Do you know the character Barbe Rouge from the French comic strip? No? I’m not surprised. He’s hardly known outside of France.
However, the parody version of him has achieved international fame in the Asterix books.
Victorian children were taught a poem beginning :
“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
Lewis Carroll’s parody version is now much more famous. Indeed, most of the Alice poems are parodies better known than the original.
I suspect that when most younger folks encounter the line “We don’t need no… stinking badges” (or variants of it), they are more likely to think of Blazing Saddles than of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
I grew up watching parodies of performers in Warner Brother cartoons when I hadn’t seen the originals. There are others I’ve seen more of in the cartoons than elsewhere.
Dame Edna Oliver, Joe Penner, lots of others I’ve either forgotten the names of, or never knew the names of.
I came in here just to mention that. I swear, kids (myself included) are going to be sitting down listening to Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre and singing, in the aisles, “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit…”
I’ve never seen Davey and Goliath (those christian morality stories with the claymation boy and his dog), but between Moral Orel, Family Guy and The Simpsons I’ve seen half a dozen spoofs of the characters.
I learned Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh years before I discovered that Allan Sherman wrote only the words – the tune is Dance of the Hours, from the 1876 opera La Gioconda.
Has Weird Al ever parodied something obscure that his relative popularity eclipsed? Only-applies-to-me example: I had never heard “Ridin’ Dirty” before I heard Al’s version: “White and Nerdy.”
Does “Play it again, Sam” count? Famously, that particular phrase is of course never used in the movie, but it is one of the first lines people recite.
Or, back in the day, there was automatic Cary Grant saying:
[Cary Grant]
Judy, Judy, Judy
[/CG]
The only problem was the Cary never said it - it was the comedian Larry Storch, who said he liked the way the word sounded when he was trying to get his Cary accent ready, so he kept using it…
I guess most folks here know that the immortal line “Beam me up, Scotty” was never actually uttered on the original ‘Star Trek.’
FTM, “Jan Brady” only spoke the line “Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” one single time on “the Brady Bunch”, but it’s been so endlessly parodied that it seems as if it was a catch-phrase spoken on every single episode.
Except that Grant did say the word “Judy” many times in the movie Only Angels Have Wing* (though not three times in a row).
Nearly all the poems in Alice in Wonderland are parodies. Even obscure stuff like Carroll’s:
“Speak roughly to your little boy
And beat him when he sneezes”
is better known from the parody than the original.
He also parodied “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” so much so that some versions of it contain one of his lines – “Like a teatray in the sky” instead of the correct version.
Carroll’s poems that are parodies include:
“Will you walk a little faster?”
“’'Tis the voice of the lobster”
“I passed by his garden”
“Beautiful Soup”
“They told me you had been to her”
“Tweedledum and tweedledee”
Only “Jabberwocky,” “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (and it appropriates a rhyme scheme from another poem), and a couple of nursery rhymes in the Alice books are not parodies of something.
Although it doesn’t really count, I recall an anecdote about the Stan Freberg record St. George and the Dragonet, which was, as you can tell by the name, a parody of the Dragnet TV show. In some foreign country (Australia, perhaps?), the record was released despite the fact Dragnet did not air in that country. When Dragnet was aired, someone from that country told Freberg that he was surprised to see a TV show inspired by one of his comedy routines!
