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Following

"Weird Al" Effect

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/weird_al_2.png
Above: A YouTube upload of the song "Jeopardy" Below: Weird Al's parody. Notice how the parody has almost four times the views.

"Spoof films used to be so good that they'd eclipse the movies they spoofed."
— Gabriel Morton, The Ego Review: Age of Evil
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When a parody of a particular work is more popular than the original work, often to the point where those unfamiliar with the source material will believe that the parody is its own thing.

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's song is a parody. For example, many people are now more familiar with "I Lost on Jeopardy!" than with the original "Jeopardy" by the Greg Kihn Band (or even the original game show from the sixties). Some may even have forgotten Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park," or Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" (or Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise," for that matter), remembering only Weird Al's "Jurassic Park" 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 they thought.

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Occasionally the trope can be inverted, where the parody is forgotten, but aspects of it get associated with the original work.

Related to the concept of a Forgotten Trope, except it is not tropes but works or personalities that have been forgotten. Could be an extreme expression of Rule of Funny (the music may not have had much staying power, but at least the parody is funny). See also Adaptation Displacement, Popcultural Osmosis, Popcultural Osmosis Failure, Older Than They Think, The Coconut Effect, Covered Up and Revival by Commercialization. Contrast Shallow Parody, when lacking knowledge of the original work merely renders the parody meaningless.

Be careful: If the original still has a respectable pop culture presence, then claiming the parody is better known may tend toward Fan Myopia.

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Examples:

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    Trope Namer 
  • For those wondering how people could make such a mistake with "Weird Al" Yankovic, he does also have a lot of original humorous songs. Most of us older folks know him better for his parodies, but he's spanned a few generations since his Dr. Demento days and is still going strong. Moreover, knowing that a song is a parody and knowing the song it parodies are two different things.
    • Coolio was quite peeved about "Amish Paradise", for which Yankovic had obtained permission through official channels but not through Coolio himself. He felt that Weird Al's version trivialized the seriousness of the song. Though Lady Gaga on the other side of the spectrum stated that having your song parodied by Weird Al is like a rite of passage to being an artist in the music industry. This was backed up in an earlier interview by Kurt Cobain where he said when Al called him about making a parody of "Smells like Teen Spirit" is when he realized Nirvana made it in the music industry.
    • To confuse matters further, many of Al's original songs are "style parodies" where he parodies a band's/artist's musical style instead of a specific song. Because he does change the music a bit even with parodies, this leads to some thinking that these style parodies are a parody of a specific song. Examples follow:
  • His Once-An-Album polka medleys tend to be time capsules of a particular period in music, covering both enduring hits and flashes in the pan. For instance, "Polka Your Eyes Out" from 1992 note  is bookended by "Cradle of Love" and "Ice Ice Baby", but in-between has such classics as "Losing My Religion," "Love Shack" and "Enter Sandman"
    • Referenced in The Flash Tub Gamescott Review (which is a parody of both 90's internet videos and internet game reviews) in the end credits, crediting Papa Roach's "Last Resort" to "Weird Al", since Weird Al did cover it in one of his medleys.
    • Incidentally, the polka medleys themselves are an example of this trope. A lot of us probably don't remember Stars on 45, a Dutch novelty act which created song medleys set to disco. Al took the concept, only he set the medley to polka music instead with "Polkas On 45". While Stars on 45 is largely forgotten, Al continues to feature polka medleys on each of his albums (except "Even Worse" and arguably "Alapalooza", where instead of a medley he did a polka cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody").
  • Because Weird Al was effectively the only parody artist to hit it big in the pop music era, there is a widespread, pronounced tendency on the Internet to attribute to Weird Al any parody song whose artist is otherwise unknown. This has been especially common on pirate MP3 repositories such as Napster, where searching on Weird Al would produce any number of non-Al music, some of it obscene or offensive, with his name on it. (Weird Al is on record as saying that this mistaken identity, rather than any theoretical lost revenue, is the biggest unwanted effect piracy has on him personally.)

    Advertising 
  • The Energizer Bunny, Mascot for the Energizer brand of batteries for over 20 years, was originally a parody of an ad campaign by rival Duracell, in which a small and cute bunny with a small drum powered by their battery would last longer than one powered by their chief rival — which in the commercial was Everlast to not name Energizer (owned by Eveready at the time) by name. (Energizer's ad was that its bunny, like its battery, was too large and impressive for Duracell's ad.) In part due to its effectiveness as a campaign and in part due to Duracell not keeping up with the trademarks, the original bunny is all but forgotten in North America (although still active in other continents). Duracell claimed that 40% of the audience thought they were still Duracell ads, but never really tried to back that up.
  • The phrase, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature" has been used and re-used so often (just as often as a parody as not), that it's approached the point where many people have no idea where it actually came from (for the record, it was from a 1970 commercial for a butter substitute called Chiffon).
    • Similarly, the phrase "that's-a spicy meatball-a" is used in a few places. It was originally from a fake ad for meatballs inside an Alka-Seltzer ad from 1969.
    • And again for a very distinct, hushed delivery of "We've secretly replaced somebody's 'X' with 'Y.' Let's see if they can tell the difference." Originally from a Seventies and Eighties ad campaign for Folger's Coffee Crystals, but the references to it have far outlasted the ads.
    • This is, in fact, pretty common with commercials. The endless repetition of them can easily create annoyance, which means writers and creators will see them as ripe for parody in their work, with the end result being the parodies can live on even when the ad campaign itself ends.
  • A 2013 Super Bowl ad set in a library, in which a whispered argument over Oreo cookies escalated into a brawl, prompted the creation of a sign proclaiming, "In light of recent events, NO OREOS will be allowed in the library." In the years since, this sign has frequently circulated on social media—shared by puzzled library-goers who have no idea what it's talking about.
  • Unless you're a pretty major film buff, chances are pretty good that you've heard of Segata Sanshiro long before you heard of the Akira Kurosawa film Sanshiro Sugata. By a similar count, the frequent Actor Allusions to Kamen Rider probably flew over the heads of most Westerners.

    Art 
  • Quite some famous or well known people from previous centuries are nowadays better known because they were painted or sculpted by world famous artists. So whenever, for instance, the Mona Lisa is parodied, most people aren't aware that she was an actual aristocratic 15th-16th century lady.

    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?
  • Gunbuster was actually a parody of Aim for the Ace! a tennis manga and anime series; as well as Super Robot anime programs like Mazinger Z and Getter Robo.
  • Dragon Ball originally started as a parody of Journey to the West, which, while still popular in Asia, is more or less unknown in many countries Dragon Ball was released in except those that had Monkey! on their TVs.
  • 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 Lyrical Nanoha protagonist Nanoha Takamachi has almost completely eclipsed its original use as a canon nickname for the RX-78 and/or Amuro Ray of Mobile Suit Gundam.
  • In the Western world, Naruto has completely overtaken terms and names like Fuuma Shuriken, (Kage) Bunshin, Kawariminote ; a ninja called Sasukenote ; and a trio with the names of Tsunade, Orochimaru and Jiraiya with powers based on snails, snakes, and frogs, respectivelynote .
  • Ouran High School Host Club appears to be headed this way, with more people watching the show having not seen any of the shojo it parodies. The surface humor and well-developed characters serve to attract people who don't get the joke.
  • Sgt. Frog: The anime commonly includes Shout Outs to older works to entertain some of its older audiences, so naturally for many younger viewers, it's often the first they've ever heard of certain things. Lampshaded by the Dub, in which the narrator tells people to search for Space Sheriff Gavan on YouTube. Interestingly, that show actually was shown in America, but it's highly likely that most viewers never saw it.
  • The gaudy clothes, pencil-thin mustache, and uncommonly large overbite of Osomatsu-kun's Iyami is much more well known to Japanese audiences than Tony Tani, the vaudeville comedian who inspired him. Even his trademark "zansu" tic came from Tani's act.
  • A general example: The sheer amount of references to the Ultraman franchise in anime is staggering, ranging from blatant parodies of the entire franchise to extremely subtle nods to specific episodes of specific series, but most are rarely understood by non-Japanese viewers, especially since Ultraman is usually brushed off as "that low-budget Power Rangers ripoff" by many.

    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. You have a shot at recognizing them if you've seen one of the 90s cartoon shows, but the parody characters have such a distinct look that it's not obvious.
    • Iznogoud contained a Shout-Out to specifically to the Asterix versions of the pirates in one story. They look much more like their Asterix designs and the crow's nest pirate observes that the ship they're about to attack 'has no Gauls on it'.
    • Furthermore the pirates, on yet another occasion when their ship is smashed by Asterix and Co, 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. The parody has untranslatable French puns involving the idiomatic meaning of "médusé" (stupefied). The English translation has them say "We've been framed, by Jericho!" note 
    • Asterix generally is packed solid with references to French politics, society, and other such in-jokes, though in some cases the original reference are quite obscure nowadays. In Asterix and the Banquet Asterix meets a group of characters in Marseille, who are a shout-out to the 1930s movies Fanny and Marius by Marcel Pagnol, something most people of today, even in France, wouldn't get. The antagonist from Obelix and Co.. is supposed to be a parody of Jacques Chirac. Yes, as in former President of France Jacques Chirac, though the parody was focused on his largely-forgotten-outside-France stint as Prime Minister.
  • Lucky Luke: How many people today think of the Dalton brothers as the historical Bob, Grat, Bill and Emmett, compared to the Dalton Brothers as Lucky Luke's Joe, Jack, William and Averell? In Europe and the French-speaking world, at least, it's not even a contest.
    • Joe, Jack, William and Averell are supposed to be the Dalton cousins. The "historical" Dalton brothers were featured (caricatured) in the album Outlaw which is probably forgotten because Goscinny didn't write it, plus it's just one album vs. over 20, plus they were actually Killed Off for Real whereas Lucky Luke moved to Thou Shalt Not Kill a few albums later.
    • There are others who may associate the Daltons as Dinky, Pinky, Stinky, etc. from Huckleberry Hound.
    • Morris' work on the series in general has resulted in this. He liked to parody various overused tropes from Western films, and the distinctive features and screen personas of actors associated with the genre. While the comics keep getting reprinted, much of the European audience is no longer particularly familiar with the parodied films, or with tropes that haven't seen much use since the 1960s. Most of the actors parodied are also long gone, and in some cases poorly remembered.
  • Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday. Also, he is a zombie. If you know of Solomon Grundy, chances are you probably know him from the comics and cartoon, but not from the nursery rhyme. In Mexico, there is a wrestler known as Solomon Grundy, and people don't know about any rhyme, comic, or cartoon. The rhyme itself IS mentioned in the popular Batman series The Long Halloween. It is also briefly referenced in Justice League and Arkham City. One Justice League cartoon episode has him sacrifice himself for something (nevermind that being a zombie, he can't really die off permanently). The gravestone shown usually mentions the rhyme. The rhyme is also referenced in the Batman story "One Night in Slaughter Swamp", published in Batman: Shadow of the Bat # 39 (1995). The Crash Test Dummies also used his name for their Superman song, only because it rhymed with money. ...sorta. The rhyme was also used in Arrow, with Ollie quipping "Died on Saturday; buried on Sunday" after defeating him.
    • Note that the 19th-century nursery rhyme has a couple of variations, but is only eight-lines long and gives the Grundy depicted no individual traits. Making it unlikely to receive many memorable adaptations. In its longer form, the nursery rhyme simply describes the rather conventional course of life for a man. Grundy was (in order) born, Christened, married, taken ill, having his medical condition further deteriorating, died due to his illness, and then buried.
  • Many comic book fans didn't even realize that DC Comics had other characters besides Wesley Dodds and Morpheus who went by "The Sandman" until they saw Hector Hall acting foolish 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 to some extent, but Thunderbolt and the Peacemaker (Ozymandias and the Comedian's counterparts respectively) have suffered.
    • In Thunderbolt's case, he isn't owned by DC anymore. Pete Morisi, the creator of the character, eventually claimed full ownership over him. Morisi died in 2003, and his estate still owns the rights to the character. Thunderbolt still had a second lasting contribution to comics aside from Ozymandias, though: his quartered black and red costume influenced Bruce Timm’s design for Harley Quinn. (On a curiosity, Pete Morisi based the Thunderbolt's costume on the "symmetrically divided, red-and-blue costume" of a 1940s superhero: "Daredevil" by Lev Gleason Publications. Morisi had attempted to purchase the rights to the defunct character, but after one of the co-owners refused, he simply decided to create an expy with a similar costume.)
    • And Peacemaker only very superficially resembled the Comedian, making any connection ridiculous on its face. (If they ever met, they would not get along.)
    • 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 it frequently, but it was 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. Its meaning is shifting even beyond that, now that it's being used as a tool of 4chan/anonymous for their real-world protests (although, technically they are using it in the style in which it is portrayed in V for Vendetta) — and this applies to both the US and UK as the mask has lately appeared on the office wall of The IT Crowd. Whee!
    • Indeed, in the "set tour" featurette on the 3rd series of The IT Crowd, it's actually referred to as the V For Vendetta mask, rather than a Guy Fawkes mask, by Graham Linehan himself!
    • British technology news/discussion site The Register also uses the mask as the only icon available for Anonymous Coward posts.
    • For that matter, the English word "guy" is itself a reference to Guy Fawkes that has evolved over the centuries to be used as reference for anyone, not just an effigy of the original Guy. On top of that, Mr. Fawkes himself was named after a long forgotten local celebrity from his hometown; Guy Fairfax.
  • Deadpool was originally conceived by Rob Liefeld as a rather blatant ripoff of DC Comics supervillain Deathstroke. Later writers took the character and revamped him into a parody to save Marvel some face. While Deathstroke still has a strong fan following, Deadpool has pretty well eclipsed him in terms of popularity.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as an underground comic strip that affectionately parodied many popular Marvel Comics series of its era, but it went on to become much better-known than most of them after the cartoon adaptation became a major hit. In particular, the comic took major cues from the Daredevil and X-Men issues penned by Frank Miller, who was famous for his fascination with Japanese culture. The most obvious aspects were the Turtles' mentor "Splinter" (as opposed to Daredevil's mentor "Stick"), and their enemies "The Foot Clan" (Daredevil's were "The Hand"). The Turtles' origin story, involving a runaway canister of radioactive chemicals, also parodied Daredevil's origin.note  And their basic character dynamic parodied the X-Men—another surrogate family of temperamental teenage mutants with contrasting personalities. Even their most iconic villains, the samurai Oroku Saki ("The Shredder") and the grotesque alien Krang, took some obvious inspiration from the Marvel villains Keniuchio Harada ("The Silver Samurai") and the grotesque mutant MODOK.
  • Even with proper annotation you'll be hard pressed to identify most of the references to Victorian literature in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with bonus points if you are even aware of the original work. To understand how far Alan Moore goes, there are references to Victorian porn novels that have been out of print for decades, and visual reference gags can number in the triple figures on one page. It gets even worse once he gets into the twentieth century.
    • In some cases the characters mentioned or encountered are from the 19th century, but not from British literature. There are cameos for example of Auguste Dupin (created by Edgar Allen Poe) and Anna/Nana Coupeau (created by Emile Zola). Also there are references to even older characters. Issue second includes a reference to the character Lady Termagant Flaybum. Flaybum is a major character in an 18th-century novel concerning flagellations, and having a sado-masochistic tone.
    • There are also unusual depictions of famous characters, such as Charles Dickens' characters outside their typical era. One scene involves an aging thief giving Fagin-like training to a group of child thieves. Moore does not give a name for the old man, but the implication is that we are seeing child-thief Artful Dodger in his old age. He became a copy of his mentor. Another scene involves a young rape victim who seems unusually optimistic. The name given for her is Polly Whittier, a character better known as "Pollyanna".
  • 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 prototype of the Bat Signal in The Bat was not used to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, but was a notorious criminal's Calling Card striking fear into the hearts of people staying in an Old, Dark House.
  • Viz started as a parody of British children's comics and now the genre it parodies is all but dead with the exception of The Beano, which Viz even outsells.
  • Nero: To this day many Flemings (especially from the older generation) will think of the protagonist from this popular comic book series whenever they hear the name "Nero", instead of the Roman Emperor on which his name was based. Meneer Pheip's son, Clo-Clo, has a name based on French singer Claude-François' Affectionate Nickname, but how many people remember that?
  • Suske en Wiske: Similarly, the name "Barabas" will remind many people in Belgium and the Netherlands of the Absent-Minded Professor in this comic book series, rather than the biblical character.
    • There is a Suske en Wiske story called De Texasrakkers ("The Texas Scoundrels"), which was originally a shout-out to the popular 1950s TV western series The Texas Rangers, but this show is nowadays completely forgotten. In fact mention The Texas Rangers today in Flanders or the Netherlands and everybody assumes you mean De Texasrakkers.
  • De Kiekeboes: A lot of younger people may not associate the name "Konstantinopel" with the original name of Istanbul, but with Kiekeboe's son.
  • Urbanus: Urbanus, just like the comedian he is based on, is named after several medieval popes. Nowadays most people in Flanders and the Netherlands will automatically think of him, rather than these popes. Similarly there are lot of children who know Urbanus more as a comic book character than as the comedian he was based on, mostly because Urbanus doesn't perform that often anymore.
  • Agent 327: This series started out as a parody of James Bond, but mostly the campy 1960s version. For many people unaware of these movies they may not notice the parody element anymore. Similarly the character Olga Lawina has a Punny Name (lawine means avalanche in Dutch and the character is of Swiss nationality) which refers to the nowadays almost forgotten Dutch singer Olga Lowina.
  • The Hellfire Club's introductory appearance in X-Men was originally a parody/homage of the classic The Avengers episode "A Touch of Brimstone", where Steed and Peel battle a genteel criminal organization called...the Hellfire Club. Practically everything about the story arc's plot was inspired by the Avengers episode in some way: Jean Grey's famously kinky "Black Queen" outfit was an exact replica of Emma Peel's "Queen of Sin" costume, and Jason Wyngarde was modeled after British actor Peter Wyngarde, who guest-starred as that episode's villain. But while the Hellfire Club in The Avengers appeared only once, Marvel's Hellfire Club has remained a major part of the X-Men mythos for over three decades, and most younger fans don't know about its origins, especially in the US, where the syndication package omitted that episode and it only became available much later. It helps that their introductory appearance was in the first part of The Dark Phoenix Saga, the most beloved X-Men story of all time.
    • Fewer people still may be aware that the Hellfire Club was a real thing, albeit not necessarily evil, but rather a series of 18th century gentlemen's clubs that took a satirical and ironic view of society and religion. Calling themselves "devils" and engaging in mock ceremonies that mostly just involved alcohol and pranks, Flanderization and Artistic License – History likely inspired their appearance in The Avengers.
    • The other part of Jason Wyngarde's name is from the amiably cheesy TV series Jason King (1971–2), in which Wyngarde portrayed a foppish writer who is often mistaken for the hero of his adventure novels.
  • Hitman featured a Take That! in its DC One Million issue to '90s Anti-Hero Gunfire, who was at the time fairly new, having debuted in the same Crisis Crossover as the protagonist of Hitman. In the years since that issue came out, Gunfire has appeared in all of five issues, and had a speaking role in only one of them, while Hitman remains a Cult Classic - consequently, chances are that if anyone has read an issue featuring the character, it's the one where he turned his ass into a hand grenade.
  • Thanos was created as an Alternate Company Equivalent to Darkseid but years of buildup to his confrontation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have led Thanos to becoming more popular than the character he aped off of, whose appearances in DC's own cinematic universe have been limited to being The Ghost.
  • The second annual for the Sponge Bob Squarepants comic features a story that's a Whole Plot Reference to Stardust the Super Wizard, even being written in part by the guy largely responsible for bringing the series to the public eye. Considering that Stardust is deep inside "cult fanbase" territory, and the few fans it does have generally don't overlap with people who buy SpongeBob tie-in comics, it's anyone's guess how many kids were left very confused by that issue.

    Fan Works 

    Film - Animation 
  • Dumbo's name is based on the legendary circus elephant Jumbo, something not many people nowadays remember or know (his proper name is given as Jumbo Jr., while "Dumbo" is a mean nickname given to him by the other elephants).
  • In Rockadoodle, Pinky is to Colonel Tom Parker what Chantecleer is to Elvis Presley. Young kids who grew up in the 90's probably knew who Elvis was, but the Colonel, not so much. The name/character of Chanticleer himself is from one of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, who took it from the body of folk tales about him and Reynard the fox. But you would have to be a medievalist to make that connection.
  • Thanks to its very quick one scene usage as an in-joke in The Lion King, people are insistent that "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was written by Elton John and Tim Rice for the movie, even when you explain to them it wasn't. It doesn't help that the song is used briefly in the Broadway musical and on the Rhythm of the Pridelands CD.
  • While older audiences and rock fans likely know of the song, the target audience for The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie typically know of "Goofy-Goober Rock" before the original 1980s song "I Wanna Rock" by Twisted Sister. This extends to fans who were kids at the time of release but are now adults.

