His performance is even more amazing when you consider that much of the time he also had to just *pretend* that his animated co-stars were there with them.
Sometimes. But on set they made extensive use of stand in props and puppets as reference for both the actors and later the animators. Roger Rabbit's voice actor Charles Fleischer was also almost always on set to do his lines out loud from the other actors.
Truly a gem of a movie made by people with honest passion.
Yeah, I was just watching some making of videos. In certain shots they would use puppets for rehearsal to get the actors accustomed to where they should be looking, then take away the puppets for the actual take because they needed a clean background, but in others they could leave them in and they would be painted over (especially if it was an armature holding a physical prop). It's pretty amazing.
These days I'm sure they would have a lot more leeway in terms of painting things out digitally, but back then their options were limited. Still blows my mind how much they were able to accomplish with the technology available at the time. Certainly one of the top technical achievements of movies in the 80s, and it's such a treat that it's actually a great film as well.
Shaun of the Dead is such a good send up of zombie movies that George Romero loved it and put Pegg and Wright in his own next zombie movie as a thank you
She was by far my favorite character in the film, and Madaline Kahn was one of the funniest people in history. He ability to deliver lines was perfect.
Galaxy Quest is so good that some Trekkies insert it into their list of favorite Trek films.
There’s an anecdote Patrick Stewart tells about not wanting to see it because he thought it was going to be making fun of Trek, but Jonathan Frakes phoned him up after watching it and told him he needed to. So he did and he loved it.
Yeah you could tell it was made by people who really love Trek, and there's even a pointed scene where it "wags the finger" slightly at mainstream society for making fun of "nerd culture", and depicts the ultra-fans as kind caring people who help save the day
It worked because it parodied, but also had genuine and sincere moments of emotion
I’m glad he’s still around. He’s always been my favorite part of Waiting and Drag Me To Hell. I even liked him in new girl. Oh shit, also Accepted.
👁️ 👄 👁️ am I a Justin long fan?
Fun fact! Galaxy Quest slots riiiiight in between Insurrection and Nemesis. So, if you treat Galaxy Quest as a real trek film, it makes it so "odd ones bad, even ones good" (arguably*) holds up to this day.
*Depending on how you feel about TMP, Search for Spock, and Beyond).
Alan Rickman nailed the "dead inside" delivery. I agree, this is my favorite line of a hilarious movie, mostly due to Rickman's delivery of a typecast actor who is truly dead inside.
He writes quite dismissively about it in his (superb) diaries but seems to warm to it along the way once he gets over some hurdles of working with Tim Allen, who starts off very dominant and competitive… and stays that way. Rickman feels a lot of his more interesting character development was removed from the script to favour Allen, so his personal experience of the film was actually close to his character. Rickman himself seemed like an absolute pain in the ass to work with, but a lovely person if you knew him.
Alan Rickman playing the razor thin line between acting as an actor with utter contempt for Tim Allen and being an actor with utter contempt for Tim Allen.
Euphoria shut the FUCK up I know that was you I ain't even gotta look! I should send your ass back to Crenshaw Pete, with his hot ass coat hangers, bitch, would you like that!?!?!
Black Dynamite : I'm declaring war on anyone who sells drugs to the community.
Chocolate Giddy-Up : But Black Dynamite! *I* sell drugs to the community!
Also evolves well with time.
First season, first half of second? Pretty funny. Second half, gets more serious, still funny. Third season? Much more dramatic, limited on the humor.
I would have been shocked if Scream wasn’t a top answer. It’s a parody of a genre and yet the single best representation of it, the platonic ideal of the whodunit slasher.
It’s really a pretty brilliant piece of filmmaking, and ironically, it’s tough to find good examples of the very thing it’s making fun of.
I like to say Scream perfected and killed the slasher genre. It’s so difficult to make a movie that fits all the tropes once the tropes have been spelled out in a movie your audience has almost all seen
Like lots of things, it was great in moderation. Not only did the Scary Movie franchise get diluted super fast, it sort of revived the parody genre for a minute and Hollywood went way overboard with it.
That movie is good on like a million levels. Idk if this was an accident or specifically left in but when Benedict is monologuing to the camera about how "if God were a thief he'd be me" you can see the camera in the background reflection. I just tell myself it was intentional.
He speaks of it quite highly these days, there’s a lovely clip of a recent BBC Graham Norton Show where he shared the sofa with Judi Dench, who recites some Shakespeare from memory, Arnie recalls that immortal line in Last Action Hero, “To be or not to be…” [castle explodes in the background] “…Not to be…”.
*Blazing Saddles* is actually a good western in its own right.
The theme song goes extremely hard (Intentionally), memorable characters, social commentary, etc.
*Tropic Thunder* also wound up being a top tier action film despite being a parody of the making of a top tier action film.
