Parody Displacement / Live-Action Films

Mel Brooks

• 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 held a patent for radio frequency-hopping) 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.
  • Few people know who Randolph Scott or Richard Dix are anymore.
  • "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!" is a reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (where the proper quote was "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.") and has become the more common quote to refer to.
• 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.
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights is probably better remembered by its fans 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).
  • Robin Hood: “Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.”
• 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.

Other

• Many Hollywood actors of the 1930s and 1940s are only familiar to younger generations as a result of their caricatures in old Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, not from the movies that made them famous.
• Kenneth Alford's 1914 tune "Colonel Bogey March" is now best known as "that whistling tune from The Bridge on the River Kwai” (or “the Dink song”). 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.
• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker:
  • Airplane! (1980) lifts, often word for word, the story of a 1950s disaster movie called Zero Hour! (1957) (itself a remake of a Canadian television play). 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 the '70s disaster films, especially 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.
    • The 60 Minutes segment Point/Counterpoint, where a liberal and a conservative debate on current events, and its conservative commentator James Kilpatrick, only live on in the public consciousness from the Kilpatrick parody in the film.
      "Shana, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"
    • The joke with a copilot who's played by (and seemingly really is) basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a particularly silly reference to the original Zero Hour!, where the co-pilot was played by Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch, a popular football player at the time who was trying to break into film. The number of people who remember both Zero Hour! and Hirsch today is pretty small.
    • In one scene a wife is surprised to see her husband have a second cup of coffee, saying "Jim never has a second cup at home", and is similarly surprised when he later vomits. Few people today will realize that this is actually riffing on a 1970s ad campaign for the now obscure Yuban coffee brand. They even used the same actress.
  • People who watch Top Secret! today do not realize that Hilary's "backstory" is a send-up of the 1980 film adaptation of The Blue Lagoon, a film that was popular in its day but is only recalled today by hardcore fans of that version's star Brooke Shields.

