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alt title(s): Parody Displacement When a parody remains popular after the original works being parodied are no longer known to the audience.
Named for the fact that, when listening to the earlier work of Weird Al Yankovic, modern fans may be so unfamiliar with the songs being mocked as to not even realize that the Weird Al song is a parody. For example, many people are now more familiar with "I Lost on Jeopardy" than with the original "Jeopardy" by Greg Kihn. Some may even have forgotten Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park" Toni Basil's "Mickey", or Coolio's "Gangster's Paradise", remembering only Weird Al's "Jurassic Park", "Ricky", or "Amish Paradise".
Often, people who are only "familiar" with a work through the parody are surprised when the subject of the parody turns out to be Better Than It Sounds.
For those wondering how people could make such a mistake with Weird Al Yankovic, he does also have a lot of original humorous songs - but just happens to be more well-known for his parodies.
Related to the concept of a Forgotten Trope, except it is not tropes but works or personalities that have been forgotten. See also Popcultural Osmosis, Older Than They Think and Covered Up.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Neon Genesis Evangelion and Martian Successor Nadesico are a Deconstruction and a parody, respectively, of the Humongous Mecha series of their day. Ten years later, who can remember their contemporaries?
- Between Nadesico and Irresponsible Captain Tylor there are buckets of fans who "know" Uchuu Senkan Yamato/Star Blazers without ever having seen it.
- The flip-side of this trope, when it comes to mecha anime, is the Super Robot Wars game series, which have the effect of re-popularizing old, "out-of-print" series.
- Dragon Ball originally started as a parody of Journey To The West, which, while still popular in Asia, is more or less unknown in most countries Dragon Ball was released in.
- The speech "Sometimes I'm a..." is closely associated with Cutey Honey, so much so that the original source (Tarao Bannai) that Cutey Honey was parodying with that speech has been long forgotten
- Fandom example: At least on this wiki, it appears as if the use of the term "White Devil" in reference to Nanoha Takamachi has almost completely eclipse its original use as a canon nickname for the RX-78 and/or Amuro Ray.
Comics
- The pirates in Asterix comics are close parodies (allowing for the difference in art style) of Captain Barbe-Rouge (Redbeard) and his crew in the comic of the same name. Originally published in the same magazine as Asterix, Barbe-Rouge is almost unknown outside France.
- Further, the pirates, whenever their ship is smashed by Asterix and Co., usually end up in a sequence with them parodying the now somewhat obscure painting "The Raft of the Medusa". Said painting is actually pretty famous in France, and a mainstay of school textbooks on French painting.
- Asterix generally is packed solid with references to French politics, society, and other such in-jokes, which are funny (in their own right) to everyone else, and absolutely hilarious to the French.
- Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday. Also, he's a zombie. If you know of Solomon Grundy, chances are you probably know him from the comics and cartoon or because of his desire to own pants, but not from the nursery rhyme.
- In Mexico, there's a wrestler known as Solomon Grundy, we don't know about no rhyme or comic
- The rhyme itself IS mentioned in the popular Batman series "The Long Halloween". It's also briefly referenced in Justice League.
- The Crash Test Dummies also used his name for their Superman song, only because it rhymed with money.
- Many comic book fans didn't even realize that DC Comics had other characters besides Wesley Dodds & Morpheus use the title of The Sandman until they saw Hector Hall make an ass of himself in volume 2 of Neil Gaiman's celebrated series.
- While the characters of Watchmen have become popular and well-known despite only being in that story, the original Charlton heroes that inspired their creation have almost faded into obscurity. The Question, Blue Beetle, and Captain Atom have managed to escape this, but Thunderbolt and the Peacemaker (Ozymandias and the Comedian's counterparts respectively) have suffered. And few people are even sure who was the inspiration for Silk Spectre.
- The author said Silk Spectre is not based on any particular heroine. He just thought he needed a female in the cast. She's loosely based on a mixture of Black Canary, Nightshade, and Phantom Lady.
- Another Watchmen one: Moore and Gibbons' use of the 9-panel grid has prompted a lot of people, including comic book historians to believe that Steve Ditko (The creator of the original Charlton characters) worked almost exclusively in the 9-panel grid format. This is not to say that Ditko didn't use them frequently, but they were hardly his "go to" layout.
