A lot of parody media from the internet is guilty of this trope, mainly thanks to some creators just wanting to jump on current trends to parody/mock just to gain some kind of fame or notoriety. Usually without knowing anything about the subject they are parodying/mocking.
- Lampshaded by The Angry Video Game Nerd when reviewing the video game adaptation of Rocky and Bullwinkle when he fails to give even a synopsis and then just admits he's never seen the show. Thankfully it's also averted as the game itself gives him more than enough material to parody without even touching the source material.Nerd: Rocky and Bullwinkle on NES. Based on the cartoon... um... the cartoon... about a moose and a squirrel. (Beat) Do I have to see everything?
- Bart Baker's YouTube parodies of famous songs sometimes fall into this; namely, situations like his parody of Ariana Grande's Focus. It focuses entirely on Ariana Grande being secretly transgender, when the actual song was a stereotypical pop tune that had absolutely nothing to do with that whatsoever.
- YouTube contributor Ben Loka posted a video titled "My Life if it were an episode of Lost"
which isn't completely accurate. At the end, he apologizes to other Lost fans, admits that the video is nothing like the show, and recommends watching the actual show which he says is much better. - BuzzFeed: The video ''If Disney Princesses Were Real'' features several shallow parodies of the Disney Princesses.
- Cinderella, for example, is portrayed as an attention-seeking, man-dependent whiner who seemingly hates her stepfamily for no reason. This completely ignores the fact that in the original movie, Cinderella was abused and enslaved by her stepmother and stepsisters since childhood, and wasn't even saved by the prince in the first place.note
- Anna is portrayed as a slut always on the lookout for men, and Elsa is portrayed as an "Ice-cold bitch" who willingly endangers anyone because she can't be bothered to unfreeze anything. This has several problems, as Anna in the movie only wanted to marry Hans right away because she was attention-starved her entire life and wanted to find true personal connection.note And Elsa never wanted to freeze Arendelle on purpose, this only happened because she couldn't properly control her powers and her fear was making it worse.
- Belle has a "not like other girls"/"I can fix him" shtick. Despite Belle in the movie being anything but. Movie!Belle doesn't think she's different for reading books, the town does, and she doesn't fall in love with the Beast because he's a jerkass. She only begins to love him AFTER he stops being a jerkass. To make the video's point extra moot is that they completely forgot that Belle spends a good portion of the movie warding off the advances of the chauvinistic a-hole Gaston.
- Pocahontas is a cloudcuckoolander environmental extremist who hates anything modern. While Pocahontas was in-tune with nature in the movie, she wasn't a nutcase. If anything she was more than willing to learn about the European World as long as it didn't intrude in her own people's lives. Her inclusion in the video at all is rather odd considering that... Well... Pocahontas WAS a real person.
- Jasmine is shown to encourage petty theft in the video. But aside from an apple she gave to a hungry child, she never actually steals anything in the movie. It's ALADDIN who's the thief.
- Rapunzel is portrayed as a whimpering crybaby who's scared at the mere sight of spaghetti. While Rapunzel in the film was certainly nervous about stepping out of her tower, that was only because her mother ingrained fear of the outside world into her, and she doesn't even remain that way for long. She was able to sway a bar full of ruffians onto her side almost instantly, that doesn't sound like the actions of a complete coward.
- Ariel states that she only became a human to be with a man, despite already having an interest in the human world before falling for Eric.
- The Cinema Snob: Brad Jones bases his reviewer persona on your typical snobbish movie critic, complete with making shout-outs to pretentious film directors such a critic would like. The main inspiration is Roger Ebert, whom Brad actually respects. When you check out many of Brad's other reviews and movie discussions on his site you quickly notice that the character is mostly based around his dislike of pretentious arthouse movies and the critics who tend to praise these movies instead of the exploitation films he enjoys. Brad has admitted he's never actually seen many of the arthouse films he has his character praising. So, in a sense, he's attacking an entire movie genre that he really doesn't watch and has a preconceived dislike of, making it very unfair to act as if all these movies are all the same kind of needlessly non-understandable and pretentious, unwatchable nonsense. This is one case where Flanderization has arguably improved a character; the Snob has moved more and more away from that original characterization into basically being a louder, angrier Brad Jones, which combined with the scope creep (originally the joke was that this pretenious snob was reviewing direct-to-video trash; now he reviews practically everything) has given the show breadth beyond the single-joke parody.
- CollegeHumor / Dropout:
- A video parody about bronies is just a montage of generic nerd jokes with a My Little Pony colored coat of paint on it. Coincidentally, it manages to be a Shallow Parody of Friendship Is Magic at the same time by having the pony figures talk about stereotypical Girly Girl things.
- College Humor also did a video parodying The Hunger Games called "Hunger Games Unabridged," which is all about defying the Nobody Poops trope. A hilarious idea, to be sure, and the video itself is rather well done, but there's just one problem—the "unabridged" excerpts read in the video are written in third-person point of view, whereas the actual series is written from Katniss's first-person point of view.
- Their Starcraft parody "The Worst Starcraft General" has one space marine suggest attacking an enemy without a direct order from the player; this nearly gets him shot for mutiny. The problem with this is, in the real game units actually ARE programmed to attack enemies in their line of sight without a direct order.
- One video is named "If Miyazaki films were like other anime". Apparently, outside of Studio Ghibli movies, the only other anime existing are Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Pokémon and hentai (for example, the Princess Mononoke sketch has the boar demon from the beginning of the movie being instead a Mamoswine with Naughty Tentacles).
- JonTron:
- In his review of Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis he's clearly only familiar with the Super Friends iteration of the character, as not only is that all he references but he actually gets angry when he sees Aquaman with a hook for a hand and calls it out as "fan-fiction". It actually works to the review's favor as not only does it lead to some fairly entertaining outbursts and comments from Jon, but fans of Aquaman are likely to forgive this since they don't want this game anywhere near their franchise in the first place either.
- When he encounters a Non-Nazi Swastika in a bootleg video game adaptation of The Lion King he makes the obvious joke. However, as it leads to actual footage of an Adolf Hitler speech that's been auto-tuned to make it sound like an antisemitic Hakuna Matata which is probably one of the funniest moments in the review, it gets a pass.
- His review of Pokémon Bootlegs spends its every moment on Moemon ripping on its creator and fanbase for being pedophiles, making it pretty clear Jon has no real understanding of Moe Anthropomorphism, Super-Deformed, the Game Mod community (it's not even a bootleg) and spent little if any time actually playing the game.
- Played for humor in Krunkidile's CARTOON HORSE PROGRAM!! and NIGHT OF THE PIZZA BEAR!!, which parody My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Five Nights at Freddy's, respectively. In both videos, it's very evident that Krunkidile is making no effort whatsoever to match the material in favor of focusing on Surreal Humor, getting character names wrong on a regular basis and just flat-out making up the plot summaries. This is contrasted with an occasional joke that reveals an actual familiarity with the source (for instance, making fun of Rarity's lack of focus or an infamous piece of FNAF fanart).
- Mondo Media's Like News shorts repeat one point without parodying much of the content. For example, Charlie Brown is old, or Indiana Jones is old. That's it.
- The Nostalgia Critic:
- The review of Sharknado has a painfully shallow parody of MythBusters that seems to think the entire show is blowing things up with no regard to actual science. It's like they were trying to parody the show based on having seen a couple of commercials. This especially comes through in their portrayal of Kari Bryon, who in the video is implied to only be on the show for there to be a hot chick who makes bad puns, when she is actually just as involved in the show's physical processes as her male teammates.
- He also tends to criticize Harry Potter a lot.
- In his review of The Secret of NIMH 2 Timothy to the Rescue, he specifically in regards to The Chosen One plot, on the basis that having the entire Wizarding World just instantly dub somebody as their hero and savior would not be healthy for a young kid. Which, of course, is one of the main themes of the books. It rather seems like all he knows of the series comes from the films and Pop-Cultural Osmosis.
- In his review of Master of Disguise, he once called Dementors "Ring Wraith rip-offs", despite Dementors and Ring Wraiths being nothing alike besides some vague similarities in terms of appearance.
- Doug also borrows a Shallow Parody joke from Family Guy (see that show's subpage) at least four times in his own reviews: Randy Newman is depicted as if he is nothing more than someone who writes insipid songs about stuff he sees around him. In both shows' cases, Newman's voice is imitated as if he's some kind of mentally handicapped idiot. For the record: Newman has never remotely recorded any song that justifies these parodies, and actually writes songs about far more adult topics that one would assume on basis of these spoofs. Part of this stems from Small Reference Pools — most people only know him, if at all, for the songs he's written for animated features, which are considerably Lighter and Softer.
- He's done this intentionally with movies based on shows before, particularly Pokémon: The First Movie and Thomas and the Magic Railroad, where he sat down and only watched the movies, being entirely unfamiliar with the shows they're based on, and attempts to make sense of just what in the hell is going on. He's taken flak from fans both times for this, but simply explained that he doesn't have time to watch the original shows, that a movie should be self-explanatory and not rely on its source material, and most importantly that it makes for funnier jokes when he doesn't know what's going on