Shallow Parody / Western Animation

Shows with their own pages:

• Family Guy
• Robot Chicken
• The Simpsons

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Individual examples:

• Baby Looney Tunes: Most of the parodies done in the episode "I Strain" were done very well; however "Andrew The Anteater", a parody of Arthur, is an exception. We see "Andrew" (played by Sylvester) has a problem keeping his long nose warm, when Arthur never had a long nose in the TV series^note he did have this in the first book, though. Worse yet, he is seen getting along with his sister (played by Lola) when Arthur and D.W. almost never get along.
• Chalkzone: Word of God states that "Chunky" was meant to be an Affectionate Parody of The Rolling Stones' style. The result sounds more like an Arena Rock anthem similar to Aerosmith or Foreigner.
• Clone High: Invoked with the clones, a bunch of laughably immature buffoons who are at best ignorant caricatures of the actual historical figures, effectively making them parodies of shallow parodies. It's a driving plot point that they are not the originals but merely clones who share their DNA and who haven't lived through or done anything the originals did, with many of them knowing what they know about their "clone fathers" purely from Pop-Cultural Osmosis rather than fact, and characters like Abe and Gandhi having been effectively crushed by the thought of living up to their originals and having become a submissive anxious Every Man and a party animal maniac loser, respectively. Had the series gotten a second season, an intended plot point would have been that "Gandhi" was actually a clone of Gary Coleman, thus completely invalidating the idea that they have anything to do with their originals. It's best summed up by JFK when his foster parents explain to him what the actual JFK was really like:
  JFK: I thought he was a macho womanizing stud who conquered the moon!
• Dexter's Laboratory did an anime parody three times, once specifically of Speed Racer, once as a parody of the Humongous Mecha genre, particularly Voltron, and later in the series of common anime villains traits (like being Bishōnen and wearing Scary Impractical Armor). The only problem is that the villain from the latter was a Card-Carrying Villain while the majority of villains he was parodying at least try to justify their crimes. And he has a speech pattern like he ran away from Speed Racer.
• Drawn Together:
  • Many lines involving Princess Clara parody "Disney movie cliches" that were never in any actual Disney movie. For example, the first episode parodies the "fact" that black characters in Disney movies are always servants, even though most (animated) Disney movies have no black characters to begin with (the Muses in Hercules are the first named black characters in an animated Disney film, not counting Sunflower in Fantasia, who would fit the parody perfectly but has been removed from every modern version).
  • Toot has no resemblance to Betty Boop besides appearance, and seems to be more a general parody of celebrity idols who are past their prime instead.
  • Xandir is supposedly a cross-parody of Link and Cloud Strife, but is really just a gay stereotype dressed like a video game character.^note In actuality, he's less of a parody of Japanese video game protagonists and more of a parody of the culture surrounding them at the time- most JRPG and other Japanese video game protagonists were some flavor of young Bishōnen with blonde hair, but due to Americans in the 90s and the 2000s being more used to adult protagonists who were far more macho-looking, JRPG protagonists were seen as too effeminate and were the target of gay jokes.
  • An episode includes Daria as a victim of torture in Hot Topic's basement; as the characters pass by, she drawls "This is men's fault." On her own show, Daria isn't a Straw Feminist, but rather is annoyed by everyone equally. (Daria has a Straw Feminist character, Ms. Barch, but she was created to be a contrast to less feminist characters like Daria.)
• There's an episode of Droopy, Master Detective that was a satire of Romeo and Juliet, and apparently, whoever wrote that episode was under the impression that Juliet was a princess who got captured and that Romeo rescued her.
• Kyle the Conjurer from Fanboy and Chum Chum is supposed to be a parody of Harry Potter. However aside from looking like Ron Weasley, being a wizard that attended a Wizarding School and having a Malfoy-like rival, he really doesn't have anything to do with Harry Potter. He's more based on American stereotypes of British people such as British Teeth and British being snobby toward Americans.
• Futurama:
  • "When Aliens Attack" featured a Show Within the Show called Single Female Lawyer which features a protagonist who's a Strong Independent Woman (TM) who Really Gets Around and is heroically defiant in the face of the patriarchy. It's apparently meant to be a parody of Ally McBeal, down to the protagonist having almost the same name (and the famously short skirts). The problem is, Ally was never portrayed as any kind of feminist icon and certainly not as being the least bit strong or independent - in fact, most of the show consisted of her angsting about how pathetic and incomplete she felt without a husband and children, and she never faced much in the way of discrimination. Nor was she any more or less sexually active than other women on television at the time. It's likely that this was a reference to some female critics at the time criticizing Ally for being a bad role model for women.