- The Guy Fawkes mask is now associated more with V For Vendetta than with the guy —er, Guy— it represents.
- In America anyway... Bonfire Night is still a well celebrated national holiday in the UK, and kids are taught about the history behind it in school.
- 'I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.' And, indeed, it hasn't been.
- Its meaning is shifting even beyond that, now that it's being used as a tool of 4chan/anonymous for their real-world protests — and this applies to both the US and UK as the mask has lately appeared on the office wall of The IT Crowd. Whee!
- For that matter, the English word "guy" is itself a reference to Guy Fawkes that has evolved over the centuries be used as reference for anyone, not just an effigy of the original Guy.
Film
Literature
- All the surreal poems recited in Alice In Wonderland are parodies of (mostly dreadful) Victorian moralistic verses that children Alice's age would have been expected to memorize. The majority of modern readers will be unfamiliar with most of them.
- Heck, a lot of them scholars aren't even sure of because they are now so obscure.
- In fact the only one that this hasn't happened to is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" ("Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star")
- There's a few with Alice In Wonderland. Much of the wording was meant to be surreal and strange, but has actually made its way into common parlance so that it seems perfectly normal to a modern reader. For instance, Alice says "Let's pretend," in the beginning. At the time, "pretend," meant "to lie or deceive", so "Let's pretend," sounded very strange. Now, thanks to Alice In Wonderland, the meaning of the word has changed quite a bit. Alice In Wonderland is rather like its own Weird Al Effect, one could say.
- "A few"?? Check out the wonderful book "Annotated Alice" where famed mathemagician Martin Gardener takes the time to annotate virtually every cultural reference made. Suffice to say there are at least as many words in the annotations as there are in the original stories.
- Not unlike how The Bard originated a lot of words and phrases that are still part of common parlance, a lot originated with the Alice stories as well. Because of their origin they could be considered a double instance of the trope — very few people will realize they came from Alice, and further, even if they do, they won't realize that the original references in Alice were parodies themselves!
- An even older literary example is Cervantes' Don Quixote, which parodied a number of Chivalric Romances from the time period, especially one called Amadis of Gaul. None of these are read any more, except by scholars.
- Cervantes was the victim of a trope misunderstanding when an anonymous writer calling himself "Avellaneda" published a false sequel to Don Quixote. The sequel completely missed the cleverness of Cervantes' references that mocked tropes of the chivalric genre (the noble knight's Unlimited Knapsack, the magic Healing Potion), instead choosing to write a slapstick and completely unfunny book that no one ever reads now.
- Similarly, Voltaire's classic Candide is a harsh satire aimed at the optimistic teachings of Gottfried Leibniz... who would only have been remembered as a mathematician had Candide not proven so popular.
- And even they have forgotten the more likely target of Voltaire's satire, the now still more obscure Christian Wolff
 , who combined views as optimistic as Leibniz' with a career nearly as random as Pangloss'.
- Agatha Christie's collection of stories starring Tommy and Tuppence, Partners In Crime uses a device in which each story is a Homage to a different crime-writer. While many of them are still famous today, a few are now hopelessly obscure. (Anyone familiar with the blind detective Thornley Colton? Anyone?)
- Far more people know Arkham as the asylum populated by Batman villains than know it as one of Lovecraft's fictional haunted towns in New England.
- The Colour of Magic, the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, contains several nods towards Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, including two very similar characters. Leiber's stories are hardly forgotten, but despite their influence, they are certainly not read as much now as then and very likely most new readers who pick up The Colour of Magic now will never have heard of them.
- Bill Willingham's recent inclusion of two characters who are obviously Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Fables might increase interest in Leiber's originals. Whether or not Prachett's characters will reach the same status (at least in Willingham's mind) is still up for debate.
- Given that a) it's a throwaway reference, b) the characters aren't at all memorable in their own right, and c) The Colour of Magic is itself increasingly becoming "That one weird Discworld novel where nobody acts like themselves" (The Patrician in particular seems to almost be an entirely different character), I don't think Bravd and the Weasel are nearly as well known as Leiber's heroes.
- Speaking of Terry Pratchett his non-Discworld novel Wings features a character parodying contemporary (and now largely forgotten) American Vice-President Dan Quayle.