    Film - Live Action 
  • Many Hollywood actors of the 1930s and 1940s are more familiar to younger generations who never saw their actual movies from seeing them appear as caricatures in old Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons.
  • Kenneth Alford's 1914 tune "Colonel Bogey March" is now best known as "that whistling tune from The Bridge on the River Kwai." During World War II, the song acquired parody lyrics and became known as "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball".
  • The classic 1940s-era shorts by The Three Stooges were often parodies of contemporary films, many of which are today mostly forgotten, contrary to the Stooges themselves. The best-known example may be "Men in Black" (a takeoff on a now-forgotten doctors-and-nurses tale called Men in White).
    • In a similar case, it affected former third Stooge Joe Besser as well: While he was quite popular for various comedic roles during his time — most notably his "whiny sissy" act that he carried over to his Stooge role — today, he's known for nothing but being a replacement third Stooge (and a subpar one at that).
    • Well, Joe Besser is also remembered as "Stinky" on Abbott and Costello.
  • Airplane! (1980) lifts, often word for word, the story of a 1950s disaster movie called Zero Hour! (itself a remake of a Canadian television movie). As a matter of fact, the Zucker brothers bought the rights to Zero Hour! so they could use its plot so closely without being sued. However, Airplane! is better remembered as a general parody of '70s disaster films, specially the Airport series, which jump-started the craze. And many younger viewers haven't even heard of those films, especially Airport, as Airplane! was a pretty thorough Genre-Killer.
    • Ethel Merman is best known nowadays for appearing as an asylum inmate who claimed to be her.
  • In Blazing Saddles, the villain Hedley Lamarr is always correcting people who call him "Hedy". There are fewer people today who know Hedy Lamarr (who starred in 19 films, had six husbands, and whose work in radar technology in WWII served as a key precursor to the development of cell phones, wi-fi and GPS, making her the Mother of the Cellular Age) than who know Blazing Saddles — or who know Hedy LaRue in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a more direct takeoff on Lamarr.
    • Ditto jazz musician Mongo Santamaria, who is perhaps best known today as the punchline of a throwaway joke involving the character Mongo in Blazing Saddles.
    • Almost nobody in the movie's target audience would have known that, by Hollywood cliché, Native Americans were played by Jewish actors. Hence the movie's Yiddish-speaking Indians.
    • The Waco Kid's famous speech about how and why he ended his time as the Fastest Gun in the West and turned into a depressed drunk is a spoof of a speech given by a character in an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959). The enduring fame and popularity of Blazing Saddles has meant that far more people are familiar with the Waco Kid's scene in the film than with the source material.
  • Also by Mel Brooks, Young Frankenstein makes it easy for people to find some unintentional comedy in many scenes of Frankenstein (1931) (and on a lesser level, Bride of Frankenstein). And few viewers realize that as well as being a general pastiche of Frankenstein films, it lifts its plot and several whole scenes from Son of Frankenstein in particular.
  • Yet again from Mel Brooks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights is probably better remembered than Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the movie it was most closely parodying. Also, most people don't realize that the utterly ridiculous facial expressions that Cary Elwes makes throughout the movie are actually a spot-on imitation of those made by Errol Flynn in the classic Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
  • Him again: The Producers's "Springtime for Hitler" scene features a portion where a group of people form a swastika, an image lifted straight from Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (albeit on a much smaller scale). For obvious reasons, the latter is only watched by film students and neo-Nazis.
  • Dr. Strangelove:
    • The title character is a parody of Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi scientist who worked for NASA. Ex-Nazi scientists were also a stock character in the 50s.
    • It is an adaptation of the now long forgotten dramatic Peter George novel Red Alert. Nuclear holocaust stories were popular in the 50s. The film was originally going to be a straight adaptation before getting turned into a darkly comic satire.
    • The film Fail-Safe, released around the same time, used the identical concept played straight. (In fact, it was based on a novel itself, and the author of Red Alert sued the author of Fail-Safe for plagiarism...) Today if it's remembered at all, people tend to assume it's boring and stodgy in comparison, but it's actually a critically acclaimed drama.
    • The title character's metal hand is more recognizable today than that of Rotwang in Metropolis, the character which it homages.
  • Several scenes from the spy thriller Marathon Man ("Is it safe?") are arguably more famous for being parodied than the movie itself.
  • You are far more likely to encounter Citizen Kane through a parody or reference in a children's cartoon years before you even hear of the film itself.
  • The Austin Powers franchise parodies a lot in the James Bond franchise, some that everyone would get (Random Task throwing a shoe), while others are obscure enough that most viewers wouldn't get unless they were a Bond fan. Burt Bacharach provided music for Casino Royale (1967), which is why he makes an appearance in the first Austin Powers film. Austin himself is a parody of Jason King, a suave hipster secret agent from the British TV shows Department S and his own eponymous spin-off, who is now largely forgotten even in Britain. Austin also parodies the titular character of the short-lived British spy show Adam Adamant Lives!
  • Far more people nowadays have seen the Indiana Jones films than the '30s adventure films that inspired them. To the point where one of the main criticisms of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was that it didn't follow the '30s adventure template, even though the production team was trying to do the same thing to the '50s sci-fi shows. Recursively enough, it's closer to '70s parodies of the template (the crystal skulls, Ancient Astronauts, and The Greys especially are '70s tropes).
  • Try showing some German expressionist movies to someone who isn't already familiar with the genre, and see how long it takes for them to mention Tim Burton.
  • While not a parody, Robert De Niro's famous "You Talkin' to Me??" line from Taxi Driver was a reference to the 1953 Western Shane, where the title character is called out.
    Shane: You speakin' to me?
    Chris Calloway: I don't see nobody else standin' there.
    • Other reports claim that De Niro was inspired by a standup routine he saw in New York.
  • The LOVE/HATE tattoos dangerous people have on their knuckles originated in The Night of the Hunter, which has been spoofed by countless films and TV shows:
    • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal once had a biker accidentally getting the tattoo "LOVE/HATS" but didn't mind because he actually really loved hats.
    • When BA first appears in the film version of The A-Team a pair of camera closeups during the fight shows "PITY" on one hand and "FOOL" on the other as he throws punches.
    • The four-fingered Sideshow Bob had "LUV" on one and "HĀT" on the other in one episode of The Simpsons.
    • Going one step further, Phineas and Ferb not only has a parody of the tattoo, but an even more obscure parody of the scene in which its meaning is explained.
    • Arthur had an episode where George, a moose, tried to be tougher and wrote "LOVE/HATE" on his antlers.
    • Gravity Falls had Dipper outright wear Reverend Powell's Iconic Outfit when he was supposed to play a preacher for Mabel's play. Younger viewers will be more familiar with the costume as Bipper's garb.
  • Bruce Lee is so ubiquitously parodied that many people don't even realize who they are imitating when they do it. It speaks to the man's influence that despite inspiring an entire subgenre of martial arts films, the man himself only made five movies, four and change if you want to get technical.
    • His yellow and black tracksuit in Game of Death is also common for parody:
      • Shaolin Soccer has the goalie, a Bruce Lee lookalike, wear the tracksuit and imitate some of his mannerisms.
      • Kill Bill features the Bride in a black and yellow tracksuit.
  • Pulp Fiction contains another iconic example in Jules' quoting of a (rather heavily modified) passage from Ezekiel. This is in fact a fairly overt reference to Sonny Chiba's character in The Bodyguard. Also, more people know the film's version of Ezekiel 25:17 rather than the actual Bible passage.
  • Most people would recognize scenes from films such as The Great Escape or The Dam Busters than would recognise the films themselves. For example the "bouncing bombs" or the "throwing a ball against the wall in a prison cell" are widely recognised by people who have never seen either of those.
    • The fact that the attack on the Death Star sequence in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is a shot-for-shot homage to The Dam Busters will confuse people a bit though.
    • Double that for the theme tunes. Most people will recognise the Great Escape theme or the Dam Busters march, but have no idea what film the music is from.
    • Teenagers of high-school age might find their introduction to The Dam Busters via Pink Floyd: The Wall—it's what Pink watches on TV throughout.
    • The Great Escape gets a bit more recognition in the UK, what with it having being a Christmas Tradition for many years.
  • How many people have seen or even heard of the Dalton Trumbo war film, Johnny Got His Gun, and how many people only know it as the backdrop to Metallica's music video for "One"? (Metallica bought the rights to the film for the video, but were decent enough to release it to video as well.)
  • With the release of Milos Forman's Amadeus in 1984, there was renewed interest in Antonio Salieri's music, which had been in complete obscurity for many years.
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Elizabeth Taylor does an exaggerated impression of Bette Davis saying a line from Beyond the Forest (1949): 'What a dump!' In an interview with Barbara Walters, Bette Davis said that in the film, she really did not deliver the line in such an exaggerated manner. She said it in a more subtle, low-key manner, but it has passed into legend that she said it the way Elizabeth Taylor's delivered it in this film. During the Barbara Walters interview, the clip of Bette Davis delivering the line from Beyond the Forest was shown to prove that Davis was correct. However, since people expected Bette Davis to deliver the line the way Elizabeth Taylor had, she always opened her in-person, one woman show by saying the line in a campy, exaggerated manner: 'WHAT ... A... DUMP!!!' It always brought down the house. 'I imitated the imitators,' Davis said."
  • Many of the movies and cultural references mentioned in The Rocky Horror Picture Show opening song "Science Fiction Double Feature" (as well as references throughout) are completely lost on the younger fans of RHPS.
  • Full Metal Jacket: During the boot camp sequence Sergeant Hartmann mockingly refers to Leonard Lawrence as Gomer Pyle, a character from The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.. Nowadays people associate the name Gomer Pyle with the movie, and most are unaware its not his real name.
  • The dialog between Han and Leia in The Empire Strikes Back that includes the line "I happen to like nice men" matches similar dialog from Gone with the Wind almost exactly:
    "Scarlett, you do like me, don't you?"
    That was more like what she was expecting.
    "Well, sometimes," she answered cautiously. "When you aren't acting like a varmint."
    He laughed again and held the palm of her hand against his hard cheek.
    "I think you like me because I am a varmint. You've known so few dyed-in-the-wool varmints in your sheltered life that my very difference holds a quaint charm for you."
    This was not the turn she had anticipated and she tried again without success to pull her hand free.
    "That's not true! I like nice men—men you can depend on to always be gentlemanly."
  • Probably more people nowadays recognize "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" as something Jack Nicholson said in The Shining than as Ed McMahon's introduction of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.
  • The call and response "You remind me of the babe (what babe?)" isn't originally from Labyrinth, but instead references the 1947 Cary Grant film Bachelor Knight (originally named The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer).
  • The Goonies: People are more likely to assume "Hey you guys!" is from this film rather than The Electric Company.
  • Say "It's showtime!" to anyone born before 1960 and that person is likely to think of Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. But say the same line to anyone born after 1960 and that person will probably think of Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. note 
  • I Can See My House from Here most likely didn't originate from Hot Shots!. But good luck finding someone who knows where it did come from. Considering the phrase was already pretty well known before Hot Shots! came out...
  • The afterburners on the airship from The Mummy Returns are a Call-Back to the turbos from Airwolf, which in turn are a Call-Back to Battlestar Galactica.
  • The only thing most people today remember of the 1957 horror film Night of the Demon was the line "It's in the trees! It's coming!", which was sampled rather effectively at the beginning of the Kate Bush song "Hounds of Love".
  • The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue from Animal House which everyone has mimicked/spoofed was actually a parody of the epilogue of American Graffiti, made just five years earlier.
  • Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will has been extensively parodied in everything from The Lion King to Star Wars: A New Hope to Gladiator. While most mature viewers would recognize the Nazi iconography it's doubtful they know the original source.
  • Invoked by Mr. Holland's Opus. In an effort to teach his class to appreciate classical music, Mr. Holland plays a popular rock song (the Toys' "Lover's Concerto") on the piano, then transitions into Christian Petzold's "Minuet in G" (at the time attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach) from which it derives. "Minuet in G" is also used in the film Electric Dreams in a scene where a sentient computer uses sound synthesis to imitate a Classical violinist. It's not hard to find comments or threads on the Internet where people claim the song in Electric Dreams was plagiarized from "Lover's Concerto".
  • The Sid Caesar short comedy "Sneaking Thru The Sound Barrier", which plays on a loop at the National Air and Space Museum, is, as mentioned in its introduction, a parody of films about test pilots that were popular in the 1950s. Casual museum visitors today are likely to go "What test pilot movies?"
  • Melodramatically proclaiming "YOU'RE TEARING ME APART!" has been done by countless Tommy Wiseau impressionists who probably don't realise that Wiseau got it from Rebel Without a Cause.
  • Jessica Rabbit's appearance (and especially her hairstyle) was based on Veronica Lake, a 1940s icon who frequently showed up in the sort of noir films Who Framed Roger Rabbit was spoofing (though Lake was blonde, not a redhead). Nowadays that look is usually associated with Jessica Rabbit rather than the real actress she was a parody of.
  • "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" No, not from Blazing Saddles, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.note  Go Figure! Then Weird Al himself co-opted the scene in UHF: "Badgers? Badgers?! We don't need no stinking badgers!"
  • Once you seen the numerous Gag Dub spoofs of the "Hitler Rant" scene from Downfall, it's hard to take the original scene seriously.
  • Most people today are far more likely to recognize the strut set to James Brown's "Get Up and Drive That Funky Soul" from Spider-Man 3 than from Slaughter's Big Rip-Off.
  • While on the Spider-Man movies, one video for "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" uses images from the movie it was written for, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, yet many comments are from people who know the song from a scene in Spider-Man 2.
  • People who watch Last Action Hero today may not realize that the "Hamlet" segment was a send-up of Ahnuld's fellow action star Mel Gibson, who had starred as Hamlet himself just a few years earlier.
  • In France, many young people still quote lines from the La Cité de la peur, released in 1994 (before many of them were even born) by Les Nuls, while many of the already dated Red Scare films it spoofed are now lost to time. Many, many jokes from this film, most of which are untranslatable, have now become Memetic Mutation:
    Commissaire Bialès: "Do you want some whisky?"
    Odile Deray: "Two fingers."
    Commissaire Bialès: "Don't you want some whisky first?"
  • Thanks to numerous parodies of The Seventh Seal, people who has never seen it (or any other Ingmar Bergman movie for that matter), knows at least three things about it: It's about playing Chess with Death, it's in black and white, and it's Swedish.
  • Maurice Chevalier's distinctive French accent and hon hon laugh are still imitated to this day whenever English people try and imitate a Frenchmannote . Yet virtually almost nobody today has a clue that they are indirectly referencing him. They may think of a certain talking candelabra, however...
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus has a sketch where a film crew is making a movie called Scott Of The Antarctic, about the failed expedition of polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Most viewers nowadays would be amazed that there actually is a movie with that title. Scott of the Antarctic (1947) is a faithful adaptation of the actual real life tragedy, but is mostly forgotten nowadays aside from its Ralph Vaughan Williams soundtrack (the concert version being titled "Sinfonia antartica").
  • Potted Groot dancing at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy has recently become this. Younger fans may not be aware of the battery-powered dancing flower toys popular circa 1990.
  • Edward G. Robinson's gangster portrayals in early 1930s movies have inspired quite some archetypical movie gangster, especially in cartoons like Rocky from Rocky & Mugsy in Looney Tunes and the Mob boss of the Ant Hill gang in Wacky Races. Nowadays most people have no clue that these characters and their speech mannerisms were based on anybody.
  • Adding the phrase "Electric Boogaloo" to the name of any sequel has become so commonplace that people may not be aware it is a reference to the 80s movie Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
  • It is lost on modern viewers, but in Trading Places, in the restaurant scene when Billy Ray gets asked about wheat, the entire room stops speaking and leans in to hear his advice. This was referencing a series of 1980s commercials for the brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton. Their slogan was, "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen."