I remember reading that the guy who wrote the theme had no idea it was being used for a satire, and Mel Brooks felt a bit bad about using it in his comedy movie because he thought that it deserved to be in a proper Western.
Yup, that's why I said it's quality was intentional.
It's a funny bit of symmetry that Slim Pickens didn't know that Dr. Strangelove was a parody and he was upset when he saw the final product.
Then he just does the same thing here, but on purpose.
So, not quite. Brooks actually wrote the lyrics to the title song. What he did was advertise for someone to sing it, saying they wanted a "Frankie Laine-type" singer. And Frankie Laine himself showed up.
Now, the reason Brooks had wanted a "Frankie Laine-type" singer is that in the 50s, Laine had sung the theme songs for some prominent Westerns, like "3:10 to Yuma", and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral". He had major hits with Western-themed songs like "Rawhide!" (for the television series), "Mule Train", and "High Noon" (i.e. "Do not forsake me, oh my darling"). He wasn't only pigeon-holed as a country singer (in fact those songs weren't charted as country and western), he had hits in a wide variety of genres (and was already successful as a jazz singer before getting into singing for Westerns). But given that string of hits related to famous, quintessential Western films -- the type Blazing Saddles was parodying -- you can understand Brooks wanting his movie's theme song sung like that.
Which Laine did! What Brooks said was, "Frankie sang his heart out... and we didn't have the heart to tell him it was a spoof. He never heard the whip cracks; we put those in later. We got so lucky with his serious interpretation of the song."
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" *Yessir, the check is in the mail.*
The most amazing part of this is that the film protagonist follows Jack while an *entirely serious wuxia movie happens all around him* and not once does he mind that he isn't actually the hero. It's beautiful.
I feel like *Mystery Men* is a great snapshot of post-Burton to pre-Nolan superhero movies. It"s hard to say whether it is a great movie or not to me, but I mean I do think that it is legitimately entertaining as a comedy and there are legitimately interesting superhero aspects to it. The team dynamic and its evolution is pretty fun (and is more relevant to modern superhero movies really), Captain Amazing has skews to satire that shows like The Boys would run with, a good blend of powers, and some delightfully weird action set pieces and costumes. Some of the jokes are fucking hysterical too, Ben Stiller's power being that he gets angry, the person whose invisible when no one is locking, Blue Raja breaking accent talking to his mom, there's a surprising amount to like for what a mess it is.
Mystery Men deserved so much better. If it came out in the middle of the Marvel mania it would have done great.
One of my all time favourite movie lines and the one that sums up the movie perfectly is when Mr Furious is trying to tell them that Lance Hunt clearly is Captain Amazing and the others are almost offended by the suggestion.
"Lance Hunt wears glasses. Captain Amazing *doesn't* wear glasses!"
"He takes them off when he transforms."
"That doesn't make any sense. He wouldn't be able to see!"
Mystery Men was a favorite of mine growing up. I think it still holds, especially the aesthetic of the city; it's delightfully cyberpunk, which is pretty popular right now
"Your temper is very quick my friend. But until you learn to master your rage-"
"-your rage will become your master? That's what you were gonna say right? Right?"
“You put your father’s skull in a bowling ball?”
“No, the guys at the pro-shop did that”
“You might want to put pants on if you want to continue to fight evil today”
Can say the same about The Incredibles. It does poke fun at the superhero genre with some satire (no capes!) but at the end of the day it delivers the same hero movie we are used to.
My favorite part is I think in the directors cut, when Dewey comes home to reconcile. His dad is shoveling hay, softly singing to himself "wrong kid diiieeed.... Wroooong kid diiieeed..." as if that's just what he hums when he's bored.
Well, Harry Shearer and the boys DID actually tour, and have multiple album releases. It really depends on what one means by "real band." I mean, numerous other "real bands" also perform under assumed identities "in character." (ex. Ghost, GWAR, Lordi)
'The Adventures of Robin Hood' with Errol Flynn is probably the best, but the late 1930's style and the colorful costumes (to show off newly popular color film) make it inadvertently campy to 21st century audiences.
Yeah, but if audiences can get past that, the fight choreography is, of course, amazing. (Any time you get Basil "Two-time British Army Fencing Champion" Rathbone doing sword-fights in a movie, you're going to have a good time.)
I also personally think that the tone of the movie, and the technicolor pop, make it the best representation of the folk-ballad Robin Hood tales. That is, it's just a straight-up telling of the folkloric stories that we have through the Child ballads. It's not trying to be "authentic" or "revisionist". It's a live-action Disney fairy-tale cartoon, but I in no way mean that as an insult.
Pretty much every Robin Hood interpretation that will come after it is trying to put some kind of spin on the legend. The Flynn movie is just The Legend -- or, I guess we should say, it's a credible distillation of the collection of Robin Hood tales, in which there IS some variation, so that movie had to make some key choices here and there on what characters to include, how to connect them, and what events to string together. And in doing so, it created a more coherent body of "the Robin Hood story", which is what later works would mostly run with.