- Stella Gibbons' comic novel Cold Comfort Farm has outlived the rustic romances it parodied.
- Gulliver's Travels was a satire of the then-popular genre of journeys to distant lands. It's of course now a standalone classic.
- Also, oddly enough, this has led many people to think of Jonathan Swift as nothing more than a writer of a whimsical children's tale, when in reality he was a vicious and biting satirist who regularly savaged society in his writings. One of his other better-known works is A Modest Proposal, where he suggests the best way to handle all the starving children in Ireland was to simply eat them. Rather than, you know, treating the Irish like human beings.
- One interesting detail in The Great Divorce is that Heaven is so "solid" that souls coming directly from Earth or Hell are unable to move anything—even leaves or blades of grass. In the preface, CS Lewis credits a sci-fi short story for giving him the idea: the protagonist of the story time travels to the unchangeable past and finds "raindrops that would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite". Lewis couldn't remember the name of the story or its author. Six decades later, people are still reading Lewis' novel, and we still haven't figured out what time travel story Lewis was referring to.
- Despite the modern vampire dating back to Lord Ruthven of John William Polidori's 1819 short story "The Vampyre", Dracula is still the archtypical vampire. Even then, it's the Dracula in adaptations people think of, rather than the original book charcter.
- Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey seems to be more widely studied and read than the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe which it parodies.
- A number of 18th century poets such as Colley Cibber are mainly known even to academics for being mocked and parodied by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad and other works.
Live Action TV
- When Doctor Who started in 1963, as a budget saving measure the Doctor's possibly-infinitely-large-inside space'n'time traveling ship was disguised as an ordinary, everyday object that all viewers would be familiar with — a police box, examples of which could be seen in every town in Britain. By the time the series was revived in 2005, there hadn't been a working police box anywhere in the UK for over 20 years, and a line of expository dialogue was required in the first new episode to explain the TARDIS's appearance. Indeed, the TARDIS is usually the first thing anyone thinks of upon seeing a picture of a police box.
- Even Sarah Jane makes the mistake in one episode, where she travels back to 1950's England.
- Even that reference is quickly fading, as an increasing number of people think it is a telephone booth.
- Even though you can see the words "Police Box" on every side, and can often see it up close when the Doctor and whoever he's toting around steps out of the TARDIS.
- Serious and downbeat drama series Secret Army, about the Belgian resistance during WW 2, was closely parodied in knockabout comedy Allo Allo — which went on to be much more popular and longer-running than the original. To this day, most British people are unaware that Allo Allo began as a parody at all...
- The Batusi is far better remembered than the Watusi it was originally punned off of.
- Partially. You'd have to watch a movie from The Sixties to see how the Watusi was done, but it's referred to in any number of dance-related songs from the era, as even a cursory listen of Classic Rock Radio will show.
- Of course, the Batusi is now better known as "that dance John Travolta does on Pulp Fiction."
- The Prisoner is, possibly, a sequel to spy series Danger Man, or at least a Spiritual Successor. The cartoon Danger Mouse parodies or gives a Shout Out to Danger Man. Both are much better remembered.
- Not to mention that the theme for the American release Secret Agent Man is a staple of oldies radio.
- In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the visual similiary between Spike and Billy Idol is Lampshaded. Of course, to a large number of fans, Spike is far more recoginisable than Billy Idol.
- Spike goes on to say that Idol took his look from Spike...
- Actually, it's Buffy who says this, so even if it is just a boast, she believes it.
- Get Smart parodied the various espionage TV series popular at the time such as The Man From UNCLE, I Spy and The Avengers, but has been in reruns so long that most people assume it to be a James Bond parody.
- A more obvious example of the Weird Al effect is in the title sequence to Get Smart. 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.... many people know it better these days from Get Smart!
- And another example: Maxwell Smart's famous voice was inspired by William Powell's performance in The Thin Man.
- Little references in Sesame Street intended to amuse parents which the children audience may have never found out.
- The Liberty Bell March is now better known as the theme for Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Music
- The Merry Go 'Round Broke Down is best known as "the theme song to Looney Tunes".
- The common children's song "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" appears to be a parody of an earlier spiritual, "Ship of Zion".
- You mean the same "Ship of Zion" that uses the melody of "Gimme that ol' time religion"?
