"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 (especially in recent years) Refuge In Vulgarity.
More egregious cases will often ignore elements that justify the more ridiculous aspects of the work.
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 (although parodying something that has not yet branded itself into the public's consciousness would seem a little pointless). 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.
However, Tropes Are Not Bad. Sometimes these parodies can be understood as effective parodies of trailers, of basic premises, or as exaggerations of elements in The Theme Park Version of said subject matter. For many people a Shallow Parody can be funnier than an overdone Affectionate Parody because of the lack of obscure inside jokes. Still, people who are actually fans of the subject of the parody will, more often than not, laugh at said parodies rather than with them (at best). It's notable that some of the below examples are intentional shallow parodies and derive humor from getting things wrong.
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. Compare Outside Joke, where a joke is only funny to people who Did Not Do the Research.
Examples
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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 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.
From the TV shows Naruto parody you'd think they only watched the first 3 or 4 episodes.
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.
Though only by a few months at a time when comic book scripts were written longer in advance than that. Not to mention that the creator of Doom Patrol used to work for Marvel.
Cracked, when it still was a magazine along the lines ofMad, had an issue covering the 1989 Batman film wherein a Burt Ward-style Robin complains that not only is he absent from the film, but he's dead in the comics. Never mind that it was Jason Todd who died and Dick Grayson was currently Nightwing. (To be fair, in the eyes of most casual Batman fans that is basically nit-picking.)
Pretty much any Cracked magazine parody, for that matter. They did little more than re-tell the movie or TV show straight up, with parody names.
The LucasArtsSam & Max strips frequently fell into this, possibly deliberately. Being produced for the LucasArts company newsletter and Sam And Max not starting out as LucasArts characters, Steve Purcell was allowed to draw them only if he parodied whatever games were coming out at the time. Because of this, he preferred to take the basic setting of the game he was parodying, dress Sam up as the main character of that game, and then just have the characters do their own thing - being more like one-off, themed adventures about fighting monsters or being bikers instead of parodies of Maniac Mansion and Full Throttle. Notably, the Monkey Island parody had Sam and Max in pirate costumes going to a desert island... full of monkeys. To be fair, the strips are probably more hilarious for not being true parody.
In a glaring example of Tropes Are Not Bad, Rat-Man's first story was a parody of Tim Burton's Batman, which the author had never seen. Despite this, it won the Lucca Comics award for the best script and set the foundation for what in Italy is considered one of the funniest comics ever published.
It's very amusing indeed to read old comics and magazines from the early/mid-1960s and come across a Shallow Parody of The Beatles. One can just imagine a stodgy, middle-aged writer writing one in hope of shaming those silly kids for falling for this ridiculous fad. Shallow Parodies of the Beatles usually have them all dressing, looking and speaking identically (hilariously, this usually means that they all look and talk like Ringo Starr), and have them endlessly singing "Yeah Yeah Yeah" (far from the Beatles' best or most notable song, but likely a victim of Pop Cultural Osmosis). Later parodies would have them playing concerts in their "Sgt. Pepper" uniforms (which they never did) and occasionally would depict John Lennon in his iconic 1969-era look while the rest of them still looked like they did on the Ed Sullivan Show. Nowadays, of course, parodies like this have effectively died out.
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 long shot, it is a rather direct parody of the first Spider-Man film, as is the better for it.
It's been argued that Seltzer and Friedberg don't, in fact, do parody at all. What they do is pop culture acknowledgements, feeling secure in the knowledge that there exist in America enough people devoid of a sense of humor enough that they will think the movies are funny because of the marketing alone.
Vampires Suck mostly averted this, except for a couple of throwaway gags.
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. Read about it here.
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.
Simpsons: The XXX Parody carries the oddity of not only having a Homer who acts and sounds exactly spot-on with the original, but carrying references to McBain and Cookie Kwan. It gets to a point where it's even more on-key than the recent episodes.
Honestly, there are too many aversions to easily list, aided by the porn industry being big enough that there's probably somebody who can look a lot like any famous actor and has (due to this) already practiced impressions from some of that actor's roles. It's just that Sturgeon's Law is seriously in effect here.
Pleasantville has the eponymous, 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.
Your Mileage May Vary on this one. The eponymous show is a parody of 1950s TV genres, not a faithful and accurate recreation of one. Parody thrives on exaggeration, and here certain features are exaggerated by cranking them up to eleven: the school basketball team isn't just good, it never loses a game or misses a shot, and firemen are not just more likely to be seen helping a kitten out of a tree than dealing with actual emergencies, they have no idea how to deal with a fire.
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!"
Starship Troopers- was said to be a parody of the novel after it was released, despite the fact the Verhoeven only read the first few chapters.