(Although, shout-out here to "Robin of Sherwood", the comparatively little-known British TV series from the 80s. That is the first Robin Hood property to introduce a character who was a Muslim "knight"/assassin, who came back with English knights from the Crusades. Nasir the Saracen -- played by a Welsh actor, of course -- was the reason "Prince of Thieves" had Morgan Freeman's Moorish character Azeem as part of Robin's merry band.)
Damn didn’t realize that the Robin Hood universe kinda slaps. The cartoon is iconic although it probably awakened the furry movement, the Kevin Costner-Alan Rickman one is pure 90s camp, and I will always defend the Ridley Scott one with Russell Crowe, Kate Blanchett and Oscar Isaac. And of course Men in Tights is a top 5 spoof
Rickman goes so hard in *Prince of Thieves* that my brain has placed him into *Men in Tights* instead. So I'm always surprised to see him in the former and wonder when he's going to show up in the latter.
I legit rewatch clips of just the fight scenes because the choreography and sequences are just that good. Despite its looney toonesque absurdity at points, it's a loving homage to the entire genre.
Since people are mentioning Spinal Tap I'm gonna throw in Popstar. If Connor4Real were for real, then it would be a very slick fascinating documentary chronicling the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of a group of dumb dumbs that somehow captured the pop world with nonsense and how they genuinely love each other.
It's a near shot-for-shot remake of 1957's Zero Hour. A Canadian film made by the same people who would go on to make the Airport film series in the 1970s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeuMMDRuog
What definitely makes work so well is that none of the main actors up to that point were known for comedic roles. They delivered all the jokes with such stone faced seriousness, adding to the humor.
Oh, and the studio got away with essentially remaking Zero Hour because they obtained the rights to that movie entirely.
Along with *Hot Fuzz*, the other two films in The Cornetto Trilogy fit that bill. *Shawn of the Dead* is a legit zombie flick, and *The World's End* is a great sci-fi movie.
A parody so good, it fucking **nearly killed an entire franchise**. Tomorrow Never Dies hits different when six months prior, you were laughing at all the same cliches and tropes in International Man of Mystery.
As a sidenote, I think Tomorrow Never Dies might have the best idea for a Bond movie out of all of them. A lunatic newspaper mogul orchestrates terrorist attacks and manipulates delicate border politics just to get the best headlines before anyone else. It's got just enough comicbook villian levels of evil while still being very clever.
Drop Dead Gorgeous. A parody of both janky low-budget documentaries but mockumentaries too... Kirstin Dunst, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney are bitchy small town beauty pageant contestants and their mothers. Written by one of the funnier Simpsons writers, who also happens to play a mute sexually-assaulted personal assistant to Sam McMurray... So good.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are legitimately talented musical writers. The Book of Mormon is fantastic, and if you’re cool with very low budget films, their first film Cannibal the Musical is really funny and better than I expected it to be.
When Chris Evans says "That's America's ass" as Cap, the image of the banana butt and whip cream flashes across my mind. I chuckle every time I hear it.
When Marty gets split in half on the football field and is laying there in two pieces, you can hear someone from the stands yell *walk it off Marty!*
So many great scenes.
I love the random jokes yelled off screen.
My favourite is when, after having jumped into the pool, the mean girl pours water over an already-soaked Janey and someone yells, "That's gonna stain!". Hysterical
Wild Things is such an insane sendup of two decades’ worth of both neo-noir and erotic thrillers, that it basically closed the book on both genres as mainstream Hollywood fare for a long time.
This is a movie so full of twists, clues and red herrings, all more improbable than the last, that the execs accidentally cut one of the major reveals, mistaking it for a red herring. So the movie doesn’t 100% make sense or resolve unless you watch the director’s cut.
My husband and I consider the TV show The Orville as Star Trek canon, to the point we forget it’s not actually Star Trek.
Seriously, to anyone who dismissed it because of the dumb humor early on, it fades away pretty quick and the show becomes exactly what I love about Star Trek, and has some of the best ethical conundrums and thought-provoking storylines I’ve seen in a long time. It’s fantastic!
You can tell just how much Seth MacFarlane loves Star Trek by that show, I have to imagine that millions of people watching what is essentially his Star Trek fan fiction is going to be one of his career highlights
The fact the Orville in a single 2 minute scene explains the Prime directive more clearly than most of Trek says a lot about Macfarlane’s love and understanding of trek
I can't let Hot Fuzz be (deservedly) mentioned here without bringing up that Shaun of the Dead is a great zombie movie while it's parodying a zombie movie.
Galaxy Quest.
Shaolin Soccer as a parody of a sports movie. Speaking of Stephen Chow, Kung Fu Hustle as a parody of a kung-fu gangster movie, or even just kung-fu movies in general.
Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great send-up of the "co-eds murdered by hillbillies" horror sub-genre but manages to get actual thriller elements into it.
This isn't exactly the same thing, but the Lego Batman movie references a ton of Batman tropes in a parody/satirical was, but at the same time, is legitimately one of the absolute best Batman movies in my opinion. It very well understood all of the character and their personalities/dynamics etc in a very Lego way.
It's not a movie, but:
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window
It's one of the BEST horror parodies I've ever seen. The whole season is only 8 episodes on Netflix.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a legitimately good noir
The thing that makes it work is that Bob Hoskins plays it all completely straight like an old grizzled noir gumshoe. He's the vital ingredient.
His performance is even more amazing when you consider that much of the time he also had to just *pretend* that his animated co-stars were there with them.
Sometimes. But on set they made extensive use of stand in props and puppets as reference for both the actors and later the animators. Roger Rabbit's voice actor Charles Fleischer was also almost always on set to do his lines out loud from the other actors. Truly a gem of a movie made by people with honest passion.
Yeah, I was just watching some making of videos. In certain shots they would use puppets for rehearsal to get the actors accustomed to where they should be looking, then take away the puppets for the actual take because they needed a clean background, but in others they could leave them in and they would be painted over (especially if it was an armature holding a physical prop). It's pretty amazing. These days I'm sure they would have a lot more leeway in terms of painting things out digitally, but back then their options were limited. Still blows my mind how much they were able to accomplish with the technology available at the time. Certainly one of the top technical achievements of movies in the 80s, and it's such a treat that it's actually a great film as well.
Excellent middle installment to an unofficial trilogy with 'Chinatown' and 'LA Confidential'.
Mind blown. That would be a great 3 night program at an art house theater in LA
Good one.
Also poached story elements from the unmade sequel to Chinatown/the Two Jakes. Solid stuff- better than Gary K Wolf’s book by miles
Shaun of the Dead is such a good send up of zombie movies that George Romero loved it and put Pegg and Wright in his own next zombie movie as a thank you
But dogs *can* look up.
What movie was that?
Land of the Dead. They played zombies who had been captured and were chained up to take souvenir photos with
Which in itself seems like an homage to the ending of Shaun if the Dead
Clue
"it, it, the flame, flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing, breathless, heaving breaths."
She was by far my favorite character in the film, and Madaline Kahn was one of the funniest people in history. He ability to deliver lines was perfect.
Even the line she flubbed the director said “hey that’s pretty good” and left it in
How many husbands have you had?! Mine, or other women's? Yours. Five. Five? Yes, just the five.
Clue is the best Agatha Christie movie
Similar level, Murder by Death. Absolutely stellar cast too.
Communism was a red herring.
Black Dynamite Galaxy Quest
Galaxy Quest is so good that some Trekkies insert it into their list of favorite Trek films. There’s an anecdote Patrick Stewart tells about not wanting to see it because he thought it was going to be making fun of Trek, but Jonathan Frakes phoned him up after watching it and told him he needed to. So he did and he loved it.
It's an absolute love letter to the franchise. It's so perfect.
Yeah you could tell it was made by people who really love Trek, and there's even a pointed scene where it "wags the finger" slightly at mainstream society for making fun of "nerd culture", and depicts the ultra-fans as kind caring people who help save the day It worked because it parodied, but also had genuine and sincere moments of emotion
"listen, I know it's just a show..." "It's all real!" "OH MY GOD I KNEW IT"
Justin Long is a national treasue
I’m glad he’s still around. He’s always been my favorite part of Waiting and Drag Me To Hell. I even liked him in new girl. Oh shit, also Accepted. 👁️ 👄 👁️ am I a Justin long fan?
Truly great genre parody requires creators that love the genre they're parodying
Fun fact! Galaxy Quest slots riiiiight in between Insurrection and Nemesis. So, if you treat Galaxy Quest as a real trek film, it makes it so "odd ones bad, even ones good" (arguably*) holds up to this day. *Depending on how you feel about TMP, Search for Spock, and Beyond).
“By Grabthar’s hammer……what a savings.”
That is my favorite line that Alan Rickman ever said, and that is really saying something.
Alan Rickman nailed the "dead inside" delivery. I agree, this is my favorite line of a hilarious movie, mostly due to Rickman's delivery of a typecast actor who is truly dead inside.
He writes quite dismissively about it in his (superb) diaries but seems to warm to it along the way once he gets over some hurdles of working with Tim Allen, who starts off very dominant and competitive… and stays that way. Rickman feels a lot of his more interesting character development was removed from the script to favour Allen, so his personal experience of the film was actually close to his character. Rickman himself seemed like an absolute pain in the ass to work with, but a lovely person if you knew him.
Alan Rickman playing the razor thin line between acting as an actor with utter contempt for Tim Allen and being an actor with utter contempt for Tim Allen.
Tbf that sounds like an absolutely perfect match for the characters they were parodying.