- Perhaps he means "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)?", whose melody is very definitely a slower version of "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain".
- Cheech & Chong's "Basketball Jones" is much better known than the song it was originally parodying: "Love Jones" by The Brighter Side of Darkness.
- The song "Flappie", by Dutch comedian Youp van 't Hek, was originally (in 1981) intended as a parody of Christmas songs, both contemporary and the older carols, and mostly of the fake 'Christmas spirit' people felt they needed to put up. Now most people don't realize that and play this song simply for the humorous lyrics (it tells the story of how a boy finds out his father killed his rabbit (called 'Flappie') to serve at the Christmas dinner). It's even a staple of the Christmas songs played on radio and in malls.
- The Star Spangled Banner, the national anthem of the United States of America, is a poem that was set to the tune of The Anacreontic Song (a.k.a. To Anacreon in Heaven). How many Americans have ever heard (or even heard of) the original drinking song, popularized by a society of amateur musicians to the point where it was often used as a sobriety test — its melody was so tortuous that if you could actually sing a stanza, you were sober enough for another round.
- "The Anacreontic Song" was also supposed to be performed as a lively minuet. Such a performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" today would be received as irreverent and un-American.
- On that note, The Battle Hymn of the Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord") took its melody from John Brown's Body.
- JBB was the original marching version, the tune is an older revival hymn Shall we Gather by the River. The "Battle Hymn" is a "serious" version of a parody, which itself is on the verge of being overtaken by parodies ("Glory, glory, hallelujah/Teacher hit me with a ruler...")
- National Lampoon's Deteriorata is obviously a parody of Desiterata, but the style is a parody of a hit record recording of Desiterata by Les Crane in 1971, including the narmy "You are a child of the universe" chorus.
- Allan Sherman's breakout hit Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! is arguably more well-known than it source, Amilcare Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours.
- And nowadays the K9 Advantix commercial that uses a lyrically changed version of the song is probably more well-known to younger audiences.
- On top of Spa-ghehhhhhh-tiiiiiii, all covered with cheeeeeeeeeeeeese....
- I lost my poor meatball, 'cause somebody sneezed.
- It rolled off the table, and onto the floor
- Not many people know this, but the song Boyz in the Hood was not originally an easy-going song by Dynamite Hack, but a gangsta-rap by Eazy-E called Boyz n Da Hood. Still, you'll never, ever hear Eazy-E's version (it really sucks), but Dynamite Hack's is a classic to many Gen X'ers.
- The melody to the children's song "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes" is taken from the verses of the song "There is a Tavern in the Town", a late 19th century drinking song.
- Of course, these days kids are more likely to know it as the [[Animaniacs]] theme song!
- Gracie Fields' Sing As We Go from the 1930's is almost completely forgotten today, save for the melody—instantly recognizable as Monty Python's Sit On My Face.
- Does anybody remember the original lyrics to that damn Barney And Friends "I Love You" closing song? 'Cuz this troper sure don't.
- This old man, he played one, He played knick-knack on my thumb; Knick-knack paddywhack, Give a dog a bone, This old man came rolling home.
- The catchy tune "Mah Nà Mah Nà" is known to most people in English-speaking countries from the first episode of The Muppet Show. It's actually from the soundtrack of an exploitative and inaccurate Italian "documentary" on Sweden.
- In the UK at least, novelty group The Wurzels' song about their brand new combine harvester is better-known than the original, "Brand New Key" by Melanie.
Video Games
- Even certain video games are old enough to fall into this trope. For example: Brian Clevinger's Eight Bit Theater has permanently altered how Black Mage from FF1 is perceived.
- Also, Clevinger recast the White Mage as The Chick in everyone's minds, even though the original character was male.
- White Mage being female was a common conception before Clevinger codified it.
- This troper has heard characters from Final Fantasy described as "8 bit theater characters."
- Solid Snake (and to a lesser extent, his predecessor Big Boss) has become a more popular character than Snake Plissken, the character he was originally a pastiche of.
Western Animation
- Classic cartoons such as Looney Tunes are chock full of this. Caricatures of celebrities, fragments of dialog from then-contemporary movies, catchphrases from old-time radio shows, parodies of once-popular songs; all sailed right over your head if you were a kid watching on Saturday morning decades later.