  • Bender's Game features many prominent references to Lord of the Rings (names like "Leegola" and "Gynecaladriel," evil henchmen called "Morcs," Fry turning into a Talking to Themself Gollum-like character) but doesn't even try to broach the Pop-Cultural Osmosis level of knowledge.
  • "Saturday Morning Fun Pit"'s final segment is a parody of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, but goes about it in a rather strange way; namely, the central joke is that the show, G.I. Zapp, is full of Family-Unfriendly Violence and graphic deaths, and therefore Nixon has to hastily Bowdlerise the show to be suitable for children. While not a bad joke on censorship in general, and possibly intended as a wink at the glut of kid-friendly cartoons based on R-rated movie franchises throughout the '80s and '90s, using GI Joe as the basis for this parody is a bizarre move; not only was the cartoon intended for children from the start, it's about as nonviolent as a show about soldiers can possibly be, and never had to edit itself down (the sole exception being removing Duke's death in The Movie, but that happened due to fear of backlash from kids, not parents).
• Gravity Falls features a parody of Dungeons & Dragons called "Dungeons, Dungeons, & More Dungeons". The primary joke of the episode is that the game is loaded with math, including statistical anomalies, prime numbers, difficult equations, and a heavy focus on probability. No version of D&D has any of those things; the most complicated math in D&D is basic multiplication and division, and all the rules are written in place, with the most complex editions going so far as to have you check a chart or two to see the result of your action. The game also had players making up spells on the fly based solely on imagination and the dice coming up right - a far cry from the game that codified Vancian Magic, which is based on tightly restricted spells with well-defined effects that work as the player wills.^NoteIf anything, it seems to be more a parody of its imitators and their tendency to add more complicated rules to their gamebooks than D&D itself would.
  • Not too surprising if you know what inspired this episode:
    Alex Hirsch: But one time back in my Flapjack days Pen Ward (creator of Adventure Time) and Pat McHale (creator of Over the Garden Wall) asked if I wanted to play D&D after work. I asked what the rules were, and they said, “It’s a game of imagination! There are no rules!” and then proceeded to argue about the rules for an hour and a half. I haven’t played since.
• Johnny Test: Zig-zagged with the recurring Pokémon: The Series parody Tinymon. From what we see of the TV series, it has a hero who looks like Gary Oak, acts like a Bruce Lee parody and talks like Speed Racer. In fact, his travelling companion looks more like Ash Ketchum. On the other hand, it features a legitimate parody of the gaming console, and contains obscure references like "evolution through happiness", legendary Pokémon that may not even exist and Magikarp Power. Even small things like unlockable options from league battles and stealing Pokémon.
• Cartoon Network's MAD:
  • The sketch "Pokémon Park" shows a Charmander and a Magikarp evolving to their respective fully evolved forms by their own will. Pokémon don't evolve of their own will, there are many different methods to evolve them (at least with Charmander and Magikarp, they both evolve at or above a certain XP level), furthermore, Charmander doesn't immediately evolve into Charizard, Charmander evolves into Charmeleon and then Charizard.
  • In one scene of the sketch "The Celebrity Ape-Rentice", Donkey Kong says something about kidnapping a princess in a past life. He's referring to Pauline, who is not a princess. It seems that the writers mistook Pauline's Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed design from the original arcade game with Princess Peach, who has a very similar color palette.
  • The sketch "Angry Bird Management" tells the audience that the Angry Birds attack the Bad Piggies for no particular reason, when in the actual game, they do have a reason to attack them: The birds attack the pigs because they steal their eggs (something that even the most casual Angry Birds fan knows).
  • The sketch that crosses Randy Savage with Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, "Randy Savage: 9th Grade Wrestler". And really, it seems that they only used the Ninjashow as an excuse to have a sketch about Randy Savage. Howard calls Randy by his given name in the sketch instead of his surname, they call the city "Piper Vile" instead of "Norrisville", and the plot isn't like anything like the series. In fact, it's not really a plot; it starts off by telling us how Randy can turn into the Macho Man, gives us some footage of Savage wrestling, then switches back to their high school to make fun of the show's use of odd lingo... and that's where it ends. In general, the attitude the sketch has towards the series is that it's a Quirky Work, even though it's not as weird once you actually watch it.
  • The sketch "Gaming's Next Top Princess" makes references to many female video game characters in the intro, but most of them aren't princesses; the only two princesses are two of the finalists, Zelda and Peach (the third finalist is Samus, a bounty hunter).
