The title of the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a reference to the documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, which came out a few years earlier. Since then, Anchorman has gone on to have a popular sequel, and Porn Star has largely been forgotten.
Not quite the same thing, but I suspect that far more people these days have seen Airplane than any of the 70’s style disaster movies that it’s parodying (I believe there’s one specific one with the chicken-and-fish-dinners plot that it’s most directly a knockoff of).
(Note quite what I’m looking for: A famous current TV character was named after the main character of a 1939 novel called The Day of the Locust. Boy would it be weird to go read that book and try to take the actions of Homer Simpsons seriously. However, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that Matt Groening expected many/most viewers to be familiar with that book.)
What other examples are there where something enters pop culture as a deliberately-familiar reference to, or homage to, something else; but goes on to be far more influential and better known than the original?
I think The Beatles qualify. Their name refers to two things that were popular in the early 60s, but which are now pretty much forgotten. The spelling of the name was a nod to the genre of music popular in England then, beat music, and the use of an insect name was inspired by Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets. The Beatles have certainly overshadowed both of those things.
Do you know that to be the case? I’m pretty sure it’s only a coincidence. The Simpsons’ first names come from Groening’s own family (his dad was Homer Groening), and I think the last name is just because it’s reminiscent of simpletons, or simps.
Does this count? *Sweet Home, Alabama *is an answer to Neil Young’s Southern Man, and Neil Young is name-checked in the song.
Their popularity rises and falls, but there were certainly periods when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were much better known than the Daredevil comic book that they were originally a parody of.
But the example that’s probably the trope-namer is Lewis Carroll’s parody poems in his Alice books. With the exception of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” all of the children’s poems he was parodying have been long forgotten.
I checked Wikipedia before posting this, and apparently MG has said both in interviews. So presumably his dad was named Homer, that caused him to notice the name “Homer Simpson” in the book (hey, that’s my dad’s name!), which meant that “Simpson” was in his head when coming up with a name for this new animated family, etc. Or something along those lines.
According to wikipedia: “Using money from a tax refund, together with a loan from Eastman’s uncle, the young artists self-published a single-issue comic intended to parody four of the most popular comics of the early 1980s: Marvel Comics’ Daredevil and New Mutants, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, and Frank Miller’s Ronin.[4]”.
TMNT is CERTAINLY better known to the general public than any of those other 3.
I’ve met many Young Frankenstein fans who’ve never seen any of the original Frankenstein / Bride/ Son of movies. They are missing so many of the jokes!
Bert and Ernie started out as a reference to characters in It’s a Wonderful Life, but are much more famous as muppets. That said, I’ve heard that the connection is a coincidence, but I still like to think otherwise.
The early antogonist on MST3K is named Dr. Clayton Forrester. Not many people remember the original character with that name: the protagonist of the 50’s version of War of the Worlds.
The evidence is a bit more in favor of “coincidence” than otherwise. In the late sixties when the creators of Sesame Street were working things out, IAWL was languishing in relative obscurity–it hadn’t done all that well, wasn’t re-released often, and this was before the age of home video so the only way anyone would have seen it would have been in re-releases, which weren’t happening.
It wasn’t until about the mid-to-late seventies, after Sesame Street (and Bert and Ernie) were well under way, that IAWL’s copyright lapsed and it fell into public domain. Networks started using it as a cheap movie during the Christmas season and it finally got the widespread appreciation it deserved.
(However, it did give rise to a cute wordless joke in “Elmo Saves Christmas.” One of the characters has IAWL playing on TV. Bert and Ernie happen to be passing by just as George yells, “Hey, Bert! Ernie!” and they do a double-take.)
And arguably better known than 1 or 2 of their Renaissance artist namesakes.
Howard Stern took the “Hey Now!” catchphrase from the Larry Sanders show and made it his own. I don’t know about other people, but I had always assumed it was his from the start until I learned otherwise. I’ve still never seen Larry Sanders.
The Marx Brothers got the idea of ending their names with “O” from Knocko the Monk, a popular comic strip by Gus Mager that ran in newspapers starting in 1904. All the characters were monkeys whose names ended in “O”. Knocko the Monk gradually morphed into Sherlocko the Monk, a strip about a monkey detective. After the Conan Doyle estate threatened to sue over the name, the strip became Hawkshaw the Detective which ran until 1953.
Everyone has heard of Groucho Marx. Knocko the Monk, not so many … .
Most people who have heard of the band They Might Be Giants are unfamiliar with Cervantes, or the 1971 movie They Might Be Giants, with Joanne Woodward and George C. Scott.
The band took its name directly from the movie, and the movie takes its title from Don Quixote. In the movie, George C. Scott is a mental patient, who at one point explains that Don Quixote was a genius because he thought that every windmill might be a giant. If he was convinced that they were giants, he’d be insane. Just as “all the best minds used to think the world was flat. But what if it isn’t? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we’d all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.”
Most people I know think the band called itself “They Might Be Giants” as a third person self-reference expressing the hope that they might be a famous band some day.
