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"The objections to breadth in parody are that it is not sporting to hunt with a machine gun, that jocularity is not wit, and that the critical edge is blunted. Most of what passes for parody is actually so broad as to be mere burlesque."
Simply put, this trope is what happens when The Parody is created by people who Did Not Do The Research. Instead, they watched the trailer (or the commercials or just absorbed it through Popcultural Osmosis) and then wrote the parody from that. Close enough, they decide.
Therefore, the "parody" will only bear a superficial resemblance to what is supposedly being parodied. Expect the parody to coast on Parody Names, Stock Parodies and for it to take Refuge In Vulgarity. You know it's a Shallow Parody when you see Cowboy Bebop At His Computer.
Note this is sometimes unavoidable. For example, if you're parodying a film that hasn't come out yet, the trailer may be all you have to go on. Occasionally, the parodists may make good guesses and succeed anyway. However, if you're making a parody of Citizen Kane and all you know is the " Rosebud" scene... well, there really is no excuse.
Also note that this trope does not encompass all bad parodies. Just knowing what you're parodying does not automatically make your parody funny... but it's at least a start.
Often caused by Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch. Related: Narrow Parody, in which the target is something relatively recent due to the assumption the target audience won't recognize something older even if it's riper for spoofing; and Parody Failure, where the parody writers actually do what the piece's real creators would do, but think themselves as writing a clever spoof.
Examples
Comic Books
- Mad magazine (and the TV series) sink to this. It can be justified, as the parody has to fall close to the date of the work's release, and often the writer(s) are working on early script drafts or leaked information.
- For example, the parody of the first Harry Potter movie included a scene that was in the book, but was left out of the movie.
- Mad parodies used to be written after the film was released and thus published a few months later, in part to keep on top of what movies were well-known enough to warrant them. One late-1970s article had them "selling" prematurely written parodies of movies and TV shows that weren't popular (Gable and Lombard, for instance) at a discount. This lag still applies to TV shows — their parody of 8 Simple Rules was in the October 2003 issue... just in time for John Ritter's sudden death.
- They also claimed that "The book is still great" while making fun of many of the things that were directly lifted from the book.
- On the same note their Jurassic Park parody included the subplot from the book about some of the dinosaurs stowing away on a commercial freighter, a subplot that was dropped quite early during the production of the movie.
- Mad explained away in another Harry Potter parody that they knew they got things wrong but didn't particularly care.
- They also did a parody of X-Men 2 where the writer not only seemed shocked by the idea that Mutants could be a metaphor for homosexuality, but actually seems to wonder and question if that is the case. In fact, X-Men in general has basically always used anti-mutant prejudice as a metaphor for prejudice in general.
- That particular parody seemed to have actually been written from a draft script of the movie, as it poked fun at subplots that weren't actually in the film.
- Similarly to the Jurassic Park example: the parody comic of Star Trek First Contact was based on the first draft screenplay, which was significantly different from the finished film. In their rush to get a parody out on time, they ended up parodying something that only barely resembled the movie itself.
- Marvel's Marville hopes irrelevant pop culture is enough to count as parody.
- It even explained the shallow parodies to people in the first page. Like nobody would get the jokes.
- Marvel's parody comic Not Brand Ecch portrayed the Doom Patrol as shameless rip-offs of the more popular X-Men when in reality the Patrol came first.
Film
- One of many, many flaws in the movies by Seltzer And Friedberg. This includes Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and the aptly named Disaster Movie. In fact, Disaster Movie parodied films which were not released at the time the script was written. As a result, it included parodies of films which flopped and were already forgotten by the time Disaster Movie made it to theaters.
- Tellingly not the case with Superhero Movie, not by Seltzer And Friedberg, though often assumed to be. Though not a great movie by a longshot, it is a rather direct parody of the first Spider-Man film, as is the better for it.
- Somewhat more excusable example: Airplane! includes a parody of a famous scene from From Here to Eternity despite none of the writers having watched that film. Mind you, that's one parody in a film which included... well, a lot.