    Literature 
  • In the early chapters of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, when Alice is trying to "sort her head out", she recites two children's verses, which she names "How Doth the Little..." and "You Are Old, Father William." Contemporaries of Carroll would have recognised these as parodies of "Against Idleness and Mischief" by Isaac Watts and "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them" by Robert Southey. These days, while many people know Carroll's parody of Southey's verse, fewer know that it is in fact a parody, and fewer still could name or recite the original. Some verses that Carroll parodied even scholars aren't sure of because they are now so obscure. In fact the only one that hasn't caused the Weird Al Effect is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" ("Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star").
    • Speaking of Southey, his poem "The Battle of Blenheim" originated the familiar album cover trope of the kid playing innocently with a skull.
    • And few modern readers of Through the Looking-Glass would know the tunenote  the White Knight's "A-Sitting on a Gate" is supposed to be sung to, even though Alice points out that "the tune isn't his own invention."
    • Much of the wording in Alice in Wonderland 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 note . 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 odd. Now, thanks to Alice in Wonderland, the meaning of the word has changed quite a bit. A few words, such as "chortle", were coined outright and would have been nonsense to Alice's first readers; today we think nothing of them. 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! Alice in Wonderland is its own Weird Al Effect, one could say.
    • Check out the wonderful book "Annotated Alice" where famed (and late) mathemagician Martin Gardner 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. One particularly in-depth aside takes up a full two-page spread, written in 8-point font. In a large-format hardback.
    • Through the Looking-Glass has a nice example. The Walrus and the Carpenter, the poem sung by the twins, is a parody of The Dream of Eugene Aram, which is about an elementary school teacher who is convicted of murder. This was actually a famous and still controversial trial from the 18th century. Eugene Aram (1704–1759) was a groundbreaking philologist, who worked as a schoolmaster early in his career. In 1744, a friend of Aram called Daniel Clark disappeared, and was thought to have either run away with stolen goods or to have been the victim of foul play. Aram was arrested as a suspect because he was found in possession of some of the stolen goods. There was no evidence connecting him to crime, so he was released. In 1758, a skeleton was found in a cave, and authorities suspected it belonged to the still-missing Daniel Clark. Aram was arrested again and was put on trial for the murder of Clark. He tried to explain in his defense that there was no proof that the skeleton actually belonged to Daniel Clark, and that the "evidence" against him was circumstancial. He was convicted anyway and executed. He supposedly confessed before the execution that he hated Daniel Clark, because he was a close friend of his, but he had been sleeping with Aram's wife. The murder case inspired a ballad by Thomas Hood, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and a theatrical play by William Gorman Wills. The fame of the case is partly based on the perceived duality between Aram's brilliant work as a scholar and his apparent guilt in a violent murder, and partly on suspicions that he may not have performed the murder after all. The "evidence" in the trial were indeed flimsy, and a key witness against Aram happened to be another main suspect in the murder of Daniel Clark. Some researchers view the other man as the most likely murderer.
    • The Mad Hatter was already a trope before Carroll came along. Hatters used mercury to cure felt, and would sometimes lose cognitive function from inhaling the fumes, so mad hatters was a trope somewhat analogous to the modern trope of insane postal workers. The book is the only surviving use of the trope, so modern readers assume it's an original character concept. Though interestingly, while he was a hatter, and mad, he was never outright called "The Mad Hatter" in the actual story, just "The Hatter".
    • The beast in Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky" is more commonly known by that name since most works that reference it use that instead of the creature's actual name: Jabberwock.
    • The phrase "grinning like a Cheshire cat" has been dated to the late 18th century, eighty years before the novel, although no-one is entirely sure what its origins are. It is thought that it may be connected to the dairy farms of Cheshire, and the past reputation of the area for its "abundance of milk and cream". It was the pre-eminent milk, cheese, and cream producing county of England for several centuries. Others have pointed that Lewis Carrol himself was born and raised in Cheshire, and may have been inspired by the 16th century sandstone carving of a grinning cat, on the west face of St Wilfrid's Church tower in Grappenhall, a village adjacent to his birthplace in Daresbury. A photo of Grappenhall's grinning cat is available here◊.
  • 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. The original version of Amadis of Gaul had been written by an anonymous writer in the 14th century, but the work was thought to be incomplete. Throughout the 16th century, several different writers (Spanish, Italian, German, and French) added new volumes to the story. By the 1590s, there were about 24 volumes of Amadis in circulation around Europe. They were of varying quality and full of internal contradictions, due to the different styles and backgrounds of the writers involved. There were also other Chivalric Romances which copied tropes and ideas from Amadis. Writing in the early 17th century, Cervantes decided to satirize both the genre and its main source.
    • Miguel de 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. The book is signed as "Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, born in Tordesillas", but that is a fake name, and the prologue is riffed with insults to Cervantes and unashamed flattering to his main rival, Lope de Vega. Apparently at the time the book came out the writing style was famous enough to identify the author without need of giving his real name. Given the volume of Take That! in Cervantes' canon sequel, it is more than likely that Cervantes knew perfectly well who he was. However, precisely for this reason nobody bothered to ever write down Avellaneda's real identity. Now, 400 years later, Cervantes and Don Quixote are as famous as ever, while we only know the other as "that guy that insulted Cervantes in a Fan Fic". Interestingly, in Cervantes Part 2 of Don Quixote, Quixote is infuriated that there is an imposter using his name. At one point Quixote meets Don Alvaro Tarfe (a character created by Avellaneda) and "gets him to swear an affidavit that he has never met the true Don Quixote before".
    • Another case of this in Don Quixote is that both books were a satire and, as such, contained a lot of references not only to now disappeared chivalry books (the second part contains extensive parodies of Tirant lo Blanch, one of the better chivalry books and a Cervantes favorite) but to Spain's popular culture at the 17th century: (respectful) caricatures of then-famous celebrities, unrespectful caricatures of contemporary writers, quotes from Cervantes's favorite poets, popular proverbs, then contemporary Urban Legends, phrases that can be taken in at least two different ways, all of them completely unknown for the modern reader if not by the notes provided in the reprints. Cervantes's book was incredibly funny when he published it, but it is very difficult to see it like this now.
    • Another of the difficulties of the novel is that at some points Quixote and his squire are merely listeners to someone else's story. A number of secondary characters narrate at length their own past experiences and adventures, which often have nothing to do with chivalric romance at all. They are Cervante's takes on other genres. The most famous of these sidetales of the novel is "The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious", which introduced the proverbial character "Lothario". The story deals with a man's obsession, and how it ruins his own life and everyone else's. A man called Anselmo is married to the faithful Camilla, but obsesses that she may cheat on him and wants to test her fidelity. He keeps pressuring his friend Lothario to try to seduce her, though Lothario thinks that his friend has gone mad. Anselmo then effectively plays matchmaker between Lothario and Camilla, until the two of them are actually in love. They are having their affair, without Anselmo realizing that his "test" actually worked. A series of later misunderstandings leads the couple to flee in fear of their lives, while Camilla's maid flees in fear towards another destination. Abandoned by everyone, Anselmo dies alone due to his own grief.
  • 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 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's with a career nearly as random as Pangloss's.
  • In Agatha Christie's collection of stories starring Tommy and Tuppence, Partners in Crime, 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?)
  • Stella Gibbons's comic novel Cold Comfort Farm has outlived the rustic romances it parodied.
  • Gulliver's Travels was a parody of the then-popular genre of journeys to distant lands. It is now a standalone classic. It contains innumerable digs at people and ideas of Swift's time, which go right past modern readers. 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 satirically suggests that the best way to handle all the starving children in Ireland was to simply eat them, reasoning that since the British had already exploited Ireland in every other way, the only thing to do now is go humanitarian.
    • Certain sections of Several Voyages to Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver are also parodying other works. His Laputa and Balnibari are much more directly mocking Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. And, strangely, the ideas of each of the 4 places he goes may have been taken from an old Japanese story, or collection of stories, that talked about tiny people, giants, and horses. Whether this is truth or an extraordinary coincidence unclear, but considering how Japan is the only place Gulliver goes to that Swift treats with any kind of reality (in addition to being the only real place Gulliver goes, and the only place where he doesn't learn the language) there may be something to it.
    • When Hayao Miyazaki made a film called Laputa: Castle in the Sky, he apparently didn't understand that Swift's floating island of idiot-savants was meant as a scathing satire of scientists and the British crown, so simply presented it as a place of advanced technology and learning. He also had no way of knowing that the name of "Laputa" was derived from one of the worst possible epithets in Spanish, for the sake of a joke about etymology at the expense of the scientists Swift was lampooning. Consequently, most foreign releases of the anime elide the first word of the title. "Laputa" literally means "the whore" in Spanish.
    • Most of the Laputa chapter is devoted to mocking scientists and other would-be intellectuals of Swift's era. The male masters of Laputa have devoted their entire lives to astronomy, mathematics, music, and technology, but they have little to no skills in any other area. They are complete failures when it comes to designing buildings or designing clothes, to the point that none of their clothes fit and none of their buildings have any symmetry. They are often so lost in their own thoughts, that they have to employ servants just in order to bring them back to reality for a few minutes, or to remind them that they have to eat, or urinate. These "intellectual" masters are married, but pay little attention to their wives or their needs. So their wives have to find lovers among the people who visit Laputa, and adultery is actually widespread in their society. The husbands don't pay attention, even when the adulterous act happens in front of their eyes. Lost in their own world.
  • 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, C. S. 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, but it has been speculated to be the "The Man Who Lived Backwards," by the never-famous Charles F. Hall, and thus, the only reason why some might even know of his name.
  • Although the modern vampire dates back to Lord Ruthven of John William Polidori's 1819 short story "The Vampyre", Dracula is still the archetypical vampire. Even then, it is the Dracula in adaptations people think of, rather than the original book character.
    • Only if they don't sparkle.
    • For instance, many people reading Dracula will be surprised to see the title character walking around in daylight.
    • For that matter, many people familiar with Lord Ruthven might not realize that this tragic Romantic figure was a none-too-kind dig at the author's boss, Lord Byron. And Polidori actually borrowed the name "Lord Ruthven" from the novel Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb, where Lord Ruthven is a rakish villain who seduces and corrupts innocent women. Both Polidori's and Lamb's Ruthvens are unflattering depictions of Lord Byron, because they both felt that Byron betrayed their trust. Byron had spent quite sometime trying to romance the (already married) Lamb. Once she fell for him, he quickly broke of their affair and rejected her increasingly desperate attempts to get him to bed her again. Leading to them publicly quarreling about their love life, and making their relationship one of the worst kept secrets in the British Empire. Lamb gained a rather scandalous reputation in the process. Polidori dreamed of becoming a famous writer like Byron and initially viewed Byron as his friend (and possible role model), not just as an employer. Until Byron started publicly mocking any work written by Polidori, stressing his superiority in physical, combat, and literary skills over Polidori, and getting impatient with Polidori's periods of ill health. He fired the young physician after about a year of service. A Broken Pedestal-process changed the way Polidori perceived Byron.
  • Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey seems to be more widely studied and read than the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe which it parodies.
    • In fact, for a long time scholars weren't even sure that the works she parodied even existed. The novel was published in 1817, but had actually been written in the late 1790s. Austen had chosen to include humorous references to seven then-recently published novels, most of which were soon out of print and forgotten due to the changing preferences of the 19th-century audience. Soon neither scholars, nor readers could understand what Austen was referring to. In the 1920s, two literary historians tracked down the forgotten works and revived interest in them. All seven have seen reprints in the 20th and 21st century, mostly because Austen happened to mention them.
  • 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.
  • 1066 and All That, a 1930 parody of the patriotic Whiggish school history books of the early 20th century, has long outlasted the works it is parodying.
  • The Harry Potter series was partially inspired by the time-honored British boarding school genre. Harry Potter is now way, way more famous than Tom Brown's Schooldays. note 
    • While on the topic of Harry Potter: A lot of the creatures, spells, and other magical phenomena in the book have their roots in much, much older literature. Basilisks, for example, are at least Older Than Print. However, with the exception of elements used frequently in modern works (werewolves, for example), most Harry Potter fans aren't fully aware of how little of Harry's world originated with J.K. Rowling. (The exception is that if you are even vaguely aware of alchemy, then you would know at least that Rowling did not invent the Philosopher's Stone.)
      • Not if you are a fan of the Disney Ducks Comic Universe. One of Carl Barks's most famous stories is The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone (1955). Scrooge McDuck studies enough medieval texts to track down the path of a Philosopher's Stone that kept changing hands during wars and military campaigns around the Mediterranean Sea. He finds the Stone hidden in modern Crete, but soon discovers that using the stone comes with a price. The Stone can turn everything into solid gold, but does not grant eternal life. Instead it is killing its users, and turning their bodies into golden statues. Scrooge has to stop using the Stone before it kills him.
      • And Nicolas Flamel (c. 1340-1418) was a real person, who supposedly did invent the Philosopher's Stone. The real Flamel was a successful French scribe and manuscript-seller. He gained a large fortune for his era, owned much real estate property, and had the reputation of a generous philanthropist. In the 17th century (2 centuries following his death), a number of texts started claiming that he was a fabulously wealthy and immortal alchemist. His reputation has since grown mostly due to the legends about him.
    • But then Tom Brown's Schooldays also gave rise to that grand antihero Flashman.
      • Of course, around here Flashman himself is best known for being parodied by Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!
  • Few people remember that the character of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower was an homage to and Affectionate Parody of, at the time, well-known British naval officers, particularly Lord Horatio Nelson. Many of Hornblower's adventures, as well as his career progression, closely parallel Lord Nelson's. These days, all but Nelson are largely forgotten by those who aren't historians or military strategists, and Nelson himself is little-known outside of Great Britain.
  • Believe it or not, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Trope Maker for Dystopia, was written because the writer found so much Fridge Horror in one of H. G. Wells's later novels (written long after Wells had jumped the shark) that Huxley considered that novel to depict more of a dystopia than a utopia. Today, Brave New World is considered a classic, and practically no one knows or cares about Men Like Gods or any of Wells's other post-1922 novels.Partly justified by the nature of these novels and their relative lack of impact in comparison to Wells' earlier works.:
    • Men Like Gods (1923) is told from the perspective of a journalist on vacation, who is accidentally transported to a parallel universe and discovers a supposed utopia. Following a monthly stay at this world, the man has been completely converted to the dominant political ideology. He returns to his own world with the sole objectives to spread Utopia's revolutionary thinking and to replicate its political system.
    • The Dream (1924) is initially told from the perspective of a man from the 40th or 41st century, who lives in a supposedly utopian world. He visits some ancient ruins which the era's archaeologists have uncovered, and then has a vivid dream that he lives in the era represented by the ruins. In the strange dream, he lives the entire life of a man of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from birth to death, including experiencing the era's social and financial problems, serving in World War I, and falling a victim of murder in the 1920s. The man wakes in his own future era, and contemplates whether he just shared the memories of a man who has been dead for 2000 years.
    • Christina Alberta's Father (1925) is not science fiction at all. It is set in the 1920s and tries to expose some of the era's social ills. A recently widowed, unassertive man (and small-time business owner) is somehow convinced that he is the reincarnation of an ancient king and a would-be savior. He is soon committed to a lunatic asylum, briefly manages to escape, and then dies due to an infectious disease. The man's daughter is actually not a biological relative of his, but an illegitimate daughter of the man's former wife. She is a strong-willed young woman, who is determined to live an independent life. To do so, she is forced to reject a marriage proposal by her boyfriend, because she does not want a man legally in charge of her. She also has to explain to him that she is not a virgin and that she has had previous lovers.
    • The World of William Clissold (1926) is mostly the tale of a man who narrates his past experiences, as a form of psychoanalysis. It was inspired by a meeting that Wells had with Carl Jung. The man starts by narrating his upbringing as the son of a businessman, and how his way of life was disrupted by the suicide of his father. Later the man compares the successful career of his brother as an innovative advertiser, and his own unsteady love life. He has had one failed marriage, and two passionate but short-lived affairs. The man then narrates his interest in a younger woman, who seems to be his last chance to find love. After contemplation, he decides to marry her and is determined to make this relationship work. The epilogue, set a few days later, reveals that the narrator and his would-be wife were both killed in an automobile accident. The narrator's plans and hopes were consequently left unfulfilled.
    • Meanwhile (1927) is set entirely in Italy under Benito Mussolini's regime, and the lives of the characters serve mostly to display the perceived problems of interwar Europe. A wealthy, expatriate British couple invite a number of guests to their villa in the Italian Riviera. One of the guests is a famous writer, who uses the event to sermonise about his political ideas. A young, married (and pregnant) woman discovers that her wealthy husband is having an affair. Realizing that he is mostly bored with his life, and that he has been neglecting the administrative problems of his company, she manages to convince him that what he needs is to get back to work. An amorous female aristocrat is converted to the fascist ideology, and returns to Great Britain to offer fascism as the solution to its class warfare. And the hostess of the villa is convinced to use her connections to allow an Italian liberal politician, wanted by the fascist authorities, to cross the borders towards France.
    • Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) has a deceptive plot and an Unreliable Narrator. The affluent heir of a well-to-do English family, has his entire worldview shaken when he is betrayed by both his best friend and by his mistress. He is displaying signs of mental instability, so a family solicitor advises him to travel abroad to escape his problems. A shipwreck off the coast of Brazil, causes the man to be stranded on Rampole Island. An isolated human society with Neolithic technology lives there, and they decide to keep him with them. He causes conflict among some of this society's leaders, and seems about to be killed. Then he wakes up and finds himself in New York City, in the care of a psychoanalyst. He learns that he has had a psychotic episode, that he has been hallucinating for quite a while, and that Rampole Island does not exist. Learning that World War I has just begun, the man volunteers for the British Army. He hopes that military service will help him get through his mental problems. The aftermath of the novel involves his wartime experiences, and his post-war career as a business advisor to the friend who had betrayed him.
    • The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930) has an Unreliable Narrator, a rather weird plot, and ends in an Anti-Climax. The protagonist is a university don (college fellow or tutor at a prestigious British university) who has aspirations of becoming the editor of his own periodical. He needs to find a rich benefactor, and spends several years cultivating a relationship with a ruthless plutocrat. He takes part in a séance, because the plutocrat is interested in contacting the otherworld. The protagonist finds himself possessed by a spirit which thirst for power. Through its help, he establishes and leads his own political movement. He eventually deposes the British throne and government, and establishes himself as an absolute dictator in the style of Oliver Cromwell. Not satisfied yet, he wants to conquer the world and starts a new world war in an attempt to do so. The war goes badly, as the British Empire finds itself unable to defeat the United States. The dictator wants to use recently-invented chemical weapons against the so-far unstopable Americans, but faces an internal revolt by British industrialists. He seems to be starting a civil war (with the world war still ongoing), but then wakes up from a dream. He had fallen asleep during the séance, and dreamed up the whole thing. He soon learns that the plutocrat never intended to help him create a new periodical, and has been fooling him for years. The college don realizes that he wasted several years by counting on the wrong "benefactor".
    • The Bulpington of Blup (1932) is an unusual take on the Split Personality. A man finds a second personality in his own mind, a "self-regarding, romantic, heroic" persona. The other persona increasingly takes over his body and his life, turning him into a "pretentious fraud", a "liar in a world of lies".
    • The Shape of Things to Come (1933) represents Wells returning to science fiction, and it is one of his last works that had an impact on popular culture and other writers. It is supposedly a history of the world, written in the year 2106. It depicts a number of future events, by recording Wells' own predictions. In recent years, it is mostly viewed as an Alternate History novel. The novel starts in the 1930s, with the financial policies of both Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt turning up to be complete failures. Consequently The Great Depression lasts for several decades. In 1940, a World War II breaks out when Germany and Poland attack each other. The war lasts to 1950 and is inconclusive, as the various major combatants fail to defeat their opponents. Several of them fought each other to a standstill and gained nothing from the war. In the 1950s, most states in the world (including the ones which were neutral in the war) are about to collapse due to escalating financial problems. Later in the decade, a plague breaks out and manages to wipe out a large part of humanity. As human civilization is about to collapse, a conspiracy among the people still in control of the world's surviving transport systems manages to take over the world, with no further bloodshed. They set up a supposedly benevolent dictatorship, force all surviving humans to assimilate in the same culture and same language, and abolish all religions. In the following decades, an entirely new socioeconomic system emerges. The dictatorship lasts for a century, but is then deposed in a bloodless coup and its leaders send into honorable retirement. It is replaced by a stateless society, with more intellectual goals.
    • The Croquet Player (1936) is a Ghost Story with two (or three) Unreliable Narrators and a number of unresolved questions. The story starts with a Decoy Protagonist, an idle young man from a well-to-do family. He has no money of his own and is financially dependent on a wealthy, spinster aunt. He aspires to inherit her wealth one day. During a vacation in Normandy, the young man meets a British expatriate doctor (the real protagonist). The doctor tells him a story from his past, concerning the vengeful ghosts of Neanderthal cavemen whose graves were desecrated. They were reportedly affecting the behavior of certain people and making them more violent. The doctor himself was affected, and a psychiatrist told him that he has to share the story with other people in order to cure himself. The idle man later meets the psychiatrist himself, who claims that the doctor is a madman who hallucinates about ghosts. The psychiatrist then starts narrating his own (seemingly insane) rant about humanity itself being haunted by ancestral ghosts, and claiming that violent cavemen are still within us, behind a thin mask of civization. The young man flees in fear, but finds his own mental processes changing. He records his experience to try to get it into some perpective.
    • Brynhild (1937) is in part a satire of the British literary scene of the time, and in-part a tale of miscommunication in a marriage. An aging novelist has been increasingly withdrawing from public life, and from talking to his wife, because he is overly sensitive to criticism. He can not stand it when anyone criticizes him or his work, including his own wife. His public image suffers from his withdrawal, and he has to hire a publicist to revive his ailing career. The novelist's wife is a distant cousin of her husband and 12 years younger than him. Since he is not spending time with her, she befriends a younger, male novelist who is closer to her age. They have a brief affair and he confesses to her one of his main secrets, he is living under an assumed name (an alias) and abandoned his wife near the start of his literary career. The publicist soon uncovers this secret, releases it to the press, and ruins the young man's literary career. He has decided that the best way to improve his client's prospects as a writer is to tarnish the reputations of his rivals. The wife returns to married life, however she has gained a new self-confidence. She soon realizes that she is pregnant.
    • Star Begotten (1937) is part conspiracy theory, part Alien Abduction story. A number of men notice changes in themselves and their families. They conjecture that Martians have been contacting experiments on humanity, introducing genetic modifications, to fit their own agenda of making humans suitable to colonize other planets.
    • The Camford Visitation (1937) has a seemingly simple premise, though it leaves some implications concerning the academia of the time. A sheltered community of academics, at a peaceful college town, is shocked when an inhuman voice (a visitor from another world) asks them to define the meaning and ultimate purpose of human education. As they struggle to provide answers, the voice scrutinizes their replies and repeatedly questions the underlying beliefs behind their answers. It also suggests solutions of its own to the problems faced by humanity. Once the voice stops communicating with them, the academics explain away their experience through supposedly "rational" explanations and convenient lies. They were taught nothing by the experience, and sink back to a situation of academic inertia.
    • Apropos of Dolores (1938) is an autobiographical novel in diary form, and Wells' most "personal" novel. A man examines his relationship with a "jealous, possessive and capricious" woman that he was once infatuated with, and the reasons that their relationship deteriorated. The "Dolores" of the novel is a satirical portrayal of Wells' former mistress (and fellow author) Odette Keun (1888–1978). They had lived together as a couple from 1924 to 1933, but broke up in less-than amicable conditions. Keun had since devoted part of her work to criticizing Wells and his (in her view) inconsistent ideas, so Wells decided to return the favor. Other than perceived similarities between this novel and some later works by Vladimir Nabokov, this novel has not found many imitators.
    • The Brothers (1938) is a story of Civil War and a use of the Doppelgänger theme. The protagonist has spend years fighting in a civil war and is unquestioningly loyal to the side which he serves. He rejoices when he learns that the enemy leader was just captured. He takes a close look at the captive (who he has never met in person before), and is shocked to discover his own lookalike. He is intrigued, and starts suspecting that they are brothers or otherwise closely related. And he really wants to know the true identity of the other man.
    • The Holy Terror (1939) is a fictional biography of a supposed world leader, and in part inspired by the life of Adolf Hitler. A newborn boy (the protagonist) displays exceptionally "aggressive temperament", and then grows into a highly intelligent young adult. As a college student, the young man becomes politically active and creates a circle of political conspirators, several of which are actually older and more experienced than him. The circle inflirtates a far-right party, usurps its leadership, and introduces new ideologies to the rank and file. Through years of struggle, the party rises to power and its leader is involved in another world war. He faces a coup attempt by one of his close supporters, but manages to defeat and eliminate him. He also wins the war, by exterminating the enemy leadership. The party manages to create a world state. However, the supposedly "englightened" despot soon turns into a Josef Stalin-like tyrant, as he is increasingly unable to control his own vices and obsessions. He purges some of his most loyal supporters, because they dare to point out that he has betrayed his own ideals and those of their revolution. The leader starts planning the massacre of millions, and the greatest pogrom in history for the Jews. His personal physician (a trusted childhood friend) quietly assassinates the leader and aborts these plans. The Party remains in power, the world state survives, but they go to pains to hide the darker sides of their "heroic" founder.
    • Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940) is a tale World War II written during the war, though it mostly dears with war-related trauma. A rebelious young man is disinherited from his family, and decides to travel abroad and see the world. He gets trapped in a warzone in the Balkans, and serves as an eyewitness to a series of atrocities. His experiences lead directly to his mental and physical deterioration, but a former lover attemps to help him recover.
    • All Aboard for Ararat (1940) is a modernized version of Noah's Ark, with Noah and his God experiencing World War II. God is disappointed by humanity, and wants this Noah to build an Ark. Noah does not fully trust this God (or the God's sanity), and asks him to explain a number of apparently irrational decisions recorded in the Bible. God admits that he and his former partner Satan made some hasty mistakes before, but makes it increasingly clear that he is desperate for Noah's help. (God's own survival seemingly depends on it.) The two of them make some plans of what the world following the disaster should be like. While still trying to decide on a crew for his Ark, Noah passes out. He finds himself in the fully completed Ark, and learns that they have been sailing for at least a month. He somehow has no memory of what happened in the intervening time. He starts conversing with God again, and the book has an ambiguous ending.
    • You Can't Be Too Careful (1941) was Wells' final novel and often seen as one of the most forgettable ones. The novel covers 50 years in the life of a man, who keeps blundering from adventure to adventure. The increasingly aware man then reflects on what all these years have taught him.
  • In a variation of this trope, you'd be surprised to learn how many words you use each day that didn't exist until The Bard wrote them down. Addiction, advertizing, amazement, assassination, bedroom, blanket, blushing, countless, fashionable, frugal... The list goes on and on.
  • Crysis: Legion does this In-Universe. When Colonel Barclay mentions The War of the Worlds in reference to the alien invaders, Nathan Gould doesn't get it. The Colonel promptly laments the ignorance of the classics.
  • Ask anyone to continue "The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled...". They're far more likely to reply "Twit" than "The flames that lit the battle's wreck..."
  • The 1966 novel Mott the Hoople by Willard Manus is only remembered now because of the band who named themselves after it.
  • For a truly extreme example, The Satyricon, a satirical epic spoofing the aspiring middle-class through a group of poetry-Fan Boy criminals Walking the Earth, contains multiple occasions where characters will break into poems that are parodies of poems of the day, often with plenty of Stylistic Suck applied. Even the prose contains numerous Shout Outs to contemporary pop culture and memes. The thing is that the work was written during The Roman Empire, and almost all of the works it references are long lost. In most cases, The Satyricon is the only record that they existed at all.
  • Robert Michael Ballantyne's 1858 novel The Coral Island features three boys living in harmony on an island after a shipwreck. The novel used to be a real classic in the early 20th century. However, it also used to really annoy a certain William Golding, so he wrote a Deconstruction of it, complete with names ripped out of Ballantyne's work. Now, which is better known today, The Coral Island or Lord of the Flies?
  • A Swiftly Tilting Planet features St. Patrick's Rune, which the protagonists use to fight against evil. Many readers may believe that the rune was the author's own invention or (if they are familiar with St. Patrick's Lorica/Breastplate) that it was her own variation of the original. The truth is that the exact wording of the rune was taken from the longer "St. Patrick's Hymn Before Tara", written by James Clarence Mangan, a nineteenth-century Irish poet.
  • The Cold Equations was written as a subversion/deconstruction of Invincible Science Hero Marty Stus who Ass Pulled perfect solutions to everything using SCIENCE. It was a character archetype that plagued science fiction and other literary genres at the time, so the Downer Ending of Cold Equations was meant to be a Reality Ensues moment where the Marty Stu scientist can't magically save everyone thanks to a mixture of incompetent engineering and pure bad luck. However, the archetype ended up dying out relatively soon after, while Cold Equations has been reprinted often as a sci-fi classic. As a result most people who read it nowadays don't have the context behind the story and are just astounded by the laughably short-sighted spaceship design.
  • Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick is far more well-known today than the Biblical King Ahab from whom he gets his name.
  • How many people read eighteenth-century literature and think, “Hey, this sounds like Lovecraft!”?
  • In The Lord of the Rings, the scenes where the Ents (walking trees) join the battle and the Witch-King is defeated by Eowyn with Merry's help are actually Tolkien trying to fix Macbeth. But those of us who aren’t literature nuts probably don't realize that these scenes are references to the scenes where the witches' prophecies are fulfilled by Macduff's soldiers cutting down branches from the trees and using the branches as camouflage and Macduff being “no man of woman born” because he was cut from his mother’s womb.
  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night has been parodied so many times, most people have no idea that it comes from Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or that that phrase is the just the start of a very long opening sentence. The phrase was: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. It was supposed to be "atmospheric" and gave the novel a Gothic Horror-tone.
  • Harry Harrison's original Bill the Galactic Hero novel was a very specific and detailed parody of Starship Troopers. Relative few readers are now aware of this, given that the subsequent books in the series developed into broader parodies of pulp-SF, and that more people are aware of Starship Troopers through the equally parodic Verhoeven film version than through the novel.
  • Discworld has as one of its many settings the Unseen University where most if not all of the Wizard characters reside and as such is the most respected (read: oldest) institution of magical academics that wasn't destroyed by the Mage Wars. What many readers may not realise is that its name is a parody of the Invisible College a group of like-minded scientists and natural philosophers in England formed around the mid-17th century.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The opening credits of Police Squad! are almost a shot by shot parody of both the images and music of the little known '60s series M Squad.
  • The show-within-a-show Tool Time on the sitcom Home Improvement is a parody of This Old House, with the main host (Tim) being a charismatic salesman and his co-host (Al) being an anti-charismatic, bland, flannel-wearing man, who nonetheless possesses unrivaled expert knowledge of the topic at hand. They are both a direct parody of Bob Vila and Norm Abram's screen presence. In addition, scenes outside of Tool Time point out how most of the actual renovation work is done by a trained crew and that the hosts' contributions are mostly symbolic. In-universe the show was occasionally noted as a knockoff, and Tim had an Unknown Rival relationship with Villa when he guest starred. However, as Home Improvement has managed to remain popular and remembered in popular culture more than 20 years after it first aired, while Vila and Abram have been eclipsed by newer, younger talent in the "Home Improvement" genre such as Ty Pennington and Mike Holmes, the fact that Tool Time is a parody is largely lost on those who watch the reruns today.
  • 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 yearsnote , 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, in which she travels back to 1950s England.
    • There is a police box right out the Earl's Court tube station in London, big and blue as anything. This isn't an original police box though, it was built in 1997. It was put there because tourists who had seen Doctor Who were disappointed by the lack of police boxes in England.
    • This has led to possibly the only prop-based instance of the Celebrity Paradox — in the real world, a Police Box would be anything but inconspicuous, because just about everybody in Britain would recognise it as the TARDIS. This is occasionally lampshaded, with mixed success/cringeworthiness, in UK media.
    • Possibly the only legally binding case of the Weird Al Effect: The BBC trademarked the look of the TARDIS in 1996. The Metropolitan Police challenged it, and lost, with the judge saying that it was far more recognizable as a symbol of Doctor Who than as a symbol of the police. (The fact that the police had never attempted to trademark it themselves over the course of 40 years also counted against them.)
    • Nicely spoofed in one Eleventh Doctor Christmas Special when the Doctor gets his space suit helmet stuck backwards, and needs to recruit a local to help him find the TARDIS. After she follows his instructions on what to look for, he goes inside...and remembers that he is in a time period where there are still real police boxes.
  • Serious and downbeat drama series Secret Army, about the Belgian resistance during WW2, 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 from Batman is far better remembered than the Watusi it was originally punned off of. The Batusi is now better known as "that dance John Travolta does on Pulp Fiction." Or from The Simpsons: "How come Batman doesn't dance anymore?"
  • Speaking of Batman, most fans of the Dark Age Batman regard the 1960s series as the representative of that era's Batman, when actually it was widely regarded as an intentionally over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek parody of the comic book. According to That Other Wiki, the comic later turned up the camp because of the TV show's success.
    • That didn't stop parents from taking their kids to see the later Tim Burton movies, expecting the same style as the Adam West series. Boy were they in for a surprise...
      • The '60s TV series was also a parody of the '40s Batman film serials, especially the cliffhanger narrations.
  • The Prisoner (1967) is, possibly, a Sequel Series 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.
    • The theme for the American release Secret Agent is a staple of oldies radio.
  • In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the visual similarity between Spike and Billy Idol is lampshaded. To a large number of fans, Spike is far more recoginisable than Billy Idol.
  • Get Smart parodied the various espionage TV series popular at the time such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy and The Avengers, but has been in reruns so long that most people assume it to be a James Bond parody. Although the show did occasionally parody James Bond, it spoofed the previously mentioned shows far more than they did James Bond.
    • A more obvious example of the Weird Al Effect is in the title sequence to Get Smart. Few 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 U.N.C.L.E..... many people know it better these days from Get Smart!
    • Maxwell Smart's famous voice was inspired by William Powell's performance in The Thin Man. And by extension, so is Inspector Gadget.
  • The children's TV series LazyTown has the song "Cooking by the Book", which was eclipsed by its comic mashup remix with the hip-hop song "Step Yo Game Up" featuring Lil Jon. Its mashup actually has more than 30 million views on YouTube if compared to the original song, that has only 6 million views.
  • One Seinfeld episode had George wanting Bozo the Clown for his girlfriend's son's birthday party. These days, Bozo is all but forgotten, and yet by the mid-1990s it was regarded as painfully uncool.
  • People who grew up in the 1980s might be familiar with the series Mr. Belvedere, starring Christopher Hewett in the title role. However, many of them might not be aware that this was based on the Clifton Webb movie Sitting Pretty, which was in turn based upon the novel Belvedere, both from The '40s.
  • The TV show Blackadder is now better known than the Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Black Arrow, which the title is a Shout-Out to and which the first series parodied.
    • The intro of the second season features a snake crawling over the opening titles, and being dragged back into shot by black-gloved hands when it leaves the screen too quickly. Hardly anyone nowadays knows this is a parody of the opening titles from I, Claudius.
  • Once upon a time, there was a UK game show called If I Ruled The World. It inspired another game show called Parlamentet. If I Ruled The World stopped after two seasons — Parlamentet, however, is still going strong. In Scandinavia, admittedly, but twenty-two seasons deserve a mention.
  • Many Game Shows become an example of a variation of this trope when a revived version of the show becomes more popular than the original version. Some examples:
    • The Price Is Right has been a fixture on daytime TV since 1972 and is likely the only version known to most people today—but the original version was also very popular in its time, airing in both daytime and primetime from 1956 to 1965. Additionally, when producer Mark Goodson updated The Price Is Right for the revival, he intended to incorporate elements of the most popular game show on TV at the time—Let's Make a Deal. The Deal connection was largely forgotten... although with a new version of that show now airing (on the same network as Price and as a companion piece, no less), the connection may become clearer once again.
      • With the two shows having held a crossover week in the 2015-16 season, it seems mission accomplished.
    • Match Game. The 1970s version is the most popular due to the funny and suggestive nature of the questions. However, the original version—despite being much more sedate and tame—also had a long run on NBC from 1962 to 1969.
    • Press Your Luck, one of the most popular game shows of the 1980s, was actually based on a short-lived game show called Second Chance that aired in 1977.
    • Before the still-running version with Alex Trebek started up in 1984, Jeopardy! was hosted by Art Fleming for 10 seasons (1964-1974), followed by a short-lived reboot in 1978. (Yes, children of the '80s, that's who that guy is in the Trope Namer's "I Lost On Jeopardy" video...)
    • Despite what its producers would have you think, Pat Sajak and Vanna White were not the original host/hostess tandem on Wheel of Fortune — that would be Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford. Still, Chuck ends up a subversion, since he would go on to become famous for many other popular game shows, such as Scrabble, Love Connection and Lingo.
      • This came back to bite one group of contestants on another Woolery show, Greed, who were asked to pick out the one game show Woolery had not hosted, with the possible answers being Scrabble, Love Connection, Wheel of Fortune, and Singled Out. The contestants chose Wheel, when the correct answer was Singled Out.
  • Speaking of Wheel of Fortune, many people may remember the jingle "I'm a Wheel Watcher", used in commercials (and sometimes even on the show itself) for most of the 80s and 90s. What most people may not realize is that the song is a rewrite of "I'm a Girl Watcher", a 1960s blue-eyed soul song.
  • Saturday Night Live's The Continental recurring sketch with Christopher Walken is actually based on a real TV show. The Continental was a short-lived CBS program that aired Saturday nights during the 1952-53 season, and starred Renzo Cesana as the title character. Its target audience was lonely, dateless women (though when it moved to ABC, it aired in the daytime for lonely, bored housewives). The combination of the subjective camera angles and the Continental's charm was designed to make these women believe they were being romanced through their TV sets. The SNL version is exactly like that, except Walken's Continental has been flanderized to a Handsome Lech-cum-Stalker with a Crush-cum-Dirty Old Man-cum-Casanova Wannabe.
    • Truly, this is Poe's Law in effect.
    • Similarly, more people recognize Mike Myers' "Simon" sketches than "Simon in the Land of Drawings", the British series that it spoofed.
    • The ''Prose and Cons'' short, particularly Eddie Murphy's "kill my landlord" poem, is more familiar these days than the Norman Mailer/Jack Henry Abbott debacle that it was satirizing.
    • The "Royal Deluxe II" car commercialnote  is continuously available on Hulu while the original Lincoln-Mercury ads it spoofs, despite old car commercials as a class being rarely copyright-policed at all, are hard to find on the internet.
    • When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was on his deathbed in 1975, news programs would sometimes update his condition on slow news days. Sometimes, these reports would simply state that "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still alive." He finally died in November of that year. Then, Chevy Chase started to feature Breaking News reports that "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." The catch phrase remained in the public consciousness long after the countdown to Franco's death.
    • Weekend Update's Point/Counterpoint ("Jane, you ignorant slut!"), was a parody of a 60 Minutes segment that aired in the seventies until it was replaced by A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney. The segment was also parodied by Airplane! ("I say, let 'em crash!").
    • The Dear Sister digital short, where everyone shoots each other while Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" plays, is probably much more famous than the scene from the second season finale of The O.C. that it was spoofing.
    • Not many people know that the nickname for the original cast, the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players", was a reference to a competing show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosellnote , which had a trio of comedy performers called the "Prime Time Players" – all three of whom (Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Christopher Guest) went on to join the SNL cast.
    • Can most people even remember what George H.W. Bush sounded and acted like? Or are you more likely to picture Dana Carvey doing his impression of Bush? The original was only President of the United States, and within the lifetimes of many of us alive today. Likely the same could be said of Gerald Ford and Chevy Chase as well.
    • An inversion of the Trope. While "Hans und Franz" never eclipsed Arnold Schwarzenegger by a long shot, many of their features and Running Gags are incorporated in the numerous expies of him.
  • Horatio Hornblower had an obvious influence on Star Trek frequently acknowledged by people who worked on the series. Now Trek is better known. The original series was also influenced by the TV Westerns of its day, but now more people have heard of Star Trek than Gunsmoke. Gene Roddenberry specially referenced the highly successful show Wagon Train in his original pitch and as a result the eight-season show is probably best known for being mentioned in Roddenberry's famous pitch "Wagon Train To The Stars".
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 popularized many old and obscure Sci-Fi movies simply because the old and obscure movies were the cheapest to get the rights to. The show itself owes a lot to a tradition of host segments on old horror movies (see Horror Host) dating back to the 1950s, and started in a similar vein—a local show on a station that needed filler. Its willingness to mock the movie not just during breaks but during the runtime, its reliance on sarcasm and wit rather than the stock campiness-and-bad-puns format of other hosts, and its heavy utilization of home video has insured that it outlasted and overshadowed most of its ancestors.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus:
    • A lot of sketches are parodies of British TV shows that were popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, "How To Do It?" is a spoof of the BBC children's program Blue Peter. "The Golden Age of Ballooning" spoofed costume dramas on the BBC. Whicker's World spoofed TV presenter Alan Whicker who had a travel show. The spinning globe was also an official BBC bumper between broadcasts. The sketch The Bishop is a parody of the opening titles from The Saint. Many people who grew up outside the United Kingdom or who are younger than the 1970s will probably not understand something is being parodied.
    • Flying Circus managed to do this to a figure of speech, of all things. The show's classic "Spanish Inquisition" sketch is kicked off when the Spanish Inquisition bursts into a boring British drawing room drama after a man gets tired of being badgered with questions, and cries out, "Mr. Wentworth just told me to come in here and say there was trouble at the mill, that's all! I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition!" Many younger viewers might be unaware that "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!" was a well-known Stock Joke that had been used in English drama and television for decades before Monty Python came along; in classic absurdist fashion, the Pythons used that phrase as a stepping stone for a nonsensical sketch where the Spanish Inquisition takes it as their cue to ambush a hapless Victorian couple in the Yorkshire countryside. Of course, now that the Pythons' sketch is far better-known than the hackneyed old joke that it was mocking, it can be hard to get what made it so funny in the first place.
  • Referenced in the game show Beat the Geeks. The host of the show once jokingly referred to Michael Jackson as "the guy who did all those Weird Al parodies". Sadly, the Effect did not help music geek Andy Zax. He was unable to describe the cover of Weird Al's album "Off The Deep End", despite it being a parody of Nirvana's "Nevermind", the topic of the previous question.
  • Popular and light-hearted WW2-themed TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes was considered at the time to be a rip-off of the darkly humourous 1953 movie Stalag 17 (itself an adaptation of the Broadway play of the same name), starring William Holden. While the producers of Hogan's Heroes never acknowledged the parody, the two were similar enough to inspire a successful lawsuit by the creators of Stalag 17; even down to the name (and look) of the bumbling German guard "Sgt. Schulz". Today, Hogan's Heroes is an icon of American pop culture; while Stalag 17 is known only to serious classic film and theatre buffs.
  • Chappelle's Show made popular many things, but none of them are as readily quoted as David Chappelle's Rick James impersonation: "I'm Rick James, bitch!" If you were to ask anybody trying to imitate this catchphrase who were born after 1980, they wouldn't even know who the real Rick James is, except some funny sketch from a comedy television show. Similarly, Kenan Thompson's series of "What Up With That" sketches on Saturday Night Live, which started airing in 2009, always include a parody of Lindsey Buckingham, of all people.
  • Children who grew up watching Sesame Street in the early-mid 1980s were likely introduced to Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" character from the shorts starring Maria (Sonia Manzano) doing a Chaplin impression (with Emilio Delgado playing the Tramp's Butt-Monkey) before (or even instead of) ever seeing the original Chaplin movies. Either that, or they saw the original TV and print ads for the IBM PS1 computer, which adopted Chaplin as an unofficial spokesperson (four years after his death!) in 1981.
  • Famous Mexican comedian and writer Chespirito has several:
    • El Chapulín Colorado is a parody of both the superhero genre and the tokusatsu genre, especially Ultra Man, but the show is so popular in Latin America and has been in reruns for so many decades that most people would probably associate Ultraman with Chapulin than vice versa.
    • Chompiras and Botija is a parody of The Honeymooners, problem is, the original Honeymooners never was popular in Latin America and nor even ran in some countries, so very few Latins other than TV Geeks would know the reference.
  • Community:
    • An in-universe example. Britta does an impression of a bit Jon Stewart does frequently on The Daily Show, itself an impression of Johnny Carson, which comes off as a weird impersonation of Carson. When asked "Is that your Johnny Carson?" Britta is confused, and says no, it was her Jon Stewart.
    • Later in the same episode another in-universe example plays off the first in-universe one: when Starburns does his Carson impression, Troy says he's "got Britta down."
  • In-universe in Parks and Recreation, at Ann and Chris' going-away party, Chris gets a rubber John F. Kennedy mask and begins to recite his "Ask not what your country can do for you..." line. Andy mistakes it for coming from Family Guy.
  • In Spain, La Hora Chanante's sketch "Hijo de puta más" (More son of a bitch) is better known than the song that it's based on, Mr. T's "Treat Your Mother Right".
  • Barney & Friends: People are now more familiar with the opening theme and the closing theme "I Love You" than the songs they were based on: "Yankee Doodle" and "This Old Man", respectively.
  • The Muppet Show was originally a parody of vaudeville theater and variety TV shows. It also included many songs and acts from the vaudeville era, which would have otherwise been unknown to young viewers in the 70s. Today, even songs that were then contemporary are probably now only remembered by their Muppet Show appearances. The same is probably true for at least half the guest stars. The fact that viewers do not remember vaudeville is not entirely unexpected. It was a dominant form of theatrical entertainment from the 1880s to the 1930s, but was considered unable to compete with the then-innovative sound films at the movie theatres (or with the fact that tickets to a movie theatre were often much cheaper). During the 1930s, several companies and theatres previously counting on vaudeville for their profits, either shut down or invested in the film industry. Most of the old vaudeville stars were forced to either retire, or try their hands at a film career. References to vaudeville in the 1940s were already considered retro. About 70 years later, they are references to an entirely different era.
  • The syndicated talk show The Morning Show with Mike & Juliet lasted just two seasons and is largely forgotten. However, the Spaghetti Cat meme, which it unwittingly originated, is still around.
  • Mythbusters: Adam Savage's Catch-Phrase "I Reject Your Reality and substitute my own!" actually comes from the 1984 film The Dungeonmaster. He did give its current literal meaning, though.
  • More people know or at least have heard of Grey's Anatomy than Gray's Anatomy, the textbook the TV series is named after.
  • Scotch And Wry: The cultural legacy of the Last Call sketches far outstrips that of the sermonettes they were actually parodying. There doesn't seem to be a conclusive date as to when the original Late Call finished up but it was probably at some point during the early nineties.
  • The Drew Carey version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? includes constant jabs at Drew and Ryan for "having two shows" and joking plugs for The Drew Carey Show, which ran on the same network during the same period, and was quite popular. Popular enough, in fact, that Drew Carey's involvement in pitching Whose Line to the network was what got the show and its cast brought to the United States from England. These days, Whose Line still has a dedicated fanbase, and has had a successful revival in 2013. The Drew Carey Show is not shown in reruns anymore, and while people probably remember when it was on, don't think of it much, except as "the other show Drew and Ryan were on while they were doing Whose Line."
    • Gene Rayburn, host of Match Game '73, often teased panelist Richard Dawson with "if you ever get your own show," when Dawson was host of Family Feud.
    • Drew's version also contained several jokes about the quality and success of the TV movie Geppetto, an adaptation of Pinocchio which Drew starred in and Wayne Brady was featured in. It is forgettable enough that most people only know of it now through its ridicule on Whose Line.
  • FC De Kampioenen: Carmen's dog Nero was originally named after the Belgian comic strip character Nero. Since 2002 the comic strip has been terminated and the albums are no longer available in regular stores, making the original reference more obscure. Most younger people will probably assume it is a reference to the Roman emperor Nero.
  • Spitting Image: This show featuring puppet versions of famous celebrities has also caused some Memetic Mutation. Today many people in the UK remember Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher more as in their grotesque villainous puppet versions than as Real Life people. A good example is Thatcher beating up members of her cabinet in many sketches, which a lot of people almost assume she did.
    • And, arguably, most Americans have no idea the British TV show even existed (much less the short-lived US adaptation.) They only know the puppets, which appeared in Genesis's music video for their song Land of Confusion.
  • In 1986 BBC Scotland ran a documentary about football called Only a Game?. In 1987, they ran a Self-Parody called Only An Excuse? Today OAE?'s parody of football and Scottish culture is a fixture of the Hogmanay schedules and has had several live shows, while Only a Game? remains a thirty year old documentary (although there is talk of an updated version).
  • The Canadian Sketch Comedy series The Red Green Show is a loose parody of The Red Fisher Show, a Canadian comedy series that aired from 1965 to 1989. In both Canada and the United States, The Red Fisher Show has become completely obscure in comparison.
  • Die Wochenshow, given its massive success in Germany, naturally did it when they spoofed lesser known shows, such as Tsjakkaa! Du schaffst es.
    • Anke Engelke's portrayal of Ricky as The Ditz was so popular (she would actually return to the role on occasion on other shows for years to come), it obviously had this effect for people not too familiar with pop music. In fact, Tic Tac Toe's success had also been massive but relatively brief, and both Ricky's solo career and the later reunion were particularly short-lived.
    • Engelke's parodies of politician Regine Hildebrandt were also prominent for a while. There is a rumor that Hildebrandt once entered a cab and the driver was completely surprised that she was actually real.
  • Partly a case with Greek sitcoms from the 1990s and 2000s, such as Konstantinou kai Elenis and Savatogennimenes. They often included satirical references and even episodes with Whole Plot References to a number of "serious" dramatic series and long-running Soap Operas of their era, counting on the audience getting the jokes. One or two decades later, many of these sitcoms are still being broadcast on reruns and are familiar to most Greek television viewers. (The programs of old channels such as Mega Channel, have consisted primarily of reruns for years.) The dramatic series mentioned are rarely being broadcast anymore (with several of them considered too dated), and the soap operas are both long-defunct and never chosen for reruns by their channels. Quite a number of viewers have no idea what is being satirized.
  • A lot of Riverdale fans didn't realise that Veronica's "Your Brain On Jingle Jangle" scene was a parody of a 1990s anti-heroin PSA.