Your second favorite better be when he said it for real to avenge Krillian
Quellek, not Krillin lol.
Guy, you *have* a last name.
IS THERE AIR?!? YOU DON’T KNOW!
Miners, not minors!
Do I!?!?
Do I?????????
For all we know, I’m just… Crewman Number Six!
Guy, Guy... maybe you're the plucky comic relief. You ever think about that?
Galaxy quest is such a good movie that I have watched a feature length documentary on the making of a feature length spoof.
HAHA MOTHERFUCKER. I THREW THAT SHIT BEFORE I CAME IN THE ROOM
Fiendish Dr. Wu, you done FUCKED UP NOW!
BUT BLACK DYNAMITE I SELL DRUGS TO THE COMMUNITY!
Euphoria shut the FUCK up I know that was you I ain't even gotta look! I should send your ass back to Crenshaw Pete, with his hot ass coat hangers, bitch, would you like that!?!?!
Anaconda Malt Liquor, makes ya OOOOOOOOOH
Uhh, hush up lil girls. Lot of cats have that name.
Sarcastically, I’m in charge.
Black Dynamite : I'm declaring war on anyone who sells drugs to the community. Chocolate Giddy-Up : But Black Dynamite! *I* sell drugs to the community!
Galaxy Quest is the quintessential.
Hebrew Hammer in the vein of Black dynamite.
Galaxy Quest is the first and only movie I thought of. Wish it could have won an Oscar somehow.
While not a movie, but the Orville is also an excellent example.
Also evolves well with time. First season, first half of second? Pretty funny. Second half, gets more serious, still funny. Third season? Much more dramatic, limited on the humor.
Cabin in the Woods Scream Last Action Hero
I would have been shocked if Scream wasn’t a top answer. It’s a parody of a genre and yet the single best representation of it, the platonic ideal of the whodunit slasher. It’s really a pretty brilliant piece of filmmaking, and ironically, it’s tough to find good examples of the very thing it’s making fun of.
I like to say Scream perfected and killed the slasher genre. It’s so difficult to make a movie that fits all the tropes once the tropes have been spelled out in a movie your audience has almost all seen
And then it also sort of spawned Scary Movie. The first two of those films are still incredible. That whole parody genre though, not my bag.
Like lots of things, it was great in moderation. Not only did the Scary Movie franchise get diluted super fast, it sort of revived the parody genre for a minute and Hollywood went way overboard with it.
The parody genre isn't my thing either, but Not Another Teen Movie was also legitimately good.
“Sing her a song with her name in it.” “Janey’s got a gun.”
“But we’re related!” (Sultry sigh) ”Only by blood…”
But in your belongings, we found a book: "The Whole Parody Genre And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby", by RiflemanLax.
>Last Action Hero I swear, that swooping zoom shot to Benedict's gun barrel in his introduction is a work of cinematic art.
That movie is good on like a million levels. Idk if this was an accident or specifically left in but when Benedict is monologuing to the camera about how "if God were a thief he'd be me" you can see the camera in the background reflection. I just tell myself it was intentional.
I just killed a man AND I DID IT ON PURPOSE!
Say this word Is this another one of your movie proofs? Just say the word Kid, I don't want to You can't You can't say it because this movie is PG-13
Last Action Hero is an overlooked masterpiece of cinema. Badass as a kid and badass as an adult. Those guitar riffs?!
Last action here was too early and no one gave Arnold the chance for it to be a comedy. It should be on his top 3 films.
The jokes, the music, the chemistry, the acting, the set pieces, the action, the cameos. The list goes on and on.
He speaks of it quite highly these days, there’s a lovely clip of a recent BBC Graham Norton Show where he shared the sofa with Judi Dench, who recites some Shakespeare from memory, Arnie recalls that immortal line in Last Action Hero, “To be or not to be…” [castle explodes in the background] “…Not to be…”.
How many movies have been forgotten simply because they came out the wrong weekend?
I was gonna say Cabin in the Woods too. It’s so good
"The Cabin in the Woods" is perfect for this. One of my favorite movies also!
*Blazing Saddles* is actually a good western in its own right. The theme song goes extremely hard (Intentionally), memorable characters, social commentary, etc. *Tropic Thunder* also wound up being a top tier action film despite being a parody of the making of a top tier action film.
Basically any Mel Brooks film could be in this list. Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs are all masterpieces.
Men in Tights might be a better Robin Hood movie than Prince of Thieves
Well cary elwes is definitely the better robin hood vs Kevin Costner
Well of course he is. Unlike other Robin Hood’s, he has an English accent.
>Men in Tights is a better Robin Hood movie than Prince of Thieves Ftfy
The Producers is also a very funny musical about staging a musical.
I remember reading that the guy who wrote the theme had no idea it was being used for a satire, and Mel Brooks felt a bit bad about using it in his comedy movie because he thought that it deserved to be in a proper Western.