- Practically all pornographic parodies of non-pornographic films. Titles like The Sopornos and I Know Who You Did Last Summer are invariably those movies' only clever feature, and their only real point of contact with whatever they're supposed to be parodying.
- With the notable exception of the infamous "Edward Penishands". The, ahem, actor playing Edward tried valiantly to mimic Depp's peculiar mannerisms. The scene at the end, paralleling Kim spinning under the flakes of ice as Edward carves a sculpture, simply must be seen to be believed. Or so I've read...
- Hung Wankenstein is also something of an exception. While it's not nearly as funny as Young Frankenstein, it comes across as an extremely affectionate parody (with lots of hardcore sex thrown in), and at least nods to the original plot all the way through.
- Sex Trek: The Next Penetration did some parts quite nicely too. For instance, a scene where Bones says, "He's dead, Jim." while the crewman in question is walking around and clearly not dead. Kirk immediately realizes that Bones is a quack and that they've been burying countless living men on other planets because of him.
- A different, earlier parody has a similar scene, where Spock calmly explains to a redshirt that he's going to be killed off because he's the only one in the group without a long-term contract.
- Pleasantville has the titular show, which is supposed to be a parody of shows from the 50's, but is actually just how a modern person who has never watched Leave it to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show assumes they are. Sure, there was a lot less drama and they were more family-friendly, but they were hardly surrealistic utopias where outsiders and fire didn't exist.
- The 41-Year-Old Virgin who Knocked up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It. "Hey, remember this scene from a Judd Apatow movie? Well we don't have any writers, so we're just going to do the scene just the same, but make it longer and less funny. Hey, here's the Verizon guy!"
Live Action TV
- MAD tv once did a parody of The Dark Knight where Batman couldn't afford good gadgets because of the economy and make it seem like that without gadgets his villains could easily kick his ass. Nevermind the fact that Dark Knight Batman was trained by ninjas and that he hasn't been an (extremely) gadget-heavy hero since the 60s.
- Well there is The Brave and the Bold...
- Until their contract expires, Saturday Night Live doesn't have to care if it's a well researched parody.
- Done intentionally and fully admitted to on the "Movie Trailers That Are Destroying America" segment of The Colbert Report, where Colbert thinks of ridiculous reasons to consider movies offensive based entirely on the trailers.
- French and Saunders did a sketch about the Lord Of The Rings apparently without having read the books or seen the movies: Gandalf and Frodo repeatedly mention Frodo's quest to find the one ring to rule them all.
- A better example of the same flaw can be seen in Dead Ringers` early LOTR parodies, in which indeed Gandalf sends Frodo on a quest to find the Ring. Later on they were better researched.
- Similarly on The Chaser (dare I speak ill of them) with a sketch about rumours of a movie version of The Hobbit and imagining it directed by various people (Nick Giannopoulos, Woody Allen and Michael Moore). For some reason the first one had two Hobbits with a dynamic suspiciously similar to Frodo and Sam, and not a dwarf in sight.
- Note though that this was technically a parody of The Wog Boy and not of The Hobbit. Same for the Woody Allen and Michael Moore trailers.
- Almost every Lost parody revolves around smoke monster-polar bear-French woman-"fat guy" jokes, despite all of those things being important only in the first season
- Bob Hope parodied Shogun on one of his specials. The sketch writers assumed Anjin-san (Richard Chamberlain) was the title character.
- The Julie Brown vehicle The Edge never got much past this.
Literature
- Candide by Voltaire fits this trope in its attempts to parody the philosophy of Leibniz.
- Phule's Errand by Peter J. Heck includes a long sequence which is a painfully Shallow Parody of Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels. "Perry Sodden" = Comedy gold!
Music
- A notable aversion is when Weird Al wrote "The Saga Begins," a song about Star Wars Episode I, almost entirely before the movie was released. It works because he got all the plot details from fan sites.
- In fact, he only had to change one detail after the movie came out, because Episode I left it rather vague whether or not Padme and Anakin would marry.
- He also spent $300 to attend an early screening of the film to make sure he had all of the details correct.