• Megas XLR: In the Thanksgiving episode, there's a character called "Augie the Adorable Aardvark", who is a parody of Sonic the Hedgehog. Coop and Jamie snark about Augie killing them with kindness, implying the character is an overly saccharine mascot like a Care Bear. Anybody who has played a Sonic game (or even watched any of the cartoons) will know that Sonic is snarky and isn't afraid to get aggressive with his enemies, and his early appearances were so emblematic of '90s 'tude that they spawned an entire character type all on their own.
• The Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures episode "Don't Touch That Dial" takes potshots at The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, and The Real Ghostbusters through widely inaccurate parodies. It's made harder to swallow by the episode ending with the message that this show is awesome and all the other cartoons (and to a lesser extent, television in general) are trash that isn't worth watching.
  • The Flintstones and The Jetsons are amalgamated into The Jetstones, with the bulk of the satire being on the show having an annoying theme song rather than any valid criticisms on either of the cartoons' actual content.
  • The Scooby-Doo spoof portrays the stand-ins for Mystery, Inc. as being different ethnicities with the Fred Jones analogue having a British accent and an afro when the characters in the source material were all American and Caucasian.
  • The Real Ghostbusters are lampooned as The Real Gagbusters, four Animesque men with wild, multi-colored hair who wore identical jumpsuits and all talked like Bill Murray, which completely disregards that the art style of The Real Ghostbusters wasn't severely influenced by anime and that the show actually made an effort to make Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddemore, Ray Stantz, and Peter Venkman more diverse and easier to distinguish than their depictions in Ghostbusters (1984). For example, Egon was the only Ghostbuster shown to have a bizarre hairstyle due to his pompadour and rattail combo, and the four all wore differently-colored uniforms in addition to having distinct voices and personalities.
  • The only exception is the Rocky and Bullwinkle parody, and even then that's only because the Bullwinkle parody is a diminutive super-intelligent moose while the Rocky parody is Rocky Balboa.
• The Paradise PD episode "Who Ate Wally's Waffles" serves primarily as a Take That! towards Disney, with one scene having Robby and Delbert distract Disney's lawyers by setting free all of the Disney characters that were notorious for being politically incorrect nowadays. Among them is Donald Duck dressed as Adolf Hitler, which is clearly a reference to Der Fuehrer's Face, but completely disregards that the original short condemned the Nazis and ended with Donald relieved that he was just having a nightmare about being a Nazi.
• The Real Ghostbusters had several "parodies" of other popular shows at the time, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, but other than the similar look and color of the characters they're parodying, nothing else is similar, especially not the personalities. For example, in the Simpsons parody, the Bart expy is presented as the smart scientifically-oriented kid and the Lisa expy as the snarky brat.^*More akin to her Tracey Ullman incarnation^also...This whole thing can be justified since, judging by the name of the characters, they were actually written as parodies of the Bundys from Married... with Children but drawn to look like the Simpsons instead In the TMNT episode, other than the preference for pizza, the reptilian ghosts have nothing more in common.
• Rick and Morty has a few:
  • The episode "Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender" has been criticized as an ineffective critique of superhero media. What makes satirical deconstructive superhero fiction like Watchmen and The Boys so effective is that they explain how and why superheroes are incompatible with the complexities of the real world.^note  Watchmen shows how super-heroic morality clash with Cold War politics such that those who fully embrace super-heroics become government pawns, die horribly, or turn evil while the most sympathetic characters are the ones who actually manage to balance their mundane lives with fighting crime. Likewise, The Boys depicts superheroes as celebrities who abuse their power to coerce people into sex or avoid litigation for collateral damage. In contrast, Rick and Morty shows the Vindicators as one-dimensional assholes without explaining how their superheroic mentalities turn them into scumbags. Furthermore, the negative impact of the Vindicators on ordinary civilians is never shown and instead is quickly glossed over, thereby defeating the whole point of the deconstruction (which is to show the dire consequences). The superhero parody is a Red Herring in any case; the episode abandons it and makes a sudden swerve into tearing down Rick himself about ten minutes in.
  • Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion, like many Western Animation parodies of anime, suffers from being extremely dated, mostly mocking the extremely limited range of anime that got exported in the 80's and early 90's and the specific flaws of dubs of that era. While the show does at least reference actual aspects of Voltron, the GoTron pilots feel more like a parody-of-a-parody-of-a-parody filtered through several layers of Animesque shows than the actual anime they're supposed to reference; to the extent that anime ever looked or sounded like that, it hasn't really been a thing for decades. Kendra's habit of adding in random sounds and words as punctuation certainly paints a picture of the joke being based on a misremembered anime dub from several decades ago.