    Music 
  • The "Dance of the Sylphs" from Hector Berlioz' The Damnation of Faust will nowadays be recognized more as the melody of "The Elephant" from Camille Saint Saens' Carnival of the Animals.
  • The "Can Can" was not originally composed for the Moulin Rouge; rather, it originates as the "Infernal Galop" from Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld (from a scene where people are partying in hell). Offenbach's "Orpheus" is itself a spoof of another opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orpheo et Eurydice". Camille Saint Saens spoofed this one in "Carnival of the Animals" too, slowing it down to provide the melody for "Tortoises".
  • West Coast Rapper Eazy-E's most famous song "I'd Rather F*** With You" is actually a parody of the slightly obscure "I'd Rather Be With You" by Bootsy Collins.
  • Everybody seems to take for granted that Howard Shore wrote the "Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold" tune for Peter Jackson's Hobbit films from scratch — but listen to "Misty Mountains Cold" that Maury Laws produced for the Rankin/Bass Hobbit film from 1977!
  • Many a classical music Standard Snippet will get this due to usage in cartoons, comedy shows, etc. For instance, in Intouchables, "Flight of the Bumblebee" gets the reaction Tom and Jerry?
  • In some Spanish-speaking countries, the song "Pluma Pluma Gay" is more popular/better known than "Dragostea din tei", the song it parodies.
    • In Brazil, a cover that isn't a parody but certainly takes a Filth detour, "Festa no Apê", also obscures "Dragostea din tei".
    • And in some English-speaking countries, "Dragostea din tei" itself is widely associated with "Numa Numa Gary", a video of a man doing a silly dance to the song ("numa numa" is a soramimi of some of its lyrics) that became an early internet meme in the mid-2000s.
  • A double-Weird Al Effect: What is usually referred to as "the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey" is actually a piece by the late-Romantic German composer Richard Strauss, entitled "Also sprach Zarathustra". Considering how widely-used the song is outside of the movie that featured it, it is strange how few people know that. But fewer still know that the Strauss piece was itself an homage to the essay of the same title by Friedrich Nietzsche.
  • There is a song from The Gay '90s, called "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay", parts of which can be heard in The Aristocats. (It's the song Georges Hautecourt, the lawyer, sings when he visits Mme. Bonfamille.) However, viewers who grew up in The '50s would be familiar with a different set of lyrics, to wit: "It's Howdy Doody time!".
  • The Beatles:
    • If you say the word beetle in a non-English speaking country nobody will think of insects, but will immediately think you're referring to the rock group.
    • The song "Good Morning, Good Morning" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has a line about "it's time for tea and Meet the Wife." Most people probably assume it alludes to meeting your wife after a long day of work, but it's actually a reference to a popular British TV series, Meet the Wife, that has nowadays completely faded away in obscurity.
    • English-speakers are probably more familiar with the beginning of The Beatles "All You Need is Love" than the beginning of France's National Anthem.
      • Probably doesn't apply to all English-speakers. Those on the European side of the Pond are more likely to recognise La Marseillaise when they hear it.
      • It's the tune that the man with the tape recorder up his nose plays!
      • And the tune to which Allan Sherman sings "Louis XVI was the king of France in 1789; he was worse than Louis XV... (etc.) ... the worst, since Louis the First!"
      • This gets referenced in the Rifftrax to Casablanca. When part of Marseillaise is used in the opening (and closing) credits, the guys start singing "Love, love, love!"
    • Another Beatles song, "Back in the USSR," was originally written as a tribute to a Chuck Berry song, "Back in the USA," that is largely unremembered by comparison to the Beatles song. It was also a sarcastic response to a buy-native-made-goods ad campaign which used the slogan "I'm Backing Britain" (the refrain sounded like "I'm backin' the USSR") which no one remembers either.
    • Again, it cuts both ways. The British answer to Weird Al is probably style parodist Neil Innes, whose Beatles-themed soundtrack to the parody film All You Need Is Cash was so stylistically perfect that to this day, songs like I must be in love are often mistaken for actual Beatles tracks. Much of his earlier work with The Bonzo Dog Band consists of stylistically perfect parodies of other peoples' work; refer to the Bonzo Dog Band page for lots of examples.
      • And then to muddy things further, The Bonzo Dog Band showed up in a scene in the film Magical Mystery Tour.
  • For you American kids who sang "My Country, 'Tis of Thee (America)" in 2nd grade, you probably don't know that its melody is taken off "God Save the King/Queen".
    • Similarly, what US kids would call "The Graduation Song" (and is actually called "Pomp and Circumstance") contains the patriotic British anthem "Land of Hope and Glory" by Sir Edward Elgar.
    • Speaking about anthems, Britain's God Save the King/Queen is (allegedly) an adaptation of an earlier French anthem (Grand Dieu sauve le Roi) that was composed to commemorate Louis XIV's recovery from some painful hemorrhoids. Indeed.
    • AKA, even more esoterically, "We Wear Our Blue and White."
    • You mean, it's not a cover of a Queen guitar instrumental on A Night at the Opera?! The one they played on the PA at the end of their concerts?
    • Molly and Emily from the American Girls Collection fight over that very subject.
  • The Merry Go 'Round Broke Down is best known as "the theme song to Looney Tunes".
    • Or that one song that Roger Rabbit plays when he breaks plates against his head.
      • Who Framed Roger Rabbit actually helps counteract the Weird Al Effect in this instance, as a few scenes later, Judge Doom says the name of the song in a very memorable scene. It's also a Freeze-Frame Bonus, as pointed out by the DVD extras.
    • Similarly, Merrily We Roll Along, from Billboard Frolics of 1935, is only known today as the Merrie Melodies tune and an incorrect alternative set of lyrics set to the tune of Mary had a Little Lamb.
    • Looney Tunes has done this to other music. Thanks to "What's Opera, Doc?" many people can't hear "Ride of the Valkyries" without singing "Kill da wabbit!" And the 19th-century song "Those Endearing Young Charms" is known today mainly for its use in a recurring Looney Tunes gag where a piano or xylophone explodes—or at least it was until "Come On Eileen" came along.
      • Similar to the Roger Rabbit example above, Animaniacs had Slappy Squirrel use the proper name for the song, teaching at least some viewers its real name.
  • Cheech and 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.
      • "The Star-Spangled Banner" was performed as a lively minuet until John Philip Sousa rearranged it circa 1900 to make it sound more majestic, and added, amongst other things, the two holds and the counterpoint. Most current arrangements are based on the Sousa version. The original, more spritely version can be heard in the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War.
  • The Battle Hymn of the Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord") took its melody (and some of its lyrics) from the Civil War marching song John Brown's Body.
    • ...which took its melody from Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us.
    • And which has subsequently found many new versions as summer camp songs such as "I wear my pink pajamas in the summer when it's hot..."
    • "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school..." AKA "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah/Teacher hit me with a ruler..."; every UGA fan has this stuck in their heads.
    • Plus the Engineers drinking song, "Lady Godiva". Many Engineering students only know this song with the words: "We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers. We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers!".
  • National Lampoon's Deteriorata is obviously a parody of Desiderata, but the style is a parody of a hit record recording of Desiderata 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 more well-known in the USA than its 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.
    • And if not either of these, there's Fantasia's version accompanying the dancing ostriches and other animals.
    • What was just mentioned above gets lampshaded in an episode of Family Guy in which Peter, after visiting a 1950s-themed diner, becomes enamored with '50s and '60s novelty tunes. His absolute favorite is "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen, which he starts listening to ad infinitum and obsesses about to the point that the rest of the Griffin family becomes sick of the song. When Peter panics after Brian and Stewie steal the record, Lois comforts him with the fact that records don't just walk up and leave; this leads to a Cutaway Gag with an old LP of Sherman's "Camp Granada" song, stomping out the door in a huff while claiming (in a stereotypical upstate New York accent) that there are many "old Jews out there" who still want to listen to it.
      • "Surfin' Bird", incidentally, is combination of "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird's the Word" by The Rivingtons, and is now better known than either of them. And indeed, the song is much better known today from its use on Family Guy than as a hit from the '60s.
      • And there may be one or two in the audience who remembered when the short-lived CBS cartoon Birdz used a cover of "Surfin' Bird" as its theme song.
  • "On top of Spa-ghehhhhhh-tiiiiiii, all covered with cheeeeeeeeeeeeese..." For all non-yanks in the Audience On Top of Old Smokey is an American Folk Song. And for all those Americans in the audience too young to remember any but the least obscure folk songs, the third line is "lost my true lover", not "shot my poor teacher".
    • Another rendition of this for military children in Japan is "On top of Mt Fuji, all covered with sand, I shot my poor teacher, with a rubber band."
    • 'On Top of Spaghetti' is a real song. Copyrighted and everything.
  • 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. It has also been set to "London Bridge Is Falling Down", but unlike "There Is a Tavern in the Town", that song is still fairly well-known in its own right.
  • French satirist group “Les Inconnus” has quite a few such songs. “C'est toi que je t'aime” is still played at almost every student party (at least in Belgium), more than 20 years after its release, while very few people remember ska band Mano Negra on whose performances the parody is based (although most people know who is Manu Chao, very few know that this is the band which made him famous before his solo albums). The same could be said about “Casser les couilles” which parodizes Patrick Bruel's “Casser la voix”.
    • While "Casser la voix" and Bruel himself are still somewhat recognized in France (albeit among the sort of people who still remember him as a teen heartthrob rather than a poker commentator), this completely applies to "Isabelle a les yeux bleus", which took large jabs at the band Indochine, its needlessly depressed tone, its word salad lyrics, even Gratuitous English, and is possibly the most well-known of Les Inconnus' parodies in France today. Suffice to say Indochine frontman Nicolas Sirkis was not amused. And today, virtually any mention of Princess Stephanie Grimaldi will elicit a reference to their impression of STEPHANIIIE DE MONACOOOO. Or "Est-fe que tu baives".
  • On the subject of French satirists, the song "La Carioca" from Les Nuls' film "La Cité de la peur". It's often believed to be a real dance (since Carioca literally means an inhabitant of Rio), but Alain Chabat made it up on the spot, ostensibly to poke fun at shoehorned musical interludes in period Red Scare films.
  • 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", written by Eric Idle, from Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album.
  • The catchy tune "Mah NA Mah NA"note  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.
    • While it probably won't eclipse the Muppets, the ROFLMAO Song by Oxhorn is fairly well known. In fact, click on it and check under Crowning Music.
    • Also, younger Muppet viewers might have originally thought the "word" was phenomenon and that the song came from Kermit and Sandra Bullock.
  • 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.
    • If they see Boogie Nights, they'll never forget the original.
    • The Wurzels didn't even come up with Combine Harvester on their own either. It was actually recorded a year earlier by Irish comedian Brendan Grace
  • "I'm Looking Over My Dead Dog Rover", in its various and sundry forms (almost all of which claim to be first), started out as a parody of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf-Clover".
  • Many tunes for prim and proper church hymns were actually co-opted from drinking songs.
    • And in turn, many were co-opted as union songs, the best-known of which are "The Preacher and the Slave" ("The Sweet By and By") and "Which Side Are You On?" ("Lay the Lily Low").
    • Thank you, Martin Luther; all those months spent, ahem, researching folk songs in German taverns have left behind some great pieces of music.
      • Bar Form. It's a common misunderstanding on the part of people who don't know anything about music history—or church history, for that matter.
  • Could be the case for "Work That Sucker To Death" by Xavier, with "Boss Theme (Japanese)", a song being much better known in the Sonic community that samples the chorus.
  • The 1961 Harry Belafonte song "Monkey" is more well-known for being covered and parodied on an episode of Animaniacs.
  • The classic Shaker hymn Simple Gifts has been appropriated twice: Once for another hymn (Lord Of The Dance), but most people would recognize it as the first movement of Aaron Copland's ballet/suite Appalachian Spring. The tune is attributed: that section is titled Variations on a Shaker Melody.
    • People who were in elementary school wind ensembles probably first knew it as an unnamed (or possibly numbered) warm-up "etude".
    • Weezer's "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived", subtitled "Variations on a Shaker Hymn"—you guessed it.
    • Speaking of Copland, how many people can hear the Hoedown from his "Rodeo" (itself based on an older folk tune), and not immediately think "Beef, it's what's for dinner"?
  • Rap gets subjected to this All. The. Time. Play the opening of Rick James's "Super Freak" for anyone born after 1980, and I can practically guarantee you that they'll start chanting, "Can't touch this!"
    • Or possibly even "Can't watch this!"
    • Same with "Under Pressure." It's managed to avoid this in a way though, as most people will wonder until the guitar part if it's "Under Pressure" or "Ice Ice Baby."
    • Many more of these can be found on the Sampled Up page.
  • This is happening to Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" in Poland. While a lot of people know the song from Back to the Future, the parody made by a famous Polish cabaret "Ani Mru Mru" is becoming more known.
  • In Russia, most people do not know that the song “Malchik khochet v Tambov” by Murat Nasyrov is actually a parody of Brazilian hit Tic Tic Tac by Carrapicho
  • John Philip Sousa's "The Liberty Bell March" is now better known as the theme for Monty Python's Flying Circus.
    • Hearing this theme played straight at the inauguration of U.S. presidents is something that amuses British people — and Python-literate Americans — immensely. A possible urban myth has it that the British diplomatic contingent at the inauguration of President Clinton all, without fail, blew a squelching-raspberry noise at the end of the sixteenth bar. Some things become ingrained...
    • The other Sousa march trotted out at such an occasion is the Earwig Song, one generations of British people know, from football matches, as a soccer chant:
    Earwig-o, earwig-o, earwig-o... (Here we go, here we go, here we go!)
    • It's known to Americans as "The Stars and Stripes Forever", though its bridge may be better known thus:
    Be kind to your web-footed friends ...
  • For some time after the movie Excalibur came out, the "O Fortuna" movement from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana was widely known as "that music from Excalibur".
    • For those in the '80s who were unfamiliar with Excalibur, it was "the music from Conan the Barbarian (1982)" — or "that Old Spice music" (from an aftershave commercial). (It's not in Conan the movie, but it is in a trailer for Conan.)
    • Now it's "that Ominous Latin Chanting music in all those movie trailers."
    • It's also almost unknown, to all but the most hardcore orchestral music buffs, that the words of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana are taken from a much older collection of Latin and German songs and poems by the same name (many of them quite bawdy for their time).
    • "Estuans interius ira vehementi". Odds are you're not thinking of one of the poems, or even the Orff rendition, as much as you're thinking of Final Fantasy VII. The same goes for the rest of the non-Sephiroth lyrics of that song. (In fact, "sors, immanis et inanis" comes from "O Fortuna" itself.)
  • Many will recognise Entry of the Gladiators as the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey circus music.
  • The William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini is far better known as The Lone Ranger's theme music.
    • Or from Spike Jones repurposing it as a parodic horse race theme.
    • Or from a scene of A Clockwork Orange.
    • Unless you're an '80s kid, in which case you might recognize it as the opening tune to You Can't Do That on Television.
    • "My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to The William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger." — Billy Connolly
  • A case of Tropes Are Not Good, Hervé Roy's "Lover's Theme" is known nowadays as the background music for Two Girls, One Cup. If you want to talk about intellectual vandalism...
  • "Burlington Bertie" is still a well-known Music Hall song, if only from its appearance in The Muppet Show. Except that song, about a vagrant claiming to be an Upper-Class Twit, is actually called "Burlington Bertie From Bow", a parody of an earlier Music Hall song called "Burlington Bertie" that really was about an Upper-Class Twit.
  • There was once a Russian musical piece called "Days of our life". They had to stop playing it because whenever they did, everyone was laughing at remembering the parody. Today, the music is recognizable, and most people at least remember the first lines of the parody (A large crocodile lady was walking on the streets).
  • In Brazil, a certain child's song ("Criança feliz, feliz a cantar. Alegre a embalar seu sonho infantil."note ) is overshadowed by its parody version ("Criança feliz, quebrou o nariz, foi pro hospital, tomar Sonrisal..."note . A line of the latter was even used in a popular Pato Fu song.
  • Even though he had a long solo career, wrote entire albums for Frank Sinatra and The 4 Seasons, and became a prolific ad jingle writer, Jake Holmes is mainly remembered now because Led Zeppelin (ahem) "borrowed" his song "Dazed and Confused".
  • Fans of The Dead Milkmen might think the joke of "Watching Scotty Die" is just the fact that it's a peaceful-sounding, country-esque ballad about a young boy dying from exposure to poisonous chemicals... In fact it's a parody of the significantly sappier "Watching Scotty Grow", a Bobby Goldsboro hit released more than 15 years earlier.
    • "(Theme From) Blood Orgy Of The Atomic Fern" has a bridge where Rodney Anonymous starts sing/speaking what sounds like deliberately bad angsty high school poetry (followed by a chant of "No art!"). The "poetry" is actually taken straight from the most commonly used English translation of famously morbid Hungarian ballad "Gloomy Sunday".
  • Few Russians know the 1906 song On the Hills of Manchuria. However, play the melody, and everyone will be able to remember a few (mostly obscene) out of a virtually endless number of stanzas starting with "It's quite in the forest".
  • The theme from Carmen has been used in so many places such as The Bad News Bears and in a musical Hamlet episode of Gilligan's Island that most people have no idea where it's from originally.
  • During the 70's there was a commercial selling a classical music album based on this trope.
    • "I'm sure you recognize this lovely melody as 'Stranger in Paradise.' But did you know that the original theme is from the Polovetsian Dance No. 2 by Borodin?. So many of the tunes of our well-known popular songs were actually written by the great masters—like these familiar themes... "
  • "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was written about soldiers during the American Civil War, but most today know it as the playground song "The Ants Go Marching One By One." The Civil War song was a version of the much more depressing Irish song "Johnny we hardly Knew Ye" about a soldier returning from war missing his limbs. (Steeleye Span did a version called "Fighting for Strangers".)
  • Frank Zappa often uses high pitched or low pitched singing voices in his repertoire, most famously on Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. Most younger Zappa fans assume his singers are just putting on funny voices, while when you listen to a lot of 1950s doowop songs you'll notice those comically sounding singing voices really aren't that far off.
  • The catchphrase "Will the real [person's name] please stand up?" is now more likely to be associated with Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" than the 1960s/70s game show To Tell the Truth.
    • The line "two trailer park girls go 'round the outside" from "Without Me" is adapted from the line "two Buffalo Gals go 'round the outside" from "Buffalo Gals" by Malcolm McLaren, who was best known as The Sex Pistols' manager.
      • Although the latter is prominently featured in It's a Wonderful Life, which is still watched pretty often...
  • The tune we now hear as "Hail, hail the Gangs all here" comes from "With Catlike tread" in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance", which was a pretty obvious homage of "The Anvil Chorus" or "Gypsy Chorus" from Giuseppe Verdi's "Il Trovatore"
  • While there's no question of precedence, Finnish people born after the 70s (and not actively into Christmas music) will be able to sing the gruesome parody versionnote  of an old, sappy Christmas song (Joulupuu on rakennettu) at the drop of a hat, but struggle to remember the original lyricsnote .
  • Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" is well set on the road to this trope, as it's already more well-known for its numerous parodies than for the song itself.
  • "Aquarela do Brasil" ("Watercolor of Brazil") dates back to 1939, and gained initial success in the States via the Disney film Saludos Amigos. However, due to being one of two songs in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, most people most commonly associate it with that, and as a result just call it "Brazil" or "the song from Brazil" (to be fair, the song was commonly known under that first name long before the film came along). The younger set will probably only remember it from the WALL•E trailer. And the lyrics (or anything beyond the initial "bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-ba-bum"s) are virtually forgotten.
  • Chuck Mangione is probably better-known today for his recurring role on King of the Hill than his lengthy musical career. His big hit "Feels So Good," even more so.
  • You know that kids' song "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands"? Would you believe it was once called "Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parlez-Vous?"
  • The cover art for The Clash's iconic London Calling album was intended as a pretty blatant homage to Elvis Presley's self-titled debut album Elvis Presley. These days everyone recognizes London Calling (to the point that it itself is often paid homage to and imitated), but most young music fans couldn't tell you what inspired it.
  • Every Finnish schoolchild knows "I Know A Place So Awful"note , an ode to a child's hate of school. Few know there ever was a straight version "I Know A Place So Dear"note  on the loveliness of home.
  • The Ramones song, "Pinhead" from Leave Home (Gabba gabba we accept you, we accept you one of us!), is actually a reference to the cult horror movie Tod Browning's Freaks.
  • Many Spike Jones songs also suffer from this. Today the originals he spoofed are mostly forgotten.
  • Whenever an Ennio Morricone Pastiche is quoted during a scene taking place with cowboys, many younger generations have no idea Sergio Leone 's spaghetti westerns are spoofed. (It even happened when the article was created on this site and many younger tropers where totally unaware who Ennio Morricone was.)
    • If you're a metalhead from Europe, then Morricone's scores probably remind you of “To Hell and Back” by Sabaton.
  • The nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" takes its tune from a 1761 French song titled "Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman".
  • Billy Connolly's rewriting of the syrupy Country and Western song "D.I.V.O.R.C.E." is probably — just about — better known in Britain than Tammy Wynette's Narm-charged original about how she could bear to tell the kids she and Poppa were splitting up. the Big Yin's version is about how to tell a stroppy-but-intelligent dog you're taking it to the vet for a little operation...
  • Doubly-subverted with Weird Al's "Amish Paradise": Most people know that it's a parody of Coolio's song "Gangsta's Paradise" (1995); fewer will remember that the latter was recorded for the 1995 Michelle Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds, which never reached the same level of popularity as its soundtrack. However, what most people don't know is that Gangsta's Paradise samples the chorus and music of the song "Pastime Paradise" from Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder (1976).
  • Thanks to being featured in the film Blade, and in turn being sampled by Public Domain and Warp Brothers, the Pump Panel acid techno remix of New Order's "Confusion" ended up displacing the original.
  • Sing to any child of the 90s the first few stanzas of "Do You Believe In Magic?" and they'll say McDonald's Happy Meal commercials, when it originally was a 60s pop hit by the Lovin' Spoonful.
  • Bollywood music director Anu Malik, infamous for plagiarism, has ended up doing this to a few songs. British Indian rapper Apache Indian's Chok There was a minor hit in India despite heavy airplay, but Anu Malik's parody Stop That, sung by Devang Patel (an Indian counterpart of Weird Al), was a runaway hit for a long time in India. A few years later, Neend Churayi, directed by him, was a hit and went high up the Bollywood charts, while the song it ripped off, Sending All My Love by Linear, still remained obscure, and is remembered faintly only because Anu Malik copied it.
    • Another Bollywood music director almost did the same with Pal Pal Har Pal from Lage Raho Munnabhai, which was a big hit with the masses, but there were far too many fans of Cliff Richard in India, who were familiar with Theme For A Dream, for this to go unnoticed.
  • Many a Metallica fan probably have never seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly aside from the clip that plays before the band takes the stage (they have also covered said track, "The Ecstasy of Gold"). A minor case is "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" borrowing from The Wizard of Oz.
  • UFO is a band that still plays to date, but isn't that well remembered outside of rock/metal fans. And some only know them because Iron Maiden has "Doctor Doctor" on the PA before they start playing.
  • The Edvard Grieg composition "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is better known for its usage in the theme song to Inspector Gadget.
    • It isn't exactly the same tune, but it was inspired by it. British viewers will know this song as the "Alton Towers theme", after a theme park there used the song for its ads.
  • "Like a Boss" by The Lonely Island is much better known than Slim Thug's rap song of the same name, which it parodies.
  • Video game remix and mashup conglomerate SiIvaGunner has become this to many video game music fans. By taking advantage of YouTube's sans-serif font that causes capital "i" to look like lowercase "L", they successfully Trolled many video game music fans trying to look for the real GilvaSunner's music uploads. Eventually, SiIva's pranks gained a fandom of their own, and now a lot of people tend to associate the real GilvaSunner's videos with SiIva's "high quality video game rips."
    • The effect was made even stronger when Siiva's 'rips' started to become just as popular, and in several cases more popular, than actual videos of the music on YouTube. Famously, google searching "Slider - Super Mario 64" or "Snow Halation - Love Live" will result in Siiva being the top hit.
  • This can happen to a Bowdlerization as well as a parody: more people heard the slightly syrupy "Bless 'em All" (especially in its rendition by Vera Lynn) than Fred Godfrey's original WWI song, whose first word wasn't "Bless."
  • Most Theory Of A Deadman fans don't realize that "Bitch Came Back" is In the Style of... a children's song called "The Cat Came Back".
  • Tom Lehrer's "Lobachevsky" is much better known than its direct inspiration, a Danny Kaye Patter Song titled "Stanislavsky."
  • The bouncy jazz-blues standard "Why Don't You Do Right" was singlehandedly transformed into a slow, sultry number by Jessica Rabbit. Nowadays, the original style of singing it is nowhere to be found in covers of the song.
  • If one goes by YouTube views, the song "God Is A Girl" is this. Some people heard the Nightcore version by Maikel-6311 first (also like it better) than the original version by band "Groove Coverage".