- Weird Al tends to have his best research with Movies (also see: Ode to a Superhero), has been slipping with TV (Couch Potato) and has basically reached Hollywood Nerd or Did Not Do The Research proportions with computer/nerd related stuff (White & Nerdy, Don't Download This Song).
- That last one's contentious... What other songs name-check Grokster in an entirely appropriate way?
- The first one maybe misses the point, since you cannot correctly research and portrait what a nerd is like - there's gazillions out there and they're all different. So it's a pastiche of pastimes considered nerdy in general (or what people would think a nerd would do), not the real stuff. So if you don't do this stuff and still nerdy, fine. (You cannot be first of your class at MIT though).
New Media
- Something Awful's "Truth Media" reviews are an intentional combination of this and Stealth Parody in regards to "leaked scripts" of movies and other "sneak-peek" reviews of popular media. A particularly noteworthy example was their Star Wars Episode II "leaked script" review, mostly because pretty much everything they predicted wound up being true.
- Truth Media usually tries really hard to get everything wrong so they can post and mock the inevitable replies from Trolls and so-called-experts. The GTA San Andreas review was quite noticeable for getting the main character's name wrong despite knowing his initials.
- As an April Fools Day joke, Maddox of The Best Page in the Universe did a trailer for a fictional film, Vague Genre Movie, mocking shallow parodies such as the Seltzer and Friedberg ones mentioned above.
- This Cracked article that talks about the Ang Lee Hulk movie and how it differed from the comics, saying that The Incredible Hulk 'didn't' delve into psychological themes and that it spent an odd amount of time focusing on Bruce Banner's father. The thing is, though, Bruce Banner's multiple personality disorder and abusive childhood became a huge part of his mythos starting as far back as the 80s with Joe Fixit (and maybe even earlier than that) and continued during the 90s. Assuming this is still canon then that accounts for over half of the The Hulk's canon.
- Not parody per se, but mention Twilight on any Internet forum or chatroom and count the people whose biggest complaint is that vampires don't sparkle.
Newspaper Comics
- Pop Culture Club Comics uses Shallow Parody as mortar and brick. Every strip is just some random thing happening, only for a random character to be involved and thus... and thus... it is considered a "joke". A highway worker finds a dead cat on the road... ha ha! It's Garfield! A woman making a bed is revealed to sport a tramp-stamp... ha ha! It's Snow White! A person spontaneously combusts and burns to death... ha ha! It's Thing #1 from the Cat in the Hat! Aren't you just killing yourself laughing right now?
Print Media
- When the Gallagher brothers of Oasis confessed to being involved in robberies when they were younger, both the New Musical Express and Private Eye hit upon the idea of parodying Noel Gallagher's tendency to plagarise. But whereas the New Musical Express featured spoof quotes from musicians who had actually be plagarised (The Seekers, Stevie Wonder and Neil Innes), Private Eye simply had Gallagher confessing to stealing from The Beatles - one of the few groups that Noel Gallagher hadn't been accused of stealing from.
Radio
- Every parody of A Prairie Home Companion's Garrison Keillor is based around: "The News From Lake Wobegon" (which is just one segment of a two hour show), his alleged need to "be more funny" (his style of humor is intended to be subtle and whimsical, not broadly comedic, and he also has a strong satirical streak), his excessive folksiness (which is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek), and his voice (which is so distinctive that most imitators can't seem to do it properly. A lot of Keillor imitations end up sounding more like Stuart McLean of The Vinyl Cafe.)
- The 2000s British radio comedy Atomic Tales parodies 1940s and 1950s American radio sci-fi drama. The only problem is that it largely does so based on the popular conception of what such shows were like rather than what they were actually like. A major feature of the parody is unsubtle, invariably rightwing, "moral lessons" at the end, despite the fact that such radio drama rarely had characters deliver political speeches (not least because they were primarily adventure stories largely intended for children and were supposed to be escapist). Another target of the parody is the notion that science is "evil" despite the fact that such shows often celebrated scientific endeavour and achievement in a way, ironically, that makes them look naive now; the "dire warnings" aspect usually came-about from "mad scientists" who twisted science to evil purposes rather than science being evil itself.