- In particular, the character of Foghorn Leghorn was closely modeled on a radio character named Senator Claghorn. (Ironically, actor Kenny Delmar, who voiced Claghorn on Fred Allen's show, could do nothing about it because he hadn't copyrighted the character — copyright was not automatic at the time in the United States. But Warner Brothers *did* copyright Foghorn Leghorn, meaning Delmar had to get permission from WB to use his own character!)
- Even more ironically, Jon Stewart has referred to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-
Toyota Alabama) as "Senator Foghorn Leghorn".
- From The Other Wiki:
Bugsy's nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett, comes from the movie It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing (as Bugs would later often do), giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence. This scene was so famous at the time that most people immediately got the connection.
- People are also more familiar with Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century than with its parody target Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
- Mel Blanc's impression of Peter Lorre in particular really took on a life of its own. The real Lorre's voice wasn't nearly as raspy as Blanc's imitation, but that imitation has inspired so many others that people raised on them might not even recognize Lorre in any of his films.
- The Dover Boys is well known as the cartoon where Chuck Jones found his voice with stylized off-the-wall slapstick. Hardly anyone remembers the Rover Boys books it spoofed.
- Pepé Le Pew is based on Pépé le Moko, with a little bit of Maurice Chevalier thrown in. Even if you've heard of these sources, I can pretty much guarantee they are less familiar than the amorous skunk is.
- Not to forget that if most younger viewers watch that really thin character type, with blue, blue eyes, and a velvet voice singing and making the females faint, might not know that's a parody of a young Frank Sinatra. Yeah, the Blue Eyes himself.
- This is simultaneously Parodied and Lampshaded by the Animaniacs when the titular characters meet Rasputin. They toss him into a dentist's chair and announce that they need to give him some "Anastasia." A girl in a tiara and a poofy dress then hit Rasputin on the head with a hammer. Dot turns to the camera and deadpans, "Obscure joke. Talk to your parents."
- The process is still going on — consider all of the increasingly dated early '90s references in Tiny Toon Adventures.
- Lampshaded in a Gilmore Girls episode where Lorelei wonders out loud about whether anvils were so ubiquitous that they would've been so easily recognized by children watching the cartoons.
- Likewise, Steamboat Willie, well-remembered as the first talking Mickey Mouse cartoon, is a loose parody of a contemporary Buster Keaton feature, Steamboat Bill Jr.
- Also note cartoons like Mickey's Gala Premiere, Mickey's Polo Team, and the Donald Duck cartoon The Autograph Hound as being full to the brim with famous celebrities of the time.
- The black and white Mickey cartoon The Klondike Kid is a mash-up of The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Gold Rush.
- Guess who Mickey imitates in the black and white cartoon Mickey Plays Papa?
- In the cartoon The Hockey Champ Donald is seen at the beginning parodying then-famous skater/actress Sonya Henie.
- The 1995 seldom-seen Mickey cartoon Runaway Brain features a screenshot where Mickey stands outside a dark and foreboding house... and (of all things) it's a replica of a famous shot from The Exorcist.
- Helen "boop-a-doop" Kane is now recalled as having been like Betty Boop — which, of course, she was before Betty Boop was created.
- All of the examples quoted in Simpsons episode The Day the Violence Died fit this trope:
"Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy, but so what? Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners, we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, they'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney."
- The Robinson-Wiggum connection was lampshaded again in the 2008 "Treehouse of Horror" episode. A bunch of celebrities came back from the dead to get back for gratuitous use of their images after death. Robinson came after Wiggum — and they had a conversation mirroring each other exactly.
- In the DVD commentary track for the fourth season of The Simpsons, the writers doing the commentary specifically point out that the scene at the end of "Selma's Choice" where Selma is shown cradling her new pet iguana to the tune of "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman" is a reference to Murphy Brown singing to her newborn son, because they were afraid viewers wouldn't "get it".
- The Simpsons also frequently parodies "classic" horror concepts in its Halloween episodes. Many are recognizable as parodies of episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, but one segment was a parody of an episode of the much well less known "Amazing Stories" horror anthology titled "Hell Toupee".
- The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy has Dracula, a dead-on impersonation of Fred Sanford from Sanford And Son, complete with a penchant for calling people "Dummy".
