A while ago, I opened a thread in which I tried to show that metal sounds like a parody of metal; that metal already exaggerates all of its own defining features, so any parody of metal would actually sound a lot like normal metal.
I got shot down. I was rightly informed that what I thought was “metal” was really just a certain type of metal: power metal. The examples I cited of this sort of thing were Holy Diver by Dio and Under a Glass Moon by Dream Theater.
Now I’d like to ask a much broader question: what pieces of media (art, music, writing, news reporting, whatever) seem to you like they could very well be parodies of their own genre or form, but aren’t?
A friend of mine and I agreed that Pola X was like a parody of what people think French films (and arty foreign films in general) are like. Characters who talk cryptically while looking meaningfully at anything other than the person they’re speaking to; really obvious, overblown symbolism (he wrecks his motorcycle… because he’s wrecking his life!/they’re wearing all white… because they’re pure!/there’s a hidden room in his mom’s house… just like there’s a secret child from mom’s past!/and so on); explicit sex that doesn’t advance the plot, but seems to be included to be “real” despite the fact that everything about the film is artificial as hell; dissonant music that clashes with the film.
Image comic books in the late 1990s-- and Rob Liefeld’s work in particular-- was practically a parody of what people would expect superhero comics to be like (though in context it was just the logical extreme of some bad storytelling practices that had been gaining fleeting favor among superhero fans of the time). Bad dialogue and plotting that served as an excuse to have fight scenes, pin-up poses of anatomically-incorrect steroid cases and porn stars in spandex, ludicrously huge guns/muscles/breasts/fists/explosions/whatever pre-teens thought was cool.
I stumbled on that old metal thread a couple of days ago, too. Neat idea for a thread!
Adding:
Obscure home shopping networks, like the Knife Shopping Network, hosted by stereotypical good 'ol boy Southerners.
BBC’s My Word! - extremely posh and pretentious, and self-consciously intellectual. Basically, over-the-top more-British-than-thou; perhaps even more British than this guy.
A lot of prog rock is over-the-top, like a parody of itself. Rick Wakeman, for example, with his grandiose, twenty-plus minute long works with medieval and fantasy themes, is what I’d call the most “proggy”.
Professional wrestling. All of it, even before it became a constantly-lampshaded self-parody.
I remember once, back in the late 1970s, I tuned in for Saturday Night Live, which for some reason that night had been pre-empted by professional wrestling . . . and I watched for more than 10 minutes before I figured that out.
If you can’t tell the difference between pro-wrestling and a sketch comedy show – especially thirty years ago, when vignettes were not all that common – that says more about you than either type of show.
When we saw American Movie at the Chicago International Film Festival, we had no idea before it began if it was real, or a very clever parody. I don’t remember at what point we decided it was real, but I suspect it wasn’t until after the credits when we went to the lobby and met Mark Borchardt, Mike Schank and Chris Smith. We bought a VHS copy of Coven from Mark.
Some things simply cannot be parodied. I read in an interview that SCTV tried to parody Laverne and Shirley and gave up. No matter how broadly they played it, no matter how ridiculous the premise…it just looked like an episode of Laverne and Shirley.
Todd Rundgren said the only reason he agreed to produce Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell was that he thought it was a hilarious satire of Bruce Springsteen.
If you haven’t seen The Order of the Black Eagle, you have totally missed out. It’s a very sub-par James Bond clone sort of thing. Most of it’s set in Argentina with a bunch of Nazis and, of course, Cryo-Hitler. There is also an orangutang who dresses just like Our Hero. There is a point at which the orangutang drives the tank.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a mecha anime where, in the last episode:
the protagonist summons a galaxy-sized mecha through sheer willpower, which is piloted by a moon-sized mecha, which is piloted by a city-sized mecha, which is piloted by a building-sized mecha, which is piloted by a man who wears no shirt.
South Park parodied this, and many I have spoken to thought they came up with it originally. For quite a while I thought that this just HAD to be a parody, but there’s no “wink”, no nod to acknowledge that this might be attempting to be funny … which just makes it even more hilarious.