Theater
- The Drowsy Chaperone purports to be a forgotten Broadway musical from 1928, but bears very little resemblance (especially in its songs) to the musicals of The Twenties it aims to parody. This may have to do with actual musicals of the period being rarely seen on stage generations later except in Adaptation Decayed revival editions. The review at TalkinBroadway.com even pointed out that complete cast recordings of shows weren't made back then, which means that the musical theater fans the show is meant to appeal to will realize this is shallow almost immediately. (A more accurate Affectionate Parody of these shows is The Boy Friend, which was written in the 1950s.)
- This is Older Than Print. Travesties, in which characters from other works were placed in ridiculous situations that had little to do with the original, may be older than deeper parodies. As Macdonald notes in his careful dissection of the delicate art of parody, this was a sure recipe for dumb, cheap laughs. Disaster Movie and its ilk are therefore Older Than Dirt, and demand our respect and veneration.
- Parodies of/jokes about Cirque Du Soleil, no matter the medium, can wind up as this. Apparently, everybody in a given troupe is French or French-Canadian, they spend the whole show posing or contorting pretentiously if they aren't weird clowns who accost helpless audience members — as in an Expedia.com ad with a man's Imagine Spot having him pulled on stage to have a smiley face painted on his stomach — and it's all boring, needlessly expensive, and incomprehensible. This is a side effect of Cirque being a Love It Or Hate It thing, possibly in conjunction with its perceived "unmanliness".
Video Games
- The Gex series was about a wise-cracking Gecko going into shallow parodies of pop culture. Notably, some levels can't even decide what they're parodying—one claimed to mock Sherlock Holmes while not actually being anything like a Sherlock Holmes story. Also suffered from Small Reference Pools.
- The second game had levels that didn't even fit the TV theme and were more like generic platformer levels, like the prehistoric stages. It also featured Gex...restating famous movie lines in a appropriate context. Not even doing a voice like in 3. Just...repeating them. Hilarious?
- In the 2nd game's prehistoric levels, Gex would say lines from Planet of the Apes. "Dr Zaius, would an ape make a human doll that talks?" "You cut out his brain, you nutty baboon." He didn't even repeat them as Charlton Heston said them, he asks the first one quite casually rather than the accusatory way it was said originally, though the second line was hissed.
Web Comics
- This PHD strip was apparently written by someone whose entire understanding of Mythbusters comes from the commercials - especially seeing how there's hardly an episode where they don't use a control in their experiments. While they openly admit that most of the science that goes into each episode is left on the cutting room floor due to time constraints, their methodology does not exactly boil down to "blow something up and call it". This xkcd provides a nice counterpoint.
- Lilformers seems to think that all of the humour in Transformers came from endless repetitions of "more than meets the eye". The quotation was only used twice; once by Optimus Prime at the end, and again by Sam near the beginning, and even then he remarks on how lame his use of it was.
Web Original
Western Animation
- The creators of The Simpsons and Family Guy know very little about Harry Potter and it shows. The platform 9 3/4 does not require one to look at it from a certain angle in order to pass through (a la Quagmire), and there is no eighth grade for any wizarding school in the Potterverse (a la Mr. Burns).
- Hogwarts doesn't have an eighth grade because it's British, and the education system is structured differently there. The Simpsons treatment has a number of departures from the series along the lines of being set in America and starring the cast of The Simpsons that it would be obtuse to classify as research failures. Whether that just makes it more of a Shallow Parody, I don't know.
- The South Park episode "Jakovasaurs". The Phantom Menace wasn't out when these were made, so all they had to make fun of Jar Jar was the trailer. Yet it kinda works because it shows they knew, as they stated, "This is the new Ewok! This is what's going to ruin the movie!" Still, it's often listed around the worst episodes of the series.