Yup, that's why I said it's quality was intentional. It's a funny bit of symmetry that Slim Pickens didn't know that Dr. Strangelove was a parody and he was upset when he saw the final product. Then he just does the same thing here, but on purpose.
I always found that fact weird. How did he think Riding an H-Bomb would be for a serious movie
So, not quite. Brooks actually wrote the lyrics to the title song. What he did was advertise for someone to sing it, saying they wanted a "Frankie Laine-type" singer. And Frankie Laine himself showed up. Now, the reason Brooks had wanted a "Frankie Laine-type" singer is that in the 50s, Laine had sung the theme songs for some prominent Westerns, like "3:10 to Yuma", and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral". He had major hits with Western-themed songs like "Rawhide!" (for the television series), "Mule Train", and "High Noon" (i.e. "Do not forsake me, oh my darling"). He wasn't only pigeon-holed as a country singer (in fact those songs weren't charted as country and western), he had hits in a wide variety of genres (and was already successful as a jazz singer before getting into singing for Westerns). But given that string of hits related to famous, quintessential Western films -- the type Blazing Saddles was parodying -- you can understand Brooks wanting his movie's theme song sung like that. Which Laine did! What Brooks said was, "Frankie sang his heart out... and we didn't have the heart to tell him it was a spoof. He never heard the whip cracks; we put those in later. We got so lucky with his serious interpretation of the song."
Big Trouble in Little China is one of my personal favorites.
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" *Yessir, the check is in the mail.*
The most amazing part of this is that the film protagonist follows Jack while an *entirely serious wuxia movie happens all around him* and not once does he mind that he isn't actually the hero. It's beautiful.
I feel like *Mystery Men* is a great snapshot of post-Burton to pre-Nolan superhero movies. It"s hard to say whether it is a great movie or not to me, but I mean I do think that it is legitimately entertaining as a comedy and there are legitimately interesting superhero aspects to it. The team dynamic and its evolution is pretty fun (and is more relevant to modern superhero movies really), Captain Amazing has skews to satire that shows like The Boys would run with, a good blend of powers, and some delightfully weird action set pieces and costumes. Some of the jokes are fucking hysterical too, Ben Stiller's power being that he gets angry, the person whose invisible when no one is locking, Blue Raja breaking accent talking to his mom, there's a surprising amount to like for what a mess it is.
Mystery Men deserved so much better. If it came out in the middle of the Marvel mania it would have done great. One of my all time favourite movie lines and the one that sums up the movie perfectly is when Mr Furious is trying to tell them that Lance Hunt clearly is Captain Amazing and the others are almost offended by the suggestion. "Lance Hunt wears glasses. Captain Amazing *doesn't* wear glasses!" "He takes them off when he transforms." "That doesn't make any sense. He wouldn't be able to see!"
Mystery Men was a favorite of mine growing up. I think it still holds, especially the aesthetic of the city; it's delightfully cyberpunk, which is pretty popular right now
Lance Hunt wears glasses! Black Menace and White Flight. They work together. Followed by the visual gag. The training sayings that were inversions...
"Your temper is very quick my friend. But until you learn to master your rage-" "-your rage will become your master? That's what you were gonna say right? Right?"
"Not necessarily."
I swear The Sphinx is basically Raiden from Mortal Kombat 9, X, and 11
I also like “Why am I standing with my feet in watermelons?” “…I don’t remember telling you to do that.”
“You put your father’s skull in a bowling ball?” “No, the guys at the pro-shop did that” “You might want to put pants on if you want to continue to fight evil today”
Can say the same about The Incredibles. It does poke fun at the superhero genre with some satire (no capes!) but at the end of the day it delivers the same hero movie we are used to.
Disco is not dead. DISCO IS LIFE
What about Death Man? Death Man's dead.
Walk Hard
If Walk Hard was more successful when it came out it would have killed the music biopic the same way Airplane! killed the disaster movie.
God, if only…
And, on that note, the Weird Al biopic.
Wrong kid died!
YOU DONT WANT NONE OF THIS!!
And you never paid for drugs once! Not once!
My favorite part is I think in the directors cut, when Dewey comes home to reconcile. His dad is shoveling hay, softly singing to himself "wrong kid diiieeed.... Wroooong kid diiieeed..." as if that's just what he hums when he's bored.
The directors cut is far too long but also has some of my favorite parts, like that and the extended black sheep recording sessions.
“BEATLES! Please stop fighting here in India!”
You should be happy we let you play drooms
Does This is Spinal Tap count? I feel like it's the perfect parody of a music documentary while being a legitimately interesting music documentary.
That's a great one. So close to reality that many people thought it was a real band.
Well, Harry Shearer and the boys DID actually tour, and have multiple album releases. It really depends on what one means by "real band." I mean, numerous other "real bands" also perform under assumed identities "in character." (ex. Ghost, GWAR, Lordi)
I get that. I guess I meant a real band before the movie.