The movie has "parodies" of specific scenes from the books, but they mostly amount to taking the scenes and stripping them of the philosophy and context. Verhoeven tries to sell them as "ironic", despite being markedly less aware of the implications than the original scene. If you didn't know that the book was written first, you'd think that it was actually a scathing rebuttal of the movie.
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!
'Most parodies of one's own work strike one as very poor,' noted T. S. Eliot. 'In fact one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better.' He noted this in the context of praising an aversion; Henry Reed's "Chard Whitlow", which doesn't settle for making cheap swipes at Eliot's best known works, but parodies what his poems are actually like.
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.
Zigzagged with Saturday Night Live. Some of their parody sketches will be dead-on with what they're parodying; others, not so much. On the one side of the spectrum, there are shallow parodies that are just there to serve as the backdrop for an SNL recurring character to appear (cf. The "Mad Men" parody on Jon Hamm's first episode quickly devolved to a sketch featuring Jason Sudeikis and Kristen Wiig's characters, "The Two A-Holes" [it was even retitled "Two A-Holes Visit An Ad Agency in the 1960s"], the "Basic Instinct" parody that had Julia Sweeney's Pat character, the "Crying Game" parody that also Pat in it, the "Glee" parody that had Kristen Wiig's Gilly character) or are intentionally made shallow to make room for some kind of political commentary or Aesop about modern life. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the SNL parodies that are actually well-researched, such as the Harry Potter parodies (which use characters that aren't featured in the movie trailers, use the first names of the Hogwarts teachers, and mention things like butterbeer) and the one-off parody of There Will Be Blood from the season 33 episode hosted by Tina Fey (which was a Food Network show called "I Drink Your Milkshake," in which Daniel Plainview [Bill Hader] travels to America's malt shops and literally drinks their milkshakes). Bill Hader's Daniel Day Lewis is pitch-perfect, and the sketch references moments in the film that didn't quite become Memetic Mutations, such as "I'VE ABANDONED MY CHIIIIIIIIIIILD" and Plainview's opening speech.
Intentionally used with the sketch "What Is Burn Notice?", a game show in which the contestants have to tell the host what the show is about, because he doesn't know. The joke being that even though Burn Notice is purportedly one of the most popular shows on television, no one you know has ever seen it.
Get Smart usually did targeted parodies pretty well, considering its entire premise was general parody. However, its parody of The Avengers falls into this. Donald Snead and Emily Neal are British, styled correctly and have a lot of sexual tension, but that's where the similarities end. Snead bears very little resemblance to John Steed personality-wise, and Mrs. Neal's use of a deadly lipstick is particularly glaring, much more reminiscent of April Dancer than Emma Peel. The episode is funny, but it's pretty clear the creators are unaware of just how stylistically different The Avengers was from most other spy shows.
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's War On Everything 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.
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.
Que Vida Mas Triste had a Back to the Future parody where the main character was sent to the past to make sure his parents got together. Of course, anyone who actually saw the movie knows Marty went to the past to save his life (More or less), accidentally prevented his parents' meeting and THEN tried to get them together. They probably got confused with the second movie where Marty goes to the future to save his son. The worst part? Another Spanish show did the EXACT same mistake.
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. He also spent $300 to attend an early screening of the film to make sure he had all of the details correct. 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.
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.
ThisCracked 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.
Newspaper Comics
Pop Culture Shocke Therapy 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?
CHIKARA made "CP Munk," a chipmunk version of CM Punk. That was the whole joke.
That arguably includes elements of Totally Radical as well, since in the indies it's considered unbelievably hip to be a CM Punk fan.
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.
Stand Up Comedy
Pretty much any parody of Jerry Seinfeld will include the line "What's the deal with airline food?" Jerry's entire stand-up career was based around the fact that he tackled much more esoteric subjects than the standard hack topics of airline food. He did, however, use the line in an SNL sketch about a game show of Seinfeldian comedians.
Also "Whats the deal with Grapenuts?" Is actually from an old Mike Myers sketch. Discuss!
Theater
The Drowsy Chaperonepurports 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.)
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".
Aristophanes' portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds had pretty much nothing to do with Socrates' views as a philosopher, and treats him as a combination of a pre-Socratic natural philosopher and a rhetorician. Unfortunately, the misconception spread by the play was partially responsible for Socrates' execution.
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.
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.
there was a recent Contra-esque game, where the characters keep traveling between video games. At one point he travels to a "Japanese" game and it's made out to be one of the trippier things like Katamari Damacy, but the actual level is just a random military base, only with ninjas.
Most Pokémon parodies actually parodying the games will name the main character "Ash" and give him Ash's personality, when the game character's actual name is Red, and Ash is just his anime counterpart. Likewise, his rival will be named Gary instead of Blue, and if Team Rocket shows up, they'll usually be the anime-exclusive Jessie, James and Meowth(though to be fair, they DID appear in Pokemon Yellow.) In general, the parody will base itself mostly on the anime, even though it's quite different from the games. Even parodies made by gamers and fans are, at times, guilty of this.
