How can modern spoof movies skewer the biggest films of the day when they’re already spoofing themselves? Recontextualizing serious dialogue from big-budget fare and turning it into something wacky used to be the bread and butter of people like Mel Brooks. Thor: Ragnarok, for example, took Black Widow’s “Sun’s getting real low, big guy” line from Avengers: Age of Ultron and used it for comedic purposes. However, typical entries in this genre already dabble in gags that would’ve been at home in classic spoof movies. It’s not that there isn’t anything worth making fun of in superhero movies.
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The original Scary Movie may have parodied the genre-savvy horror/comedy Scream, but even that movie made sure to lampoon entirely serious fare like The Blair Witch Project.īy contrast, if spoof movies wanted to skewer the biggest movies of the modern era, they’d have a tougher time.
Similarly, Blazing Saddles wrung comedy out of the Western by centering its story on a character who was more like Bugs Bunny than John Wayne.
Take Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, which put a clown nose on classic noirs by literally inserting wacky Steve Martin into footage from vintage entries in the genre. Typically, spoof movies function best when skewering self-serious motion pictures. The sudden shift from prominence to obscurity for the genre in the modern era partially has to do with what movies are now available to lampoon. The targets of these motion pictures shifted but works like Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie ensured that the spoof film was a regular sight at your local multiplex. Such projects proved popular enough to ensure that we’d all be seeing the spoof movie well into the 1990s and 2000s.
The genre really got popular in the 1970s thanks to Mel Brooks works like Young Frankenstein. RELATED: The 33 Best Comedies on Netflix Right Now (November 2021)įor decades, the spoof movie was a staple of Hollywood comedies.