• South Park:
  • "Jakovasaurs". The Phantom Menace wasn't out when the episode was made, so all they had to make fun of Jar Jar was the trailer. Most of it is as shallow as can be, but it still kinda works because it shows they knew, as they stated, "[Jar Jar] is the new Ewok! This is what's going to ruin the movie!"
  • "Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus": Rod Stewart is portrayed here as an elderly, wheelchair-bound man who wears a diaper and can't speak intelligibly at all. In real life, Rod Stewart was 54 when this episode aired, and as of 2023, he is still an active musician.
  • Their parody of Inception, "Insheeption", was said to have been based on CollegeHumor's parody of the film, and that that was all they had seen. In the commentary for the episode, Trey Parker and Matt Stone said that Matt had, in fact, seen the film, and the blatant similarities between the two parodies was because of a miscommunication (to wit, they only had one chance to see the movie before the episode's deadline and had to consult outside sources to fill in on some details they didn't have time to go back and rewatch).
  • Their parody of Ghost Hunters in "Dead Celebrities" seems to have heard about the "Dude, run!" meme and ran with it. First of all, the guy who said that is the only example of anyone ever panicking during the show, and he never lived it down. The two main characters (who were being parodied), do the exact opposite. They're more attracted to an area if there seems to be something unnatural going on. Likewise, it portrays them as coming to the conclusion that everything is a ghost. In the early seasons especially (when this parody was made), they spend a good chunk of an episode disproving most (if not all) of the claims (in fact, the early show is a lot more about helping normal people feel safe in their homes and not about catching ghosts). Infamously, Jason often declares, at the end of an episode, that a place is not haunted, even if they still have a pile of evidence that they can't debunk.
  • The whole concept of "Princess Kenny" seems like Matt and Trey watched exactly one episode of any arbitrary Magical Girl series, crammed together a few rainbow/kawaii/pink dresses jokes and called it a day. Odd, because the duo should be familiar enough with Japanese culture, especially after the episodes "Good Times With Weapons" and "Chinpokomon".
  • South Park itself attracted many shallow parodies. Back when the show was still fairly new, parodies would crank up the show's penchant for Toilet Humour and Vulgar Humor to absurd lengths. Sure, the show doesn't teach as many lessons or have as much satire in the earlier seasons, but at least the plots make sense. In fact, a parody made by Cracked says outright that the show doesn't have to make sense because they just make gross jokes. This is, incidentally, the origin of the Show Within a Show Terence and Philip, which was based on what contemporary writers made South Park out to be.
• Space Goofs: The episode "Mangamania" is about an anime panda named Panda Manga, "the number one star of manga", who decides to hide in the aliens' house from crazed fans who want to sign his autograph. But besides being saccharine, doing things such as the Cross-Popping Veins, the Sweat Drop and knowing martial arts, Panda Manga doesn't feel very Animesque at all, in fact, if it wasn't for the episode telling you this, you wouldn't have a clue that Panda Manga is a parody of anime and manga (and in some parts, it feels like a Take That! since Panda Manga is a complete Jerkass towards the aliens, and his biggest fear are European comic characters). The closest thing the episode does about Anime and Manga is the climax, where Etno, Candy and Gorgious transform into Mons and start some sort of Phonýmon battle against him.
• Teen Titans Go!:
  • The episode "Squash and Stretch" has the Titans watching a Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner parody with parodies of Gumball and Darwin in the title characters' roles, seeming to indicate the writers never watched TAWoG, but wanted to parody it anyway.
  • The show itself is often seen as or accused of being one for the original Teen Titans cartoon... which, ironically, had also originally been accused of being one of the Wolfman/Perez era comic book it was inspired by. Wheels within wheels... this wasn't helped by the oft-circulated claim that creators of the show never saw the previous show.
• Velma was intended to be an adult Deconstructive Parody of the Scooby-Doo franchise, but has largely been criticized for being this instead. Putting aside the mandated absence of the Great Dane himself, the characterizations of the rest of the gang come off less as new takes on their preexisting personalities and more like the writers slapped cliched Animated Shock Comedy traits onto them. For just one example, Fred in the original show was a down-to-earth Nice Guy often depicted as the smartest member of the team behind Velma, if a bit of a Bunny-Ears Lawyer; in Velma however, he's a stereotypical wealthy Jerk Jock Manchild who can't even use a fork and knife.
• Wonder Showzen has a deleted scene called "Scooter McJimmy" which is a parody of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, but apart from the main character being a boy genius who looks like a redneck version of Jimmy, it has virtually no resemblance to an episode of the show. It's just a mockery of middle America with a Jimmy Neutron parody as a flimsy framing device. The connection between 3D animation and rednecks at least allows for a pretty amusing cameo appearance by the characters from the music video to the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing".

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