    Radio 
  • Many of the radio parodies Bob & Ray did. Perhaps the most durable example was their spoofing the then-hit Soap Opera Mary Noble, Backstage Wife as "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife". The former was a deadly-earnest story of an 'ordinary woman' married to a matinee idol; the latter... culminated, around 1970, in Mary and her family leaving showbiz altogether to open a toast-themed restaurant. The series having earlier openly mocked Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Army hearings. It is still one of B&R's best-known skits.
  • I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: "The antidote to panel games" was born from the creative minds behind I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and conceived as an unscripted parody of panel shows. Clue has been on the air for over 40 years now and is better known than the shows it parodies, as well as itself becoming not so much an antidote but a template for the next generation of panel games.
  • A lot of 1930s and 1940s American radio shows are totally forgotten nowadays, but live on as punchlines in Looney Tunes and Tex Avery cartoons. The funny thing about it is that even back in the day these jokes were completely incomprehensible to people outside the USA or people who didn't listen to the radio. Modern audiences nowadays will probably be amazed how many of these recurring catch phrases and punch lines actually originate from radio shows, movies and even commercial jingles:
    • "Turn off that light!" (reference to air raid wardens during World War II)
    • "Was this/that trip really necessary?" (reference to a slogan used to encourage people not to take unnecessary trips to free up gas and rubber for the war effort and to free up space on trains to ferry troops to their duty locations. )
    • "It's a possibility!" (reference to Artie Auerbach's catchphrase as Mr. Kitzle during Al Pearce's radio shows)
      • "Nobody home, I hope, I hope, I hope" - Al Pearce
    • "That ain't the way I heard it!" (reference to The Old Timer character from the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly)
      • "'T ain't funny, McGee!" – Molly's frequent line in Fibber McGee and Molly)
      • "I love that man!" - (reference to the character Beulah (Marlin Hurt) on Fibber McGee and Molly.)
      • "Operator, give me number 32O.. ooh, is that you, Myrt? How's every little thing, Myrt? What say, Myrt?" - (reference to the character Fibber, whenever he made a phone call to a certain Myrt in Fibber McGee and Molly. )
      • "Well now, I wouldn't say THAT!" - (reference to the character Peavey (Richard Le Grand) in the radioshow The Great Gildersleeve)
    • "Don't you believe it!" was the title of a 1947 radio show in which popular legends, myths or old wives' tales were debunked.
    • "Aha! Something new has been added!" and "So round, so firm, so fully-packed. So free and easy on the draw." (reference to Lucky Strike cigarettes)
    • "B.OOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" from a commercial for Lifebuoy soap against B.O. (body odor)
    • "Ain't I a stinker?" (Lou Costello from Abbott and Costello)
      • "I'm only three and a half years old!" - From a character named Martha (Billy Gray) on the Abbot & Costello radio show.
    • "Ah, yes! (Insert statement here), isn't it?", "Yehudi?", "Don't work, do they?" and "Greetings, Gate! Lets osculate!" (Jerry Colonna, sidekick on Bob Hope 's radio show.)
    • "I dood it!", "He don't know me very well, do he?" and "You bwoke my widdle arm!" – Red Skelton's radio comedy character Junior, aka Mean Widdle Kid
    • "Of course you realize this means war!" (Groucho Marx)
    • "Ain't I a devil?" - Ralph Edwards in "Truth or Consequences".
    • "Which way did he go, George? Which way did he go?" and "I'm going to hug him and pet him and hug him and pet him..." (reference to John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men)
    • Several dimwitted characters were based on Mortimer Snerd, a puppet character by puppeteer Edgar Bergen, created in 1938.
    • "Henry! Heeeeeeeeeeen-RY!" "Coming, Mother!" (reference to The Aldrich Family, a radio sitcom)
    • The NBC Chime
    • "Monkeys is the cwaziest peoples." - A catch phrase from Lew Lehr. In parody the word "monkeys" was often replaced by other animals or people.
    • "Ah say! I'm from the South, son!", "That's a joke, son!", "Pay attention now, boy!" - Kenny Delmar as Senator Claghorn in "The Fred Allen Show". The Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn was entirely based on this radio personality.
    • "See?" - A verbal tic actor Edward G. Robinson used. When characters in Looney Tunes use it, it's usually in a police or gangster context.
    • "I'll moida da bum." - A reference to boxer Tony Galento.
    • "I have a problem, Mr. Anthony!" - Reference to John J. Anthony, who presented the daily radio advice program "The Goodwill Hour".
    • "Train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuuuu-ca-mon-gaaa!" - Mel Blanc usually said this, quoting a character he played on "The Jack Benny Show".
    • "Come with me to the casbah" - Reference to Charles Boyer as Pépé le Moko in the 1937 film Algiers. Interesting detail: the line was prominent in the trailer, but not in the movie itself.
  • The signature station ident of the BBC World Service is a jolly tune, dating from the late 17th century, called Lilliburlero. People not familiar with the music of Restoration England tend to wonder why Britain's English-language service to the world uses an up-tempo version of the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree top/When the wind blows, the cradle will rock... as its theme tune.
  • Baba Booey, the nickname of Howard Stern's producer Gary Dell'Abate, is probably more well known than whose name it was a mispronunciation of - Quick Draw McGraw's sidekick Baba Looey.
    • Double Inversion, as Baba Booey is so commonly screamed after a golf swing on TV that some think it is just something you scream when golfing.
  • The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, in its various incarnations, is much better known these days than The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to Europe, the real travel book that inspired it.
  • Many episodes of the 80s comedy Radio Active are parodies of specific and now long-forgotten shows, though if (as is highly likely) you don't know the original shows, they still work as send-ups of a general type of programme.