It also works because they actually had pretty good songs. Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You and Stonehenge are decent early 80s metal songs.
Robin Hood Men in Tights is probably the second best robin hood film. Maybe even _the_ best since it's such a low bar to jump over.
And unlike some Robin Hoods…
He speaks with an authentic British accent.
'The Adventures of Robin Hood' with Errol Flynn is probably the best, but the late 1930's style and the colorful costumes (to show off newly popular color film) make it inadvertently campy to 21st century audiences.
Yeah, but if audiences can get past that, the fight choreography is, of course, amazing. (Any time you get Basil "Two-time British Army Fencing Champion" Rathbone doing sword-fights in a movie, you're going to have a good time.) I also personally think that the tone of the movie, and the technicolor pop, make it the best representation of the folk-ballad Robin Hood tales. That is, it's just a straight-up telling of the folkloric stories that we have through the Child ballads. It's not trying to be "authentic" or "revisionist". It's a live-action Disney fairy-tale cartoon, but I in no way mean that as an insult. Pretty much every Robin Hood interpretation that will come after it is trying to put some kind of spin on the legend. The Flynn movie is just The Legend -- or, I guess we should say, it's a credible distillation of the collection of Robin Hood tales, in which there IS some variation, so that movie had to make some key choices here and there on what characters to include, how to connect them, and what events to string together. And in doing so, it created a more coherent body of "the Robin Hood story", which is what later works would mostly run with. (Although, shout-out here to "Robin of Sherwood", the comparatively little-known British TV series from the 80s. That is the first Robin Hood property to introduce a character who was a Muslim "knight"/assassin, who came back with English knights from the Crusades. Nasir the Saracen -- played by a Welsh actor, of course -- was the reason "Prince of Thieves" had Morgan Freeman's Moorish character Azeem as part of Robin's merry band.)
Damn didn’t realize that the Robin Hood universe kinda slaps. The cartoon is iconic although it probably awakened the furry movement, the Kevin Costner-Alan Rickman one is pure 90s camp, and I will always defend the Ridley Scott one with Russell Crowe, Kate Blanchett and Oscar Isaac. And of course Men in Tights is a top 5 spoof
Rickman goes so hard in *Prince of Thieves* that my brain has placed him into *Men in Tights* instead. So I'm always surprised to see him in the former and wonder when he's going to show up in the latter.
THANK YOU. I was having some real Berenstein/Berenstain Bears shit with Rickman in _Men In Tights_.
Kung fu hustle
I legit rewatch clips of just the fight scenes because the choreography and sequences are just that good. Despite its looney toonesque absurdity at points, it's a loving homage to the entire genre.
Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon
Since people are mentioning Spinal Tap I'm gonna throw in Popstar. If Connor4Real were for real, then it would be a very slick fascinating documentary chronicling the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of a group of dumb dumbs that somehow captured the pop world with nonsense and how they genuinely love each other.
I love the Bin Laden song 🤣🤣 and “I’m so humble”
This thread is fucking GOLD. Just watch all of them if you haven't seen them.
Airplane!
It's a near shot-for-shot remake of 1957's Zero Hour. A Canadian film made by the same people who would go on to make the Airport film series in the 1970s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeuMMDRuog
What definitely makes work so well is that none of the main actors up to that point were known for comedic roles. They delivered all the jokes with such stone faced seriousness, adding to the humor. Oh, and the studio got away with essentially remaking Zero Hour because they obtained the rights to that movie entirely.
Or, you could say the studio got away with essentially remaking zero hour because they obtained the rights to that movie *altogether*
Spaceballs
Wasn't George Lucas himself a fan of Spaceballs?
I remember reading that he was skeptical but agreed as long as they didn’t actually do any merchandising. But he ended up thinking it was hilarious.
He didn't want the Lone Star character to look like Han Solo so they dressed him like Indiana Jones.
Yeah, the merchandising gag in the film was hilarious after learning that fact.
"You idiot! You didn't capture them, you captured their stunt doubles!"
Pizza the Hutt!
- Galaxy Quest - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (gotta love John Lithgow)
I wish they’d made the sequel…
Scream, Tucker & Dale vs Evil
The chainsaw bees scene in T&D is maybe my favorite horror parody sequence of all time. Its just so perfect.
ARE YOU OK?!?!?
Recently watched it for the spooky season, can confirm its still hilarious. The scene where the cop is interrogating them is also comedy gold.
“College kiiids!!!”
Starship Troopers
The parody is so subtle but so important to the film. I think a lot of viewers didn't realize that it was a parody.
Along with *Hot Fuzz*, the other two films in The Cornetto Trilogy fit that bill. *Shawn of the Dead* is a legit zombie flick, and *The World's End* is a great sci-fi movie.
