Because well-known and obscurity are both subjective. One of the examples is : Watch the opening to "Car 54 Where Are You" and try not to think of the Atari 5200 commercial for "Mario Bros.". Since I wasn't old enough for either, the one I'm most familiar with is the "Car 54 Where Are You" opening, because of Nick-at-Nite.
The statement one troper made that the bond franchise was a parody of 1950's spy thrillers is incorrect. While some of the films might be considered parodies, the original books by Ian Fleming were supposed to be a realistic account of the life of a secret service agent. Fleming was a spy himself,after all.
OK, so maybe not subjective but diachronically unstable. I am old enough to remember the original song Jeopardy as being a big hit, and this was before the internet. It is not surprising that in the age of the internet the spoof gets more hits, and I accept that the spoof might thereby be better known to the younger generations than the original song. Still, to me the spoof is the "spoof of the song" and not the "song of the spoof" which it might well be to the younglings.
Edited by tweekatten
Anyone else think we should include reference to how Shrek 2's shot of Fairy Godmother lying on the piano has become more timely than what it's referring- Michelle Pfeiffer's performance of Makin' Whoopie?
Should Bill Cosby's portrayals in The Simpsons and Family Guy be on this list? I feel like I hear sound bytes of "Pokemon!? With the 'poke' and the 'mon'..." and "A BIG, STUPID DOO-DOO HEAD!!!" more often on any media related to Bill Cosby on the internet (particularly when it comes to You Tube Poops and similar videos) than any real snippets from Bill Cosby's performances.
I cut this:
- When hearing Bill Haley & His Comets' music to "Rock Around the Clock," do you expect to hear: "Sunday, Monday Happy Days"?
Is it true that Honor Harrington is rather transparently modelled on Horatio Hornblower? If so, she's a second-order example. (I've read neither.)
- As with Daffy Duck and "despicable" (in the Western Animation section below), the character of "Grimace" from the McDonald's commercials aimed at children has resulted in the widespread mispronunciation of the word "grimace", which is supposed to have the stress on the second syllable ("gri-MACE")
, not the first ("GRIM-uhs").
This "mispronunciation" is in fact an alternate pronunciation, according to a dictionary predating McDonaldland somewhat, so I'm pretty certain that whoever wrote that example was giving the character undeserved credit. But aside from that, I don't think pronunciations of words even qualify as examples of this trope.
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Huh, in the McDonaldland spots I remember from 197x it's definitely GRIMass.
(Hm, maybe that's why they changed it.)
Edited by Tamfang
There's was an entry in the music section that was only an example of (supposed) plagiarism. Since it did not fit the "remake/parody eclipses original" definition I removed it. For the record it claimed that the song Epilogue from the 1990 anime "Record of the Lodoss War" was copied from the 1989 Jerry Goldsmith theme to the movie "Leviathan".
This is my first deletion. If I screwed up please let me know here.
Edited by RMoribayashi
I cracked up while reading Doc Smith's The Skylark of Space, when I recognized it as the parent of Harry Harrison's spoof Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. But I won't list it because the parody may well be more obscure than the original.
Y'know, IMHO about 1/3 of the examples on this topic are just wrong. I am sorely tempted to go through and do a large-scale deletion. Somebody tell me I shouldn't... We should probably use Googlefight or something to check that the supposedly "forgotten" original is less well-known than the supposedly "popular" parody.
"a lot of Al's original songs are 'style parodies'"... Could someone knowledgeable check this list carefully? I found and removed one glaring error in there ("Bob" is a very very direct parody of "Subterranean Homesick Blues", not a "style parody"), and I am quite suspicious of some of the other entries.
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Quit putting back "Bob". It is a direct parody of Subterranean Homesick Blues, including a shot-for-shot replication of the video, for pity's sake.
I cut the professional wrestling section, since the sole example seemed more like Older Than They Think. This trope is about parodies more famous than the original, and there was no evidence those examples were meant to be references or parodies.
Wizzard
I realise obscurity is subjective, but I'm really not sure about this:
- Monty Python's Flying Circus: A lot of sketches are parodies of British TV shows that were popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, "How To Do It?" is a spoof of the BBC children's program Blue Peter. "The Golden Age of Ballooning" spoofed costume drama's on the BBC.
Blue Peter and costume dramas are both still going.
- Not a lot of people these days realise that the iconic "closing doors/phone box at end of corridor" is a quite deliberate parody on similar sequences in The Man From UNCLE
Is there a version of the Man from UNCLE opening credits that includes a phone box? The ones I've seen don't.
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As someone who lives there (well, depending on what is meant by "upstate", I suppose), I truly am curious as to what is "a stereotypical upstate New York Accent"?
Does anybody still remember the series parodies by Geoffrey Willans, hevily illustrated by Ronal Searle, concerning a not terribly able pupil called Nigel Molesworth at a not terribly well=thought-of British boarding school called St. Custards? Searle is nowadays remembered as the guy who invented the concept of St. Trinians (though he'd probably be turning in his grave if he could see the current franchise), but it's worth noting that the word "Hogwarts" comes from the Molesworth books, where it is the name of the headmaster of a rival school. Also, "The Hogwarts" is, according to Molesworth, an obscure ply by Aristophanes. Naughty Ms. Rowling!
Hmmm... I would have expected a lot more examples in the Video Games section here...
Why is this listed as a "subjective trope"? It seems to me that it's very clearly and objectively defined: a parody that's still well-known when the original has faded into obscurity.
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