     Religion, Folklore and Mythology 
  • The Bible has been so ingrained in Western culture that many sentences, expressions, sayings, allusions, festivities in many languages are directly inspired by the text, yet how many people are aware of all of them? Even Christians may not realize all the linguistic expressions that have a biblical origin.
    • Many, many common names in regions where the Abrahamic traditions are dominant come from the Abrahamic tradition. The names have, through use, become utterly unremarkable. What English speaker immediately thinks of the Biblical origin of such common names Thomas, Matthew, David, Mark, John, Michael, Sarah, Elizabeth, Rachel, Naomi, and Mary? The same happens in many languages. More at The Other Wiki.
  • Similarly, some stuff that is associated with Christianity has in fact little to do with it. Christmas, for instance. People already held end-of-the-year festivities centuries before Christ's birth and the Church simply adapted Jesus' birth to that date because these pagan festivities, like Saturnalia (Roman Winter Solistice) were too popular to simply ignore or suppress. Even if you approach the text logically it wouldn't make sense for shepherds to be tending sheep flocks at night during the winter (but they would in spring). Though the date of Christmas is nine months after the Conception on March 25 — the start of the barley harvest in the Middle East— the Bible still doesn't mention the date of Jesus' conception and birth.
    • His birth date comes from the Jewish tradition of being executed on the date of your conception.
  • In Belgium and the Netherlands Sinterklaas is a popular festivity. Many foreigners assume he is a rip-off of Santa Claus, while in reality it's the other way around! Also, Sinterklaas was originally a Catholic saint Saint Nicholas, but since the 19th century people of all faith celebrate Sinterklaas, many not even aware of its religious origin. In fact: the only thing still reminding of his Catholicness are his name and outfit. And to go even further: Sinterklaas riding his white horse and leaving presents for the children on December 5th was derived from the Scandinavian god Odin and his white horse Sleipnir.
  • Many Flemish and Dutch folklore characters are more familiar to Flemish people for appearing in Suske en Wiske albums than from their original origin. Examples are Flemish folklore characters like Lange Wapper, Kludde, De Bokkenrijders and Tijl Uilenspiegel.
  • American folklore and/or tall tale characters like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill... are all more familiar to audiences today from the fact that Walt Disney used them in cartoons and/or live-action TV series.

    Sports 
  • Many AFL clubs' theme songs are better known to Australians (at least in AFL states) than the songs they are based on. Even where those based on songs that are still widely known (Adelaide: the "Marines' Hymn" (as in the US Marines); Brisbane: "La Marsellaise"; Geelong: Song of the Toreador from Carmen; Hawthorn: "Yankee Doodle Dandy"; St Kilda: "When the Saints Go Marching In"), people are more likely to be familiar with the club song lyrics, while once-popular songs used by other clubs (Carlton: "Lily of Laguna"; Collingwood: "Goodbye Dolly Gray"; Essendon: "Keep Your Sunny Side Up"; Melbourne: "Grand Old Flag" (which is very well-known in America); North Melbourne: "Wee Doch an Dorus"; Richmond: "Row, Row, Row" (not to be confused with "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"); Sydney: "Victory March" (the University of Notre Dame fight song); Western Bulldogs: "Sons of the Sea") are now known almost exclusively as the club songs. Here are some of the original versions.

    Stand-Up Comedy 
  • Brian Posehn, a Weird Al fan, brings this trope up while talking about how he is unsure of the proper way to introduce Weird Al's music to his kids.
    Brian: Should I make them listen to the original song first, and then go "Okay, here's Weird Al's version of it"? Or should I pretend they they are all completely original songs? That would be easier, but it might mess him up a bit, like when he's 16 and at some party and Michael Jackson starts playing, and he goes "Wait a minute! What the hell is this?! "Beat It"?! Well it sure sounds a hell of a lot like "Eat It"! Somebody needs to get sued."