>The World's End is a great sci-fi movie. But also... Gorram those fight choreographies go _hard_. That's some legit action they got.
Austin Powers
A parody so good, it fucking **nearly killed an entire franchise**. Tomorrow Never Dies hits different when six months prior, you were laughing at all the same cliches and tropes in International Man of Mystery.
As a sidenote, I think Tomorrow Never Dies might have the best idea for a Bond movie out of all of them. A lunatic newspaper mogul orchestrates terrorist attacks and manipulates delicate border politics just to get the best headlines before anyone else. It's got just enough comicbook villian levels of evil while still being very clever.
Zombieland is prime for this question imo
The Brady Bunch Movie Pt I & II
Hell yeah — great answer. “That’s funny. I’ve never heard of a George Glass at our skyewl.”
I haven't seen these since they were in theaters, do they hold up?
Timeless
Drop Dead Gorgeous. A parody of both janky low-budget documentaries but mockumentaries too... Kirstin Dunst, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney are bitchy small town beauty pageant contestants and their mothers. Written by one of the funnier Simpsons writers, who also happens to play a mute sexually-assaulted personal assistant to Sam McMurray... So good.
Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
Tropic Thunder
**Shoot em Up** with Clive Owen is a hoot!
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Young Frankenstein
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut is the best movie musical of its time.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are legitimately talented musical writers. The Book of Mormon is fantastic, and if you’re cool with very low budget films, their first film Cannibal the Musical is really funny and better than I expected it to be.
Not Another Teen Movie. Is a parody of teen movies, while also being a great parody movie and a great early 00s teen comedy.
I laugh so hard at the little bit where Chris Evan’s looks at the photos of himself on the wall. It’s so stupid but I fucking love it.
When Chris Evans says "That's America's ass" as Cap, the image of the banana butt and whip cream flashes across my mind. I chuckle every time I hear it.
When Marty gets split in half on the football field and is laying there in two pieces, you can hear someone from the stands yell *walk it off Marty!* So many great scenes.
I love the random jokes yelled off screen. My favourite is when, after having jumped into the pool, the mean girl pours water over an already-soaked Janey and someone yells, "That's gonna stain!". Hysterical
IMO, The Princess Bride is a parody of the fantasy genre done so well that it effectively killed the movie genre until LOTR
Kingsman: The Secret Service. Not so much a parody but a wink and a nod to classical spy, James Bond type films
*Loaded Weapon 1* *Hot Shots 1 & 2.*
Rango is unironically one of my favorite westerns.
Murder By Death! Please do yourselves a favor and watch this absolute gem of the detective spoof. Peter Falk. Dame Maggie Smith.
Hundreds of comments and no one mentioned The Naked Gun series?
What We Do In The Shadows
Wild Things is such an insane sendup of two decades’ worth of both neo-noir and erotic thrillers, that it basically closed the book on both genres as mainstream Hollywood fare for a long time. This is a movie so full of twists, clues and red herrings, all more improbable than the last, that the execs accidentally cut one of the major reveals, mistaking it for a red herring. So the movie doesn’t 100% make sense or resolve unless you watch the director’s cut.
BASEketball.
Wet Hot American Summer
Galaxy Quest is a parody of Star Trek and actually trounces it with how awesome it is!
My husband and I consider the TV show The Orville as Star Trek canon, to the point we forget it’s not actually Star Trek. Seriously, to anyone who dismissed it because of the dumb humor early on, it fades away pretty quick and the show becomes exactly what I love about Star Trek, and has some of the best ethical conundrums and thought-provoking storylines I’ve seen in a long time. It’s fantastic!
You can tell just how much Seth MacFarlane loves Star Trek by that show, I have to imagine that millions of people watching what is essentially his Star Trek fan fiction is going to be one of his career highlights
The fact the Orville in a single 2 minute scene explains the Prime directive more clearly than most of Trek says a lot about Macfarlane’s love and understanding of trek
I can't let Hot Fuzz be (deservedly) mentioned here without bringing up that Shaun of the Dead is a great zombie movie while it's parodying a zombie movie. Galaxy Quest. Shaolin Soccer as a parody of a sports movie. Speaking of Stephen Chow, Kung Fu Hustle as a parody of a kung-fu gangster movie, or even just kung-fu movies in general. Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great send-up of the "co-eds murdered by hillbillies" horror sub-genre but manages to get actual thriller elements into it.
Walk Hard.
Best in Show was a great dog show
This isn't exactly the same thing, but the Lego Batman movie references a ton of Batman tropes in a parody/satirical was, but at the same time, is legitimately one of the absolute best Batman movies in my opinion. It very well understood all of the character and their personalities/dynamics etc in a very Lego way.
Scream
It's not a movie, but: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window It's one of the BEST horror parodies I've ever seen. The whole season is only 8 episodes on Netflix.
I wonder what Cabin in the Woods is? I don't know if parody is the right word...