Fans are guilty of this indeed. In the first game, there are four naming options. In the Red version, they are "Red", "Ash", "Jack", or a custom name, and your rival is "Blue", "Gary", or "John". In the Blue version, those are reversed. So Ash is as good a name as any.
Thelemite, and how. It's a fairly good game on its own merits, but as a parody of Prototype, it sort of kind of resemble the original game if you squint, and seems to have been written by someone who heard a summary of the game and once saw a picture of Alex Mercer. For starters, their Mercer stand-in becomes a "mutant ninja" who flies around kicking people complete with Power Glows and Kiai. This is roughly the equivalent of a parody of The Incredible Hulk that's utterly convinced the Hulk is a physically-ten-year-oldRobot Girl whose primary form of attack is an exploding Rocket Punch — the character is entirely unrelated, and although the attack does somewhat resemble something in their arsenal, it gets almost every other detail of it wrong.
An advertisement for the racing game Blur acts like the Mario Kart games are kiddie games that are about "making friends" rather than competition. Only the complete opposite is true, especially in online races with other players. Wi-Fi competitions can be BRUTAL.
The movie Dragon Brain in Grand Theft Auto IV appears to be a parody of High Fantasy films in general, but most of the jokes are about merchandising and CGI, rather than about typical fantasy movie cliches.
Web Comics
ThisPHD 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". Thisxkcd provides a nice counterpoint.
Lil Formers 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.
Anytime Lil Formers parodies Transformers that aren't Generation 1, this trope comes in full effect. The films, Transformers Animated, the Unicron Trilogy... Eventually, Short Packed! did a strip parodying Moylan's tendencies to not research his stuff at all and only mock them because they're "new" and "not G1".
Intentional in Problem Sleuth, which purports to be a Film Noir parody, but has very little in common with the genre except for using lots of black and white, taking place in a 'vaguely Prohibition-era' setting, and having three fedora-wearing detectives as the main characters (who don't actually do any crime-solving until right at the very end). They don't even act like film noir characters, except for Problem Sleuth, who is occasionally Wrong Genre Savvy and dreams of solving crimes for 'hysterical dames'. In this case, it's just to contribute to the surrealism of it all, and the work is a very well-researched parody of JRPGs.
Unwinder's Tall Comics: The original (now gone) rant for this pagediscusses this trope. Parker noted that everybody and their mother has parodied Citizen Kane at some point, but the majority seem to only reference the scenes (the bit about the sled, "Rosebud", etc) that have spread via Popcultural Osmosis. Parker deliberately set out to avoid doing that with his parody, so he imagined a Citizen Kane sequel made by a director who's obviously familiar with the original but still managed to completely miss the point. Furthermore, Parker wasn't content to simply make "the Citizen Kane parody for people who actually watched the film"—he referenced a subplot that was left out of the finished film, making his comic into "the Citizen Kane parody for people who read the screenplay".
In-universe in Bobwhite. Cleo tries to play an ironic ukelele cover version of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way". She gets a few lines in before admitting that she's never actually listened to the song.
The Bob the Angry Flower parody of Atlas Shrugged is built around the heroes being unwilling to take upon themselves the responsibilities of rebuilding society, despite spending the last third of the book in a commune seemingly devoted entirely to demonstrating they could.
Web Original
Mondo Media's Like News shorts repeat one point without parodying much of the content. For example, Charlie Brown is old, or Indiana Jones is old. That's it.
Homestar Runner's stock anime parody Stinkoman K 20X6. Possibly an in-character example as it was created by Strong Bad, whose knowledge on the subject is limited to having seen one of them once in The Eighties, back when it was okay to call it Japanimation.
"The Editing Room" is a satirical website consisting of "abridged screenplays", whereby the author takes the mickey out of a film by having its character hang lampshades all over the place and by snarking away at story points. Most are quite clever, but after a while some seem juvenile and shallow.
It Gets Worse when you realize that the writer doesn't even bother to do any research into the background of the movie, or at times doesn't appropriately represent the story.
Peter Coffin's parodies of the New Moon trailers are the Tropes Are Not Bad version of this trope. It's also Justified, as the intention was to fool Twilight fangirls into thinking they were the real trailers - so he had to make them right after said trailers were first released. And it works; if the videos themselves aren't hilarious enough for you, the angry responses from fans about how they were TRICKED!!!!1111 will be.
Western Animation
Mighty Mouse (or Super Mouse, as he was originally called) is a "Parody" of Superman, the "Parody" aspect coming solely from the facty that he's a mouse version of Superman. Paul Terry, a master of wit you were not.