    Theatre 
  • Hardly anyone realises that the willow song in The Mikado was actually a parody of the song Desdemona sings in Othello.
    • Which itself was a well-known tune at the time, a fact that is lampshaded in the play when Desdemona accidentally starts singing the wrong verse and catches herself.
    • Ruddigore is mostly a parody of a kind of melodrama no one watches anymore.
  • Hamlet was written as a parody of action plays popular around Shakespeare's time, in particular the most popular play in the Elizabethan era, a simple revenge plot about the Danish prince written by Thomas Kyd. While Hamlet has become one of Shakespeare's most popular plays and the main role a key challenge for actors, the Kyd play has been lost. Scholars call it "Ur-Hamlet."
    • Also, Amleth.
    • In Shakespeare's day it was very common for writers to rewrite well known stories, telling the same tales over and over with variation. Novelty wasn't exactly prized in art. As a result, many of Shakespeare's plays are based on other stories and/or plays. For example the tale of Hamlet derives from a legendary character in Gesta Danorum (13th century) by Saxo Grammaticus, King Lear is a character from the Historia Regum Britanniae (12th century) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Romeo and Juliet are characters from the 1550s novellas of Matteo Bandello.
  • The famous quote from Twelfth Night, "some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" is a parody of Matthew 19:12: "For there are some eunuchs, which were so borne of their mothers belly: and there be some eunuchs, which be gelded by men: and there be some eunuchs, which have gelded themselves for the kingdom of Heaven." (From the Geneva Bible, a modernized version of the translation Shakespeare would be most likely to have read, omitting the annotations telling to take it metaphorically.) Between the Squick of this verse and Shakespeare's importance, the first quote has become far more familiar than the second.
    • And many people associate it with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (his version substituting "mediocre" and "mediocrity" for "great" and "greatness" respectively) rather than Shakespeare.
  • A few Shakespeare scholars suspect that this effect accounts for a lot of puzzling things the Bard wrote. Several parts of his early comedies and later romances (the ending of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Posthumus' notorious vision in Cymbeline, most of Titus Andronicus, etc.) are not just generally deemed bad ... they're bad in bizarre, far-out-in-left-field ways that have left centuries of readers stumped as to what Shakespeare even thought he was doing. However, these scholars argue, many of these plays fall into focus if we picture Shakespeare writing them as merciless parodies of other popular Elizabethan plays, which are now lost to history.
  • It cuts both ways. Many people have searched the Bible in vain for the line "The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek." not realising the provenance is Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, Act One, Scene Three. Shakespeare is referencing something that actually happens in the Bible, at least (the Temptation in the Desert, which appears in three Gospels).
  • "Whatever Lola Wants" has been used in so many commercials like this one for Levis Jeans: (NSFW) [1] that many people don't know that it was used in the musical Damn Yankees.
  • Everyone remembers Harry Houdini, but the man whose name he stole as his pseudonym, magician Jean-Baptiste Houdin, is nowadays very obscure.
  • Indeed, the parody sometimes outlives the original, as many of the plays by famous Greek tragedians which were made a mockery of in Aristophanes's plays are now lost.
    • Aristophanes was also parodying and making satirical references to comedy works by his rivals, such as Eupolis and Cratinus. He is the only writer of Old Comedy whose works survive to the present day, and we know little about his contemporaries.
    • Some of the politicians and generals satirized by Aristophanes suffered the same fate. Lamachus was a real-life general of the Peloponnesian War, and was killed in combat (along with most of his unit) in 415 BCE. But he is mostly remembered because he is the antagonist in The Acharnians, one of the most famous among Aristophanes' surviving works. Cleonymus of Athens was a real-life general and politician, who reportedly threw away his shield during a battle and run for his life. Aristophanes often mocked him for his cowardice. More that 2000 years later, most people (including scholars) know Cleonymus due to Aristophanes' jokes about him, rather than anything he did in life.
  • A number of scenes in works by Euripides seem to satirize or point at plot holes in the older works of Aeschylus. Modern readers often have to read annotations to get the references.

    Video Games 
  • Even certain video games are old enough to fall into this trope. For example: Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater has permanently altered how Black Mage from Final Fantasy is perceived. Also, Clevinger recast the White Mage as The Chick in everyone's minds, even though the original character had Ambiguous Gender. Clevinger didn't alter their personalities, he created ones where there were none in the first place.
  • Metal Gear's 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.
  • Hardly anyone knows the name "Korobeiniki", but almost everyone will recognize it as Tetris Theme A.
  • Duke Nukem was not the first guy to make a One-Liner regarding the kicking of asses and the chewing of gum.
  • Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter Alpha (and following Street Fighter games) was a parody of the two main characters from Art of Fighting: Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia. This was a result of the original Street Fighter designers jumping ship to SNK and helping create Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. Suffice it to say, Capcom was not happy, and the two companies shared a deep rivalry throughout the 90s. However, Street Fighter is much better-known in North America than the King of Fighters games and has moved much further into the mainstream due to several separate factors, so it is not uncommon for an American fan of the series to not know that Dan is a parody of anyone specific, or to assume that he is just a parody of Ryu and Ken.
  • While it is very well known in Japan, not many Western fans of Touhou know that the title of the "Marisa stole the precious thing" meme is a parody of a line by Inspector Zenigata from The Castle of Cagliostro. Possibly because the original line has a slightly different wording if translated: "He (Lupin III) stole something outrageous — your heart."
    • Similarly, most Western fans don't know that OVERDRIVE'S famous EASY MODO?! is a parody of the H-doujin Datsu! Doutei.
  • Most people today will probably be more familiar with Morrowind, an area in The Elder Scrolls, than they will be with Morrowindl, an area in The Heritage of Shannara that it was likely named after.
  • In the memetic exchange between Richter Belmont and Dracula from the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night localization, the line "What is a man!? A miserable little pile of secrets!" is actually a quote from the preface of André Malraux's Antimémoires.
  • The Koopalings from the Super Mario Bros. series are all named after many long-forgotten 80s personalities, like Morton Downey Jr. and Wendy O. Williams. And, in one case, a classical composer. The tie-in book Dinosaur Dilemma did something similar with a bunch of officials named after real people whose last names were "Cooper" or "Koop" that the target audience probably never heard of, like C. Everett Koopa.
  • Shulk's "Now it's Shulk time!" quote in the Wii U and 3DS editions of Super Smash Bros. is a reference to the character Reyn from Shulk's home game, Xenoblade Chronicles. Reyn would frequently say, "Now it's Reyn time!" during battle, and the line became a common injoke among players. Because Smash Bros. is a much more mainstream game than Xenoblade Chronicles (which notoriously had a very limited print run in the Americas and came out extremely late in the Wii's life cycle, while Smash 4 has collectively sold nearly 10 million units), Shulk's version of the line has become much more well-known among the general gaming audience.
    • Thankfully, this issue has now been partially alleviated by the release of the 3DS port of the original game.
  • Undertale:
    • Sans and Papyrus, a pair of skeleton brothers, are a parody of a webcomic called Helvetica and its eponymous skeleton protagonist. The joke was that Helvetica is a font that is beloved by typeface aficionados, while (Comic) Sans and Papyrus are fonts that are widely derided. But Undertale became far more popular than Helvetica, and Sans and Papyrus are two of the most popular characters in the game, to the extent that even people who have never played the game know about them.
    • The line "you're gonna have a bad time" was a preexisting meme from South Park.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • There was a popular AMV a few years ago called "Euphoria". It combined the song "Must Be Dreaming" with the anime RahXephon. Rather better-known these days is a parody from AMV Hell 3: "Osaka Must Be Dreaming". (Same visual effects, same song, but with clips of Osaka.)
  • Atop the Fourth Wall:
  • Speaking of That Guy with the Glasses, how many people do you suppose get Doug's repeated references to the TV show One Step Beyond? Most people are far likelier to have heard of The Nostalgia Critic and therefore assume the catch phrase originated with him.
    • A great many movies featured on the various shows on That Guy with the Glasses are often obscure enough for the audience not to have seen them elsewhere. This is particularly true for The Cinema Snob and his impressive collection of truly obscure and terrible movies.
  • The Biting Pear of Salamanca, also known as the LOLWUT Pear.
  • There's a CollegeHumor video in which someone tells a story of Amir ordering "Gangsta's Paradise" on karaoke only to sing "Amish Paradise." The owner of the bar later said that they actually had "Amish Paradise" in the machine.
  • The Kitsune^2 song, Avast Your Ass is a popular song for remixes. One such remix, Avast Fluttershy's Ass (or whatever title the author has changed it to by now) is more often searched for than the original, and has over twice as many views. The fact that it's about Fluttershy is most likely a huge contributing factor to this.
  • One case that somewhat depends on whether you're a bigger fan of hip-hop, or Game of Thrones. If the latter, you're likely more familiar with Backflip Wilson's version of Black and Yellow than the original.
    • Green and Purple by Kritikal is so wide-spread by Internet memes, most don't know it's a parody. It's popularity is mostly from the titular colors, rather than the subject of smoking marijuana. And in an even stranger version of this, this Team Fortress 2 music video has almost double the views than the song on Kritikal's official YouTube channel (the former video).
  • Quite a few people are only familiar with the relatively obscure anime Irresponsible Captain Tylor because the Empress Azalyn character is the Author Avatar of YouTube Pooper RootNegativeSixteen.
  • Weiss Reacts was actually an Affectionate Parody of an older, moderately well-known fic the author happened to like based on a similar premise about the characters of RWBY reacting to fanfiction. Nowadays, the former fic is so famous and well-known that the latter was actually called a rip-off of Weiss Reacts, even though it came first. The authors of both fic take it in stride, as the latter fic, Dear Fanfiction is actually featured in the former.
  • In a bizarre case of the Trope Namer himself getting this treatment, very few fans of NintendoCapriSun are aware his Catch-Phrase "IN THE BATHROOM" comes from a Weird Al song. ("A Complicated Song", to be exact.)
  • One comment in the comment section of the obscure song The Midnight Tango by Herb Alpert said it better.
    That moment when a parody involving a dog barking the melody has more views than the original.
  • Mike Stoklasa of RedLetterMedia based the character of Mr. Plinkett on a character in one of his earlier films, where Plinkett was played by Rich Evans. The Plinkett reviews have proven so explosively popular that Stoklasa's version of the character has far eclipsed Evans's, to the point that Evans's reprising of the role for Half in the Bag was mostly met with They Changed It, Now It Sucks! - even RLM has come to call Evans's version "Fake Plinkett."
  • The Twitter parody account @seinfeldToday got very popular in 2014-2015 sharing imaginary Seinfeld plots based around modern technology, and was widely criticsed for being lame and uninspired (including by Larry David). One of its critics started a parody account of the parody account, @seinfeld2000, which contained dreadful spelling and grammar, surreal and horrifying plotlines, and very well-produced parody Mashup videos and music. @seinfeld2000 has outlived @seinfeldToday and made Seinfeld a popular meme.
  • These days, it's nearly impossible to find references to the original 4 Non Blonds song "What's Up?". It has been almost entirely supplanted by the He-Man parody remix, "HEHEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA" (part of a larger parody by Slackcircus created in 2005).
  • In one of The Reacts Channel regular segments "Do Teens Know 90s Music", Gangster's Paradise was played. At least one teen recognized it as "The song Weird Al parodied". He couldn't actually name the song beyond that.
  • In a case of a work doing this to itself, memetic Homestar Runner song "Trogdor" features the line "And the Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIGHT!", a Call-Back to the Strong Bad Email "guitar", where Strong Bad improvised a song that included the line "And the dragon comes in the NIIIIIGHT!" As "guitar" is a fairly early email that's on the obscure side, and the Trogdor theme is popular even outside the site, chances are very likely anyone who heard the original heard the Call-Back first.

    Western Animation — Looney Tunes 
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 morningnote  decades later. The cartoons were intended to be consumed in the time in which they were made, when their audiences would have been fully familiar with all the references they threw in. None of their creators would have expected they would still be popular fifty years later, long after nearly everyone had forgotten the original references.
  • Bugs Bunny steals entire blocks of shtick from Red Skelton, Groucho Marx and old-time comedian Joe Besser.
  • Daffy Duck's speech patterns and impediment were based on producer Leon Schlesinger — who reportedly never noticed.
  • The character of Foghorn Leghorn was closely modeled on a radio character named Senator Claghorn. Catch phrases such as "That's a joke, son" and "I say", associated exclusively with the loudmouthed roosternote , were appropriated wholesale from the Senator, who today is all but forgotten. 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-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 24½th Century than with its parody target Buck Rogers in the 25th Centurynote .
  • Daffy is also responsible for permanently changing the pronunciation of an English word. The word "despicable" is actually supposed to be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: "DES-picable". Mispronouncing it was part of Daffy's Malaproper schtick. However, since the cartoons reached so many kids who were too young to have the real pronunciation in their vocabularies yet, Daffy's "You're de-SPICK-able" was the pronunciation they all learned. And it holds true still today: That Steve Carrell movie isn't called DES-picable Me. On the other hand, few people nowadays say "FORM-idable" or "LAM-entable" either, and that can hardly be blamed on Daffy.
  • Conversely, Bugs Bunny is likely responsible for the term "Nimrod" as an insult. He says it to Elmer Fudd sarcastically, as Nimrod was a great hunter in the Bible. (Apparently, moviegoers in the 1940s had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament.) It is likely that anyone using the term today will be using it to say that the target of the word is foolish or stupid.
    • In fact, it's gotten to the point that most people who now study the Bible will assume that the name Nimrod is a case of unintentional irony.
  • 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 The Rover Boys books it spoofed.
  • Pepé Le Pew is based on Charles Boyer's character Pépé le Moko (from the film Algiers), with a little bit of Maurice Chevalier thrown in. Even if you've heard of these sources, they are less familiar than the amorous skunk is.
    • Not quite. He is actually a parody of a (then) well known French actor named Jean Gabin who stared in "Pépé le Moko" which was re-made in English as "Algiers", making this a potential I Am Not Shazam.
  • Most younger viewers watching that really thin character type, with blue, blue eyes, and a velvet voice singing and making the females faint, might not know that it is a parody of a young "Franky" Sinatra. Yeah, Ol' Blue Eyes himself.
  • Lampshaded in a Gilmore Girls episode where Lorelai wonders out loud about whether anvils were so ubiquitous that they would have been so easily recognized by children watching the cartoons.
  • While Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is not exactly obscure, it probably says something that the trope And Call Him "George"! is named after a cartoon parody of it. The trope's association with Dumb Muscle cartoon characters is so much a part of comedy now that most students reading Of Mice And Men in modern times are absolutely unable to take it seriously, despite it being quite a tragic story.
  • Background characters often got one-liners or mannerisms that were taken from the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show, including "That ain't the way I heard it!", "Oh, is that you, Myrt? How's every little thing?", "I bet-cha", and "Tain't funny, McGee!". One of the show's regular cast members, Arthur Q. Bryan, supplied the voice for Elmer Fudd, making him one of the three male voice actors, along with Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg, to regularly appear in the classic Looney Tunes shorts.
    • The title character from the Fibber spinoff show The Great Gildersleeve was also parodied several times — Bugs even did a Lampshade Hanging for one, saying that he sounded like "that guy on the radio, The Great Gildersneeze". Many shorts also borrowed the catchphrase of Gildersleeve supporting character Mr. Peavey: "Well, now, I wouldn't say that!"
  • The Road Runner was originally intended as a parody of all the chase scenes that were frequent in many cartoons from The Golden Age of Animation. Now it is almost the only famous example of "chase cartoon". To be fair, at least one of the cartoons that they parodied is still very well known.
    • More to the point, Chuck Jones intended the blackout gags in the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner sub-series to be a reference to the then-popular "The Fox and the Crow" (1941-1950) series of theatrical cartoons, created by Frank Tashlin for the Screen Gems studio. The series he was imitating/parodying ended in 1950, just a year after Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner debuted. Guess which comedy duo, modern audiences are most familiar with.
  • A number of tunes that were popular at the time but completely forgotten about later, made appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons. For example, few members of the modern audience would recognize the name of the song "We're in the Money" from the movie Gold Diggers of 1933. But let them listen to the song, and they will immediately recognize the melody that played whenever some character in the Warner Brothers cartoons experienced an unexpected windfall.
  • Looney Tunes themselves (and their sibling Warner cartoons, "Merrie Melodies") were originally named such as a parody/response to Disney's Silly Symphonies. Nowadays, Looney Tunes are considered as famous as the Classic Disney Shorts if not more so, and possibly the de facto Alternate Company Equivalent.