- He's also drawn to look like an older version of Blacula, complete with early 70's sideburns and mustache.
- Its parody of the HP Lovecraft mythos, "The Crank Call of Cthulhu", must go over the heads of most young viewers as well.
- The Cuddle Buddies from Kim Possible are on the surface send-ups of Beanie Babies. But if you dig further, you'll note their unmistakable resemblance to The Wuzzles, a slightly obscure 1980's kids' show also produced by Disney. The Wuzzles was also Merchandise Driven; when that show was current, store shelves did have boxes with stuffed Wuzzles on/in them. Disney remembers that aspect, of course...
- Grandpa from Hey Arnold has a photo stashed away of Hedy Lamarr. Naturally, kids had to go ask their parents.
- The Fairly Odd Parents has this with Adam West as Catman (parodying the 60's Batman show) and Jay Leno as the voice of a big chinned superhero called The Crimson Chin. His real name Charles Hampton Indigo or C.H.In for short really does give away a lot about his identity.
- Catman himself is also a parody of a pseudo-obscure DC comics villain named Catman, at least in costume.
- And that villain, in turn, was a villainous Captain Ersatz of Cat-Man, a Golden Age superhero.
- This troper has also seen at least one fairly intelligent college student thinking that Adam West was just a character on Family Guy.
- You could probably say this about any modern character played by Adam West. In fact I think there might even be a trope named after him.
- The "Log" song from The Ren And Stimpy Show is a parody of classic Slinky commercials.
- And until 12 seconds ago, this troper only knew the song from Naruto The Abridged Series.
- I was very excited the day i found a t-shirt with a picture of a log and the quote "Its better than bad, it's good!" Unfortunately no one else got it.
- The classic schtick of two characters trying to out-polite each other "After you. No I insist after you." has been done innumerable times in Chip And Dale and Heckle And Jeckle cartoons. Both of these are parodies of a much older comic strip routine involving two guys named Alphonse and Gaston. The only way a non-historian would have heard those names would be at a baseball game. (An "Alphonse and Gaston" is when two guys chase a fly ball and simultaneously pull up so it drops between them.) And then you need an announcer who loves the classics.
- On "It's That Man Again", a wartime BBC radio show, it was "After you Claude." "After YOU, Cecil."
- The sideplot of A Goofy Movie revolves around a fictional pop singer called Powerline. Some argue that he's a twofer parody of Michael Jackson and Prince. Goofy also remarks that this Powerline fellow can't nearly be as big as Xavier Cugat, "The Mambo King."
- The sequel, An Extremely Goofy Movie has several references to 70s pop culture.
- After the Australian sketch comedy show The D-Generation did their spoof of The Thunderbirds, it seemed to overwrite every Australian's memory of the original. The scene where the characters laboriously walk on imitation puppet strings from one side of the set to the other, only to be told when they arrive that they'd left the door open ("Close the door, Virgil!") gets quoted more than any dialogue from the actual Thunderbirds.
- It's just easier to say that Robot Chicken is another Weird Al Effect machine a la Alice in Wonderland, particularly when it comes to 80's cartoons and toys.
- Most people only know the song "Today is Gonna Be a Great Day" by Bowling for Soup as "the Phineas And Ferb theme song".
Other
- Plenty of modern media references "Do Not Adjust Your Set" to mean 'this weirdness is real, ', etc., but most of the audience is probably too young to remember any actual message on TV of this nature. For that matter, how exactly does one adjust most modern TV sets?
- Many of the radio parodies Bob And Ray did. "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife", for instance, remained a part of their act decades after Mary Noble, Backstage Wife left the airwaves.
- Several people forgot about the "Terry Tate: Office Linebacker" Super Bowl commercials. Yet there are still parodies of it floating on the internet. For example...
- Several impressionists have lamented that many of their favorite impressions are lost on the younger crowd. This troper remembers Kevin Pollack giving a hilarious routine of the fictitious Albert Brooks Show, wherein he impersonates Albert Brooks quite well, that he had to take out of his act because most people recognize Albert Brooks only as the voice of Marlin the clownfish in Finding Nemo.
- Another comic whose name I can't recall was discussing this problem on The Bob and Tom Show, finding audiences don't respond to his Gene Wilder impression.
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