The 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.
A Robot Chicken sketch parodying Into the Bluelampshaded 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.
The skit runs thus:
Paul Walker: We're going to have to go... Into The Blue! Jessica Alba: Into the blue? Paul Walker: Into the blue
... Jessica Alba: I'm in a bikini! Paul Walker: I do lots of situps...
Most Western Animation parodies of Anime seem to fall into this. Many 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 Pokémon, 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.
The Simpsons had something resembling an anime parody on the season 12 episode "HOMR." While at an animation convention, Bart and Lisa watch a Japanese cartoon (which Bart refers to as "Japanimation," which actually isn't used as much as the term anime) in which a robot-wolf-like creature captures a female warrior who turns into a prawn and destroys the robo-wolf, who then turns into a pair of wind-up shoes and walks away. So the point Al Jean (the episode writer) is making is "Ha-ha-ha, anime is weird" (which Bart and Lisa lampshade). Oddly, it seemed more like a parody of American science-fantasy cartoons from the '80s (Masters of the Universe, Thundarr the Barbarian etc.) than actual anime. Same thing with the "Battling Seizure Robot" parody from season 10 (though that's was more of a reference to that infamous Pokemon episode "Electric Soldier Porygon," which was banned after viewers suffered seizures).
For a dizzying combination of the traits described above, there's the recurring Pokémon parody Tinymon in Johnny Test, whose hero looks like Ash Ketchum, acts more like a Bruce Lee parody and, naturally, talks like Speed Racer.
The "Tinymon" in Johnny Test also have more complex a and unnatural appearences making them look more like Digimon than pokemon.
While the Fairly Oddparents episode "Channel Chasers" visits two animesque shows, the one with poor lipsync and bizarre enunciation is specifically a parody of Speed Racer, so it's somewhat better than most other examples.
Dexter's Laboratory did anime parody twice, once specifically of Speed Racer and later in the series of common anime villains traits (like being Bishōnen and wearing Scary Impractical Armor). The only problem was that the villain from the latter was a Card-Carrying Villain while majority of villains he was parodying at least try to justify their crimes. And he has speech pattern like he ran away from Speed Racer.
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 WestBatman series.
And some go into the notion that Superheroes aren't about fighting evil but violence and that every supervillain in the history is Card-Carrying Villain.
An episode of Drawn Together included Daria as a victim of torture in Hot Topic's basement. She quips this is men's fault, which is missing the point, since she tends to be misanthropic towards everyone regardless of gender. (The mischaracterization was probably because Daria looks so much like the stereotypical Straw Feminist, being "ugly" and all.)
A Robot Chicken episode also featured a parody of Ms. Morgendorffer... or rather, Mr. Morgendorffer. In the segment, sometime after the events of the show and being interviewed by Michael Moore in a "Where Are They Now? 90s" send-up, Daria became a post-op MTF transgendered person named Daryl. Daryl drolly explained the procedure to Moore, who in turn lost his lunch. That was based on the other generalized misperception (by many who didn't watch the show as well as some of the characters in the show itself) of Daria as being emotionless or "The Misery Chick". Being Robot Chicken, though, it's entirely conceivable they made the parody for the people who didn't watch Daria.
This trailer for a canceled animated movie called Blue Planet begins with a rather shallow parody of Toy Story and A Bug's Life.
The movie itself was eventually released as an FMV On-Rails shooter called Deadly Tide.
The writers of Futurama, having expressed their preference for Mac, spare no opportunity to mock PCs. The only problem? They've apparently never actually used one. For instance, in the finale to Into the Wild Green Yonder, one of the robots thinks, "I'd like to thank my operating system, Windows 7, for... ... System error." Windows 7 being most famous among users for never crashing. (If they had said Windows ME, on the other hand...)
In the DVD version released before being aired it was Windows Vista, which is sometimes called the beta version of Windows 7. Could be a case of the TV version trying to avoid We're Still Relevant, Dammit but ruining the joke in the process.
"Fear of Flying," an episode of The Simpsons, has a parody of Lost in Space that makes it look like the writers thought John Robinson and Dr Smith were a single character.
To be fair to them, they were drawing from a limited pool of characters, and there happened to be one more character on Lost In Space than in the Simpson family. Of course, they could have tossed Flanders in there or something, but still.
Recess gives us Bonkey the Green Dragon, a shallow parody to Barny The Dionsaur.
The Phineas and Ferb episode "Wizard of Odd" is a dream sequence inspired by the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Except that it continually takes its cues from the MGM film, from the appearance of the characters, to a joke about the film-exclusive hourglass scene, to using the film version of the arrival in Oz as the basis of its equivalent segment — said scene is different in nearly every detail between the two versions.