• 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 stock characters in the 50s.
  • It is an adaptation of the now long-forgotten dramatic Peter George's 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 likely to encounter Citizen Kane through a parody or reference in a children's cartoon years before you even hear of the film itself - especially the word "rosebud".
• 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 appeared 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!.
  • Few realize that Dr. Evil's diminutive clone, Mini-Me, was a parody of Majai, the miniature version of Dr. Moreau played by Nelson de la Rosa from The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), who was added to that movie at the insistence of Marlon Brando, who played Moreau, given that The Island of Dr. Moreau was a critical and financial flop more known for its infamously Troubled Production than anything else.
• 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.
  • Some people who grew up watching Animaniacs will associate it with The Goodfeathers, who occasionally used this catchphrase.
    • Similarly, many people are familiar with the Goodfeathers but have never heard of "Goodfellas". This includes people who are old enough to remember a time when Animaniacs didn't exist.
• The LOVE/HATE tattoos that 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 close-ups 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 elaborate puppet show/play in the episode "Sock Opera". Younger viewers usually will only be familiar with the costume as what Dipper wears during the play while possessed by Bill nearly the whole time, and by extension as the Iconic Outfit of Bill-possessed Dipper (aka Bipper).
• Bruce Lee is so ubiquitously parodied (specially the Funny Bruce Lee Noises in fight scenes) 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 Karate Kiba. 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 recognize the films themselves. For example, the "bouncing bombs" or the "throwing a ball against the wall in a prison cell" are widely recognized 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 recognize 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 to be a Christmas Tradition for many years.
  • Most kids who played the "Grape Escape" board game had no idea that its name was a pun.
• 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.)
• 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 a legend that she said it the way Elizabeth Taylor 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 Gumber Pyle, a reference to Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. from The Andy Griffith Show. Nowadays people associate the name Gumber/Gomer Pyle with the movie, and most are unaware it's not his real name.
• Probably more people nowadays recognize "Here's Johnny!!!" as something Jack Nicholson said in The Shining than as Ed McMahon's introduction of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, to the point that some people think the character is named Johnny. His actual name is Jack Torrance, although the book clarifies that his full name is Jonathan.
• 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 That is, if they don't think of Sting, the obscure Eddie Murphy/Robert De Niro film Showtime, or Creepshow.
• 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 similar phrase "I can see Russia from my house", from Saturday Night Live, became more famous than the real Sarah Palin quote which inspired it, "you can see Russia from land in Alaska", to the point where many people believed that the SNL line was something she actually said.
• 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, released 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.
• 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. Viewers are also likely to miss the then-Casting Gag of Kathleen Turner as a character believed to be a Femme Fatale but who turns out to be Good All Along - it was a parody of her Star-Making Role as a straight Femme Fatale in Body Heat.
• Nobody outside of Germany would have ever heard of Downfall if not for the much more famous "Hitler Rants" parodies of it.
• 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.
  • The brief appearance by a "black and white digitization of Humphrey Bogart" as one of the assigned police partners is sending up the uproar created the previous year when an ad for Diet Coke used CGI to turn Bogart, James Cagney, and Louis Armstrong into posthumous pitchmen for a modern soft drink.
• 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?
• Maurice Chevalier's distinctive French accent and hon hon laugh are still imitated to this day whenever English people try and imitate a Frenchman^note A joke about this in History of the World Part I is the trope namer for Just a Stupid Accent. Yet virtually almost nobody today has a clue that they are indirectly referencing him. They may think of a certain talking candlestick, 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 real-life tragedy, but is mostly forgotten nowadays aside from its Ralph Vaughan Williams soundtrack (the concert version being titled "Sinfonia antartica").
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
  • Parts of the film are jokes on the Broadway musical Camelot, especially the scene where the knights arrive at Camelot and immediately watch a musical number before deciding that Camelot is "a silly place." It's also most likely the reason the musical adaptation of the film was named Spamalot. As the Broadway musical hasn't been run regularly since the Kennedy administration (hence why "Camelot" is a common name for that period), the Camelot sequence comes off as pretty random to modern viewers, as does the idea of naming the musical after a comparatively innocuous line from said sequence.
  • The Intermission scene was parodying the at-the-time common practice in the Roadshow Theatrical Release, which essentially died out in the early 70s (bonus points: many of these films were musicals, including the 1967 adaptation of Camelot). Nowadays, intermissions in film are much, much rarer, particularly ones that look anything like the one in the film, and even home releases of films that do feature intermissions tend to cut them out.
• Potted Groot dancing at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) 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 gangsters, 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. Even less known is the fact that "Boogaloo" refers to one of the breakdancers' nicknames.
• 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."
• Most kids who watched the Disney Channel Original Movie "Teen Beach Movie" were most likely unaware that it was a spoof of the teen beach movie series of the 60s starring Frankie Avalon and famous Mouseketeer Annette Funicello.
• The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters was a parody of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Anyone who tells you that Stay-Puft is a real brand of marshmallows, and that the Stay-Puft Man was their real mascot, is trying to confuse you and turn you to the Dark Side.
• Tiger & Crane Fists was a rather obscure kung-fu film. Nowadays is mostly remembered as the movie that Kung Pow! Enter the Fist parodies.
• Singin' in the Rain was itself a satirical pastiche of Hollywood musicals. All but one of the songs are from earlier films. Many of the characters are references to early Hollywood royalty. And while those many films are forgotten, Singin' in the Rain tops every list of Best Movie Musicals.
• The 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser inspired a number of video games, including Quake II, Turok, and Shadow Warrior (1997), to add a railgun weapon to their arsenals rather similar to the ones in the film. Eraser is now far less remembered than many of those games.
• Ace Ventura offers two cases, as the first movie's Unsettling Gender-Reveal is followed by a reference to The Crying Game, down to including the eponymous song, and the sequel opens with a botched raccoon rescue parodying the first scene of Cliffhanger, and younger viewers decades later will probably not be acquainted with those then-recent films. An eventual aversion happened with the scene in the first featuring the Mission: Impossible theme, as some moviegoers upon its 1994 release did not know that was a reference, but two years later Tom Cruise made sure everyone knew.
• While The Brady Bunch is still well-remembered, the popular "Sure, Jan" meme is actually from the parody film A Very Brady Sequel, something casual fans or those who didn't grow up watching the 70's show might not know.
• The Beach Kiss between Burt Lancaster's and Deborah Kerr's characters in From Here to Eternity which everyone has mimicked or spoofed was actually an allusion to a similar scene between Jean Simmons' and Donald Houston's characters in The Blue Lagoon (1949), which was released four years earlier.
• In a similar case to Top Secret!, people who watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High today will not realize that the "where-are-they-now" joke that involved Jeff Spicoli saving Brooke Shields from drowning is actually an allusion to the 1980 movie adaptation of The Blue Lagoon.
• The "Say hello to my little friend" quote from Scarface (1983) was actually an allusion to Pan Am's 1980 slogan "Say Hello to Pan Am", which Pan Am introduced after their merger with National Airlines was complete, which no one remembers today.

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