appealed to me, but they just seemed “real” (rather than parody) and bad. I never really knew if they were parody or not, and in the end never liked them enough to care.
j
I love Monster Magnet, but I’ve never figured out if they’re for real or a parody. I mean, listen to (and look at) that:
Or the charmingly named Pill Shovel
In fact, you could pick everything by them to make the point (their straightest songs maybe is their cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s Evil, but the original isn’t a picnic either). But they ROCK!