    Western Animation — Other 
  • Not many people realize that the characters Chip and Dale are a pun on the surname "Chippendale"note . Or that their Rescue Rangers incarnations are dressed like 1980s live-action characters note 
  • South Park, Futurama, Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad!, Robot Chicken, Dreamworks... all suffer from this. All these series parody many aspects of pop culture like TV series, film, politics, etc., that are misinterpreted or not recognized by everyone, especially people who are younger than the creators of these shows.
  • This is simultaneously parodied and lampshaded in Animaniacs when the Warners meet Rasputin the Mad Monk. 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 hits Rasputin on the head with a hammer. Dot turns to the camera and deadpans, "Obscure joke. Talk to your parents."note 
    • The vaudeville catcall "Hellooooo, nurse!" is now forever tied with this show despite it predating the series by decades.
  • The process is still going on — consider all of the increasingly dated early '90s references in Tiny Toon Adventures.
  • Classic Disney Shorts:
    • 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..
    • Cartoons like Mickey's Gala Premier, Mickey's Polo Team, and the Donald Duck cartoon The Autograph Hound were full to the brim with famous celebrities of the time. Nowadays most people will probably only recognize a few of them.
    • 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.
    • Several of the Disney shorts were spoofing then-popular genre fiction. Duck Pimples (1945) spoofs horror-themed and crime-themed radio shows of the era, as Donald's imagination runs wild. Frank Duck Brings 'Em Back Alive (1946), spoofs the autobiography of animal collector Frank Buck (1884-1950) and its series of fictionalized film adaptations. How to Be a Detective (1952) spoofs several tropes from Film Noir, and mocks their convoluted plots. Two-Gun Goofy (1952) spoofs television Westerns. Unclear how many modern viewers get the references.
  • Betty Boop:
    • Helen "boop-a-doop" Kane is now recalled as having been like Betty Boop — which she was before Betty Boop was created.
    • Betty's design was heavily inspired by Clara Bow, down to having red hair like her (as shown in her only colored short, Poor Cinderella). Clara is considered one of the first Hollywood superstars but has since faded into obscurity for various reasons.
  • The Modifyers is a little known cartoon that was picked up by Cartoon Network, after Nickelodeon rejected it. It only aired half a pilot episode that ended on a cliff-hanger and was dropped. About the only reason anyone's even heard of it, is because of the unofficial porn parody by Zone, which has become more popular and widely known than the show itself.
  • The Simpsons:
    • All of the examples quoted in the 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, there'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 several times. In 1994's "Bart Gets an Elephant", Wiggum, skeptical of reports of damage caused by a rogue elephant, exclaimed "And I'm Edward G. Robinson" - complete with vocalization. Similarly, in "Simpsons Bible Stories", Moses's story has Wiggum playing an Egyptian foreman clearly inspired on Robinson's role as Dathan in The Ten Commandments, down to the line "Where's your Messiah NOW?" (He uses the same line to Ned Flanders in "Homer Loves Flanders".) Finally, 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.
    • Professor Frink is a parody of comedian Jerry Lewis' nerdy characters, again something that is lost on younger generations. Though it has ultimately come full circle in the Treehouse of Horror segment "Frinkenstein" in which Professor Frink brings his father back from the dead. Who plays his father? Take a wild guess! This in turn is rather Meta, as seeing as Frink was created from the style of Jerry Lewis, Jerry in a sense is his father.
    • Bumblebee Man is a parody of El Chapulín Colorado, a Mexican comedian who dressed himself as a grasshopper. His show airs on "Channel Ocho," a play on the Mexican sitcom El Chavo del ocho.
    • Radio presenter Arnie Pye is named after radio presenter Ernie Pie.
    • Barney Gumble was a pun on Barney Rubble from The Flintstones, but nowadays nobody makes that connection anymore.
    • Gil Gunderson, the unlucky salesman, is a take-off of a similar character, Shelley Levene, from Glengarry Glen Ross.
    • In the DVD commentary track for the fourth season, 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".
    • "Classic" horror concepts are frequently parodied in the Treehouse of Horror episodes. Most younger viewers, especially outside the United States, who never saw The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits don't realize many plots were borrowed from these TV series. Even more obscure is one segment that parodies a segment from the less known Amazing Stories fantasy/science-fiction anthology titled "Hell Toupee". Unlike its cousins, Amazing Stories didn't usually go into horror, and the original tale was fairly light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek... making it even less likely it would be recognized more than the parody.
    • Most people associate the phrase "D'oh!" with Homer Simpson. However, it comes from James Finlayson in the Laurel and Hardy film series, which is something Dan Castellaneta himself admitted in at least one interview.
    • The main theme from the 1991 version of Cape Fear was rather famous in its day, as it is a wonderfully atmospheric piece that evokes just the right sense of impending terror. Today, it is almost universally known as Sideshow Bob's theme music, thanks to an episode which parodied the film and played the theme from the movie whenever Bob was around.
      • That theme is even older, since it is based on part of Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1962 version of Cape Fear (played once at the very end).
      • Eventually the creators took notice of this and made it Bob's official leitmotif. In later seasons, a few bars of it always play whenever he shows up.
      • Similarly, in a few years all the references to Frasier that tend to go hand-in-hand with Bob episodes will be meaningless.
      • Another musical relation in The Simpsons shows Homer singing modified lyrics to Frank Sinatra's "It Was A Very Good Year" (when he was remembering the time he bought his first six-pack at a liquor store with an obviously fake ID — It is best not to think about how he got away with it). Anyone thinking of the song nowadays is likely to think of Homer's rendition.
    • Itchy and Scratchy are an extreme parody of typical animated cat-and-mouse cartoon series like Tom and Jerry, Pixie Dixie And Mr Jinks, Herman and Katnip... and the violence typically found in 1940s and 1950s animated cartoons. Back in the day these cartoons were broadcast daily over the entire world and thus everybody immediately understood the reference. Today, ever since Cartoon Network bought most of the rights, you hardly see these classic cartoons anywhere except for YouTube. Thus, the original joke will be totally lost on younger audiences. In the case of Herman and Katnip, the rights to the film series have changed owners many times, and the cartoons themselves were often unavailable to a wider audience for decades.
    • In a review for the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Conscience of the King", The A.V. Club notes how "pop culture turns around to bite us on the ass", and ever since the first "Treehouse of Horror", the reveal of Kodos as a man instead of a green alien loses impact.
    • Nowadays, people are likely to associate Paint Your Wagon with the episode "All Singing, All Dancing", in which Homer and Bart mistakenly think it is a typical Clint Eastwood western, with even more surprised to find out that it is an actual movie made after Eastwood became famous.
    • A couple decades after the show gave us "The Monorail Song," a parody of "Trouble" from The Music Man, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic did its own parody called "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000." The result was an amusing dichotomy where the show's target audience thought it was a reference to the Simpsons version, while the show's famous older Periphery Demographic knew the original version.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
    • There is Dracula, a dead-on impersonation of Fred Sanford from Sanford and Son, complete with a penchant for calling people "Dummy". He is also drawn to look like an older version of Blacula, complete with early 70's sideburns and mustache.
    • Its parody of the H.P. 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... But probably nobody else does. The Wuzzles was a 13-episode series, originally broadcast over a 3-months period in 1985. It is one of Disney's shortest-lived series.
  • Grandpa from Hey Arnold! has a photo stashed away of Hedy Lamarr. Naturally, kids had to go ask their parents.
  • The "Log" song from The Ren & Stimpy Show is a parody of classic Slinky commercials. There's also comedian Stinky Wizzleteats from "Stimpy's Invention," a spoof of actor/musician Burl Ives. Specifically the lines about "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs" and "I told you I'd shoot but you didn't believe me!" come from The Big Country. And, of course, Ren's voice and persona are largely based on characters played by Peter Lorre, with Ren's famous Catch-Phrase "You fat, bloated EEDIOT!" paraphrased from Joel Cairo's Villainous Breakdown near the end of The Maltese Falcon. See here.
  • 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 Goofy Gophers 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. - Though the original Alphonse and Gaston comic strip was actually fairly long-running (1901-1937), and had received adaptations in stage plays and films. It was one of the most famous creations of comic strip artist Frederick Burr Opper (1857–1937), one of the pioneers of the comic strip genre. Opper's best remembered character is Happy Hooligan (1900-1932), the "well-meaning hobo who encountered a lot of misfortune and bad luck" due to unjust treatment. He was the character which Charlie Chaplin was imitating in his "Little Tramp" persona.
    • On "It's That Man Again", a wartime BBC radio show, it was "After you Claude." "After YOU, Cecil."
  • Robot Chicken:
    • 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 '80s cartoons and toys:
    • "Oh my god! Somebody remembered this movie and made a comedy sketch about it!"
    • Most younger fans may not be aware that the chickens bawking in the end is "The Gonk" from Dawn of the Dead (1978) and instead refer to it as the Theme Tune.
    • Composite Santa Claus is probably more well-known than the villain he's a parody of. Composite Superman hasn't been seen since before Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the few people who remember him probably wish they didn't.
    • One sketch had Lewis and Clark, portrayed by Lois Lane and Clark Kent, specifically acting out their unique character traits from Lois & Clark. Clark addresses the audience that unless they saw the show they would probably not get the joke.
  • Most American Dad! viewers don't seem to be aware that Roger's distinctive voice and mannerisms (done by Seth MacFarlane) are intended to parody Paul Lynde.
    • Lynde is a frequent victim of this trope, as his voice is imitated quite often in cartoons. The result is that some animation fans think of his voice as a stock cartoon voice used for Ambiguously Gay or just plain Camp Gay male characters and aren't aware that all those voices stem from one man. He did some voice work himself, such as the Hanna-Barbera 'toons The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Charlotte's Web. HB were so well known for using celebrity imitators in their cartoons, that even people who have heard of Mr. Lynde probably assumed it was an imitation. On the other hand, since Lynde was so commonly imitated, people will often assume that any cartoon from the 1970s or earlier that includes a Lynde-like voice has him doing that voice - but sometimes it isn't. (Alan Sues is frequently mistaken for Lynde, for example.)
    • What they really aren't aware of is that Lynde admitted he borrowed his manner of speaking and mannerisms from Alice Ghostley, a popular Broadway star of the '50s who later became a Hollywood character actress.
      • Interestingly, both Lynde and Ghostley each had a recurring role on the TV series Bewitched.
    • For that matter, Seth MacFarlane's penchant for referencing 1980s TV and movies, along with 1950s lounge music, has made his shows into a Weird Al Effect machine for people too young to remember those decades (AKA the vast majority of his audience). Family Guy is a much bigger offender than American Dad, though.
    • The opening titles of Family Guy are a parody of the opening titles of All in the Family, something that is completely lost on younger viewers.
    • Family Guy's penchant for obscurity runs the gamut — especially when it comes to parodies. For example, a number of people might recognize a song they play straight — such as "Shipoopi" from The Music Man — but how many people actually know that the "Fellas at the Freakin' FCC" song from the episode "PTV" is sung to the tune of a song from an obscure Broadway musical called Take Me Along?
    • Seth MacFarlane's love of old movies, demonstrated in the score reference to The Sea Hawk during a car chase seen that turns in to a parody of age of sail ship to ship battles.
    • Go to YouTube and search for any scene or clip from a pop culture phenomenon that Family Guy has parodied or mentioned. Most of the comments will consist of, "I thought Family Guy created this!"
      • With the possible exception of Star Wars. For now.
  • Tom and Jerry:
    • The "Don't you believe it!" line in a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons is clearly a reference to one of the openings to the NBC Radio show "The Passing Parade". 'Don't you believe it!' was a radio program back in the mid to late forties. This program was run by Toby Reed. In the beginning of the show they listed off a number of trivia type things, "and say if you believe so and so ... Don't you believe it!" then it went on to explain what really happened in a kind of documentary style. Today this joke has gotten so obscure that hardly anyone remembers it.
    • Another episode had a small robotic mouse walking back and forth repeating "Come out and see me some time". This was a reference to Mae West's once-notorious line: "Come up and see me sometime".
  • Double example: the theme from "Recess" was a parody of the theme from Hogan's Heroes, which in turn was a parody of the march from The Great Escape.
  • Similarly, Fillmore! is ''Shaft... In School! (with a heavy helping of 1970's cop movies and TV shows thrown in). Although the show was loved by many fans, supposedly part of the reason is was cancelled is that the suits felt the kiddie target demographic didn't get all the 1970's references (and believed that it mattered whether the kids got all the references or not).
  • Snagglepuss is, so far, an aversion. While his voice is based on Bert Lahr's cowardly lion, the original is still well enough known as to avoid the Weird Al effect.
    • Yet Snagglepus himself is sometimes confused with The Pink Panther in countries where that character is more familiar.
  • Megas XLR exists almost entirely on this trope. Giant robot anime, movies, cartoons, tv shows, literature, pop culture, obscure throw-away characters from other series, actors, conspiracy theories, theoretical physics, urban legends, real life... Everything is a source for what is likely the most awesome cartoon ever made.
  • When they're parodying a certain musician, South Park will sometimes use a modified version of their existing material, resulting in a lot of viewers giving them full credit for it.
    • If you're a South Park viewer who doesn't listen to popular music, you might not know that the song at the end of "Fishsticks" is a parody of the Kanye West song "Heartless". Given enough time, even those who do probably won't recognize it, leaving poor Kanye's musical career eclipsed by a song about gay fish.
    • The two episodes featuring Michael Jackson—-"Meet the Jeffersons" and "Dead Celebrities"—-used three songs as the basis for his musical bits: "Heal the World" from Dangerous and "Childhood" and "You Are Not Alone" from HIStory: Past, Present And Future, Book I. Seeing as all three were lesser known relative to his other hits, it can be easy to miss them.
  • The Disney villain Phantom Blot is a parody of a character in many film serials, the main villain whose face is hidden in a cloak until the final episode reveals him to be a character already familiar to the audience. This was a recognizable stock character when the Blot was introduced in 1939. Now the serials are forgotten, but the character lives on.
  • The Flintstones used quite a few "special guest voices" of celebrities of the era given Punny Names, such as "Ann-Margrock" for actress Ann-Margaret and "Jimmy Darrock" for Jimmy Darren. Kids who grew up watching the reruns would have had no clue who these people were.
  • Rarity's song "Art of the Dress" from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is done In the Style of... the song "Putting It Together" by Barbra Streisand. The former is much more popular and many people only know of "Putting It Together" from "Art Of The Dress".
  • I Love to Singa was a parody of the film The Jazz Singer. The short lives on in popularity while the film is mostly remembered for two things: 1. The fact it was the first full-length "talkie" (though technically most of the film was a silent film) and 2. The infamous Blackface scene. And despite the short being more popular than the film, even it probably wouldn't be recognized today without Cartman getting an anal probe.
  • Moral Orel is a parody of the stop-motion Christian cartoon Davey and Goliath. Not many people realize it due to the latter being a niche work from the 60s.
  • The theme tune to SpongeBob SquarePants is sung to the tune of the sea shanty "Blow The Man Down", and has become more popular than the original song.
    • Barnacle Boy is likely a lot more well-known at this point than Aqualad, the character he is pretty clearly a parody of. Aqualad himself has been Out of Focus for decades in comic continuity, largely due to the issues DC's long had with making Aquaman on his own work.
  • How many viewers of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop realised it was a pastiche of 1910s film serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914)? Okay, now how many realised the Hooded Claw is specifically based on the villain from the follow-up to Pauline, The Exploits Of Elaine (1914), who was known as the Clutching Hand? Note that the Clutching Hand was "the first mystery villain to appear in a film serial", and became the template for every mystery villain in the genre.
    • Wait, The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine were real serials? I thought that Scott Westerfeld just invented them for the Leviathan books!
  • Most of Clone High's characters are obvious clones of historical figures - Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan of Arc, and so on. Even minor characters are based on historical figures (with the exception of Principal Scudworth). There are, however, some that may have slipped past viewers:
    • Mr. Butlertron is a parody of the titular character of Mr. Belvedere, down to calling everyone Wesley. The creators even wanted to name him "Mr. Belvetron", but they couldn't get the rights. This parody would go right over the heads of anyone who watched the series today.
    • It is easy to miss that the "guest star" Ponce is based on a real historical figure, Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon. His full name is only used once, on the end title card memorializing his death, and given the intro's blatant emphasis that he is the clone who will die tonight, it is pretty easy to assume that they just made up the character to make it his Remember the New Guy? status even funnier, as a normal person in a school of clones.
    • The series's concept as a parody of the Very Special Episode in every episode can be lost on viewers, as the overtness of such episodes has been downplayed in modern sitcoms (if it shows up at all - series typically avoid dropping such Anvilicious messages, and if they are going to include drug/alcohol use, death, or sex, they will do it from the start).
  • Link's now-memetic "Well, EX-CUUUUSE ME, princess!" from the old The Legend of Zelda animated series is fondly remembered by those who grew up with the show, and is usually understood on the Internet to exclusively be a reference to the cartoon. More than a few of these fans may not recognize that the recurring line is a direct Shout-Out to one of Steve Martin's famous bits from his stand-up comedy days. Same delivery and everything.
  • A lot of the parodies and jokes in The Boondocks that are based on pop culture go over people's heads. For example, Tom's song "Let It Burn" is an actual Usher song. Other episodes are based on real life events or real people (often times word-for-word), including the teacher who says the "n" word at Riley and the gay prisoner with the beanie.

    Other 
  • You always remember people based on the physical features and characterisations that are different than others. As a result people you know are remembered as caricatures of their physical features or behaviour more than how they actually look and behave. For instance:
    • Prince Charles' ears have been exaggerated in cartoons so often that many people often imagine them to be Dumbo-sized. In the BBC documentary series The Human Face they used him as an example by first simply tracing the lines of a photograph of him into a realistic drawing. As a result he was unrecognizable. Only when they exaggerated his features into caricature you instantly recognized him as Prince Charles.
    • Richard Nixon has appeared in so many cartoons as a heartless crook that this portrayal has become confused with the real man. Yes, he was corrupt, but not to the extent that he betrayed everybody and had villainous thoughts.
    • The vocal patterns and mannerisms of George H.W. Bush are much more remembered through Dana Carvey's exaggerated impression of him than by video recordings of his actual voice and physical presence. Indeed, once Carvey's impression gained traction, anyone else's impression of Bush Sr. was most often an imitation of Carvey's impression.
    • Many dictators like Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein... have also been caricatured as Ax-Crazy lunatics. This is also how they live on in people's perceptions, even though if they were all as nuts as some parodies make them they would have never been able to remain in power for so long.
    • Elvis Presley's greasy quiff has been elongated to such absurd lengths in caricatures that people may actually be surprised to learn it was actually not five foot long in reality.
    • Ringo Starr has been caricatured as a dimwitted Manchild in so many parodies that people may be surprised to realize that he actually is a smart normal behaving adult.
    • Similarly Michael Jackson lives on in many people's collective memory as a naïve Manchild. That he was actually a clever businessman — best selling record of all time, hello! — seems almost a shock to most.
    • Napoleon Bonaparte was caricatured by 19th century British cartoonists as a small dwarf with a large hat. This is also how he lives on in our minds. In reality he was of average height. (He was 5'6.5")
  • Bill Cosby did a retelling of a sketch from an old radio drama called "Lights Out" about a chicken heart that ate up New York City. Since he was a kid, he thought the chicken heart was coming to eat him, and he promptly smeared Jell-O all over his floor and set his sofa on fire to discourage the "monster." Cosby's routine is now much better known than the original sketch. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump...
  • The Chicken Joke: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side". Despite being used as the mascot of joke-telling, it's really a parody of other jokes. Where most jokes end with some kind of pun, "To get to the other side" is a straight answer that only works if the listener was expected something absurd. People are now conditioned to accept the answer as funny without even thinking about it.
  • Plenty of modern media references "Do Not Adjust Your Set" to mean "this weirdness is real". The phrase was first used in this sense in The Outer Limits, but it originated years earlier as a warning to viewers that the station was experiencing technical difficulties. "Do Not Adjust Your Set" meant "the problem's on our end, not yours, so don't go fiddling with the antenna".
  • The expression "technical difficulties" is now highly likely to be used as a euphemism for a person (or even a society) going insane, or even for something disastrous or off-color (as, most hilariously, in Problem Child 2), rather than something as mundane as a problem with a broadcaster's equipment.
  • Weird Al, who loved Dr. Demento and got his start on the show, probably laments the fact that the still-running Dr. Demento show has been almost forgotten except by connection to him. (To wit, he's gone internet-only.)
  • Any cartoon, video game, film, etc. made prior to The '90s that wasn't Disney-popular that was parodied in and after The '90s will get this effect in Eastern Europe due to that region locked away from Western pop-culture for 50 years (where only the very best of the West passed the border).
    • Other communist countries like China and especially North Korea also suffer from this. China has opened up more to the West since Mao Zedong's death, but North Korea remains the most isolated country in the world.
    • The same happened in Nazi occupied Europe during World War Two. A lot of early 1940s American films only reached the European continent after the end of the war. This also explains why so many comedians from the interbellum (Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin) remained far more popular and well known in Europe than American comedians who made their debut during the war (like The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello, for instance). For example, the 1978 Greek entry for the Eurovision Song Contest was the tribute song "Charlie Chaplin". It was intended to mark the then-recent death of Chaplin (he died in 1977), and primarily refers to his still-popular "Little Tramp" persona.
  • The name "Barcalounger" (the brand of reclining chair) is a play on a the name of a type of sailing ship, the Barca-longa. No one but naval historians and readers of the Aubrey-Maturin series (which are not such distinct populations) would know that now.
  • Cracked goes meta with this in "6 Things Our Kids Just Won't Get", which includes the save icon (floppy disk), time-related TV activities such as Saturday morning cartoons (thanks to cable becoming commonplace and DVRs which allow people to watch things whenever they want), and common older sitcom plots, such as plots when someone gets lost (nowadays people would just call them on a cell phone).
  • Applejack was originally a potent form of distilled apple brandy. However, for the last few decades it has been more commonly known as a breakfast cereal that once counterintuitively used the fact that it doesn't taste like apples as a marketing gimmick. And now that the cereal commercials aren't airing as frequently, a lot of people now associate "Applejack" with the My Little Pony character of the same name.
  • The McIntosh apple dates back to 1811. No, not an Apple Macintosh, a McIntosh apple. Apple named the computer after a type of apple. Averted in the case of most Canadians, since the McIntosh apple was first bred here.
  • Chucky, from Child's Play, is believed to have been based on a real toy called "My Buddy", which was only slightly less creepy. Other people believe that he was based on the "That Kid" doll.note 
  • Anyone growing up in the US in the last 50 years will be more likely to recognize the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., than (s)he will to recognize the name of Martin Luther, whom Dr. King was named after.
  • Any denizen of the Internet knows about demotivational posters. On the other hand, the kind of motivational posters they're based on aren't nearly as well-known, especially outside the USA.
    • Anyone who's worked in any kind of office environment is likely to recognize them, or at the very least take a closer look to see if it's a demotivator or the real thing.
  • The term "shooting brake" is now making a comeback, on which the definition is generally accepted as a type of station wagon that has a coupe-like roofline, with only two doors instead of five. The common belief was that the term was just an archaic name for the more familiar station wagon or estate, but nobody realizes that term originated from roofed carriages that are normally used as hunting vehicles, complete with storage for guns and ammunition. Only after the rise of motorized vehicles did shooting brakes evolved into customized wagons used for hunting towards the present form.
    • Similarly, the term "brake". Unlike the apparatus that forces the vehicle to slow down, these brakes are used to refer as carriages that "break-in" spirited horses (read: tame hyper horses for carriage work). The only usage for this term is on French car companies, only because the French word for station wagon is "break."
  • Any old black and white movie from the first half of the 20th century has scratches and missing frames on the pellicule. This has led many younger generations to believe those scratches and missing frames were actually made on purpose! As if these films have always been in bad shape.
  • Oreos, "Milk's Favorite Cookie", are actually a shameless knockoff of a brand called "Hydrox". However, the immense popularity of Oreos forced Hydrox into obscurity, and people nowadays believe that Hydrox is the knockoff (to the extent that the bulk of poor Hydrox's advertising now centers around pointing out they were on the market first).
  • Many street names are named after famous people. Some of them very famous to this day, others haven fallen in such obscurity that you have to consult an encyclopaedia to find out who they were and what they did to earn a street named after them. Although, in some cases (like Adelaide, South Australia), the street naming committee just named the streets after their own members, because they could, basically invoking this.
  • Chef Al Yeganeh, the New York proprietor of "Soup Kitchen International" (later "The Original Soupman"), and the real life inspiration for Seinfeld's Soup Nazi was in buisness about ten years prior to the episode that made him famous. Despite his insistence to the contrary, prior to Seinfeld, Al Yeganeh was an obscure New York figure known mostly to certain circles of affluent late 80s/early 90s Manhattan yuppies who were willing to pay $30 for a pint of soup. Nearly everyone else knows of him because of the Soup Nazi episode. In one TV interview, he seriously claims that he made Seinfeld famous. In an interesting subversion of the trope, many feel that the Seinfeld version is relatively tame compared to the real man who has been known to use profanities such as calling a female reporter a "bitch" on camera in one instance.
  • Conservative cultural critic Rod Dreher came up with the term “earwabbit” to describe when you can't hear a traditional song or piece of classical music without thinking of a pop culture spoof. He chose “earwabbit” as a reference to the Looney Tunes spoof of “Ride of the Valkyries”, which is discussed elsewhere on this page.
  • Brown Windsor Soup is a by-word for disgusting British cookery at its early-to-mid-twentieth-century nadir. Problem is, there are no reliable references to it existing before the mid-1940s, and the majority of references for the first few decades afterwards are Self-Deprecation jokes about horrible British railway/hotel/restaurant cuisine. In fact, it appears to have originally begun as a comic reference to a real, but now forgotten product called Brown Windsor soap, obviously the reverse of anything made for human consumption. Despite this, some "traditional British" cookbooks and websites, including Jamie Oliver's, have attempted to reverse engineer an (edible) Brown Windsor Soup, usually involving some kind of meat consomme.

Alternative Title(s): Parody Displacement, The Weird Al Effect, Parodied Up

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