- Because it fails at everything else the Family Guy episode Not All Dogs Go To Heaven, which can best be described as a Brian episode with Star Trek jokes that anyone whose ever seen a You Tube Poop can make. Oh, hey, a "Shut up, Wesley!" reference...and a joke about Trek fans never going outside and...ummm...then the cast of TNG go get hamburgers (What?)...and go bowling (The hell?) and..............that's it. Seriously, there are two Trek jokes in an episode that features the entire cast of TNG. Danny Smith, you fail at everything.
- A Robot Chicken sketch parodying Into the Blue lampshaded this, with creator Seth Green explaining that it was written before the movie came out and that they could only make the parody based on their guesses of what the movie would be like. He goes on to state he's sure that Into The Blue by now will be a complete success and received several Academy Award nominations.
- Most Western Animation parodies of Anime seem to fall into this. Kappa Mikey is perhaps the only one that wasn't — it was a "miss" as an anime parody, but it's a miss by someone who actually knows anime, not someone who took a glance at it once and decided "Ha ha! It has jerky animation and they talk funny!"
- The anime parody segment in the Fairly Odd Parents movie "Channel Chasers" was also made by someone who knew anime, and included shout outs to Miyazaki and Kurosawa (who didn't make anime, but at least they got the country right).
- The Simpsons had something resembling an anime parody. A buff woman gets into a sword fight and turns into a lobster before crawling away. So the point is "anime is weird." That's it.
- Most western media anime parodies also draw from extremely small reference pools, and are done by people that seem to fall into one of three camps: saw half an episode of Pokemon, saw two minutes of Sailor Moon, or has some vague memories of watching Speed Racer. If they're really, really, really on the ball, they might get so edgy and modern as to crack jokes about powering up for three months and yelling while looking constipated.
- A lot of animated shows parody comic book superheroes. Almost all of them act as if comic books stopped being published after the Silver Age and the last comic book adaption released was the Adam West Batman series.
- The Fairly Odd Parents is one exception, in which the Crimson Chin had a gritty 80's period. The Simpsons is good on this too.
- Same with Calvin And Hobbes, where ultraviolent late 80s and early 90s comics are quite common, complete with gritty narration, excessive violence, absurdly buxom women, and people fighting for no good reason. It even parodied the "Comics are mature art! Look at how much blood there is!"
- I think it's justified, insofar as most animated series are intended for children. After the end of the Silver Age (the late Sixties, which was the time frame for Adam West's TV series), comics started getting really violent and politically charged. By contrast, Silver Age comics tend to be family-friendly (at least if they were published after 1954, which was when the Comics Code Authority was established).
- Two episodes of Johnny Test revolve around a parody of Pokemon (Tinymon)... sort of. It was accurate in some places, such as the incredibly weak Cuddlebuns evolving into the superpowerful Screechereen a la Magikarp, slightly less accurate in other places (the fact that Johnny and co. need a medal to open the trading feature may have been a misinterpretation of the fact that you need a badge to use the GTS/Global Terminal in DP Pt), and flat-out wrong in others - the Tinymon world is depicted as a complete Sugar Bowl, full of bright colors and unearthly terrain. While the Pokemon world is pretty far removed from real life by definition, it's much more realistic in comparison. Furthermore, Tinymon appears to have somewhat Zelda-style gameplay, quite unlike Pokemon's JRPG-type style.
- One of the episodes in question was paired with a much more accurate spoof of Scooby Doo, proving that the writers can make an accurate parody; they just were too lazy to do the research on Pokemon.
- There was 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. I'm not even sure who the Wolf was supposed to be.
- Coconut Freds Fruit Salad Island did a Deep Immersion Gaming episode which attempted to spoof Final Fantasy VII. Apparently Sephiroth kidnapped the princess to force her into marriage (yeah, right) and brought her to his castle for Cloud to rescue. If only instead of being a princess she'd been a magic black rock...
- You're kinda missing the point, kid. After all, Final Fantasy VII certianly didn't have Mario, Luigi, or Navi (whom three other characters were disguised as). The episode was a parody of video games in general rather than a "parody" of Final Fantasy VII (YMMV if it actually worked, though). The costumes were just Shout Outs ment to remind you that, yes, they are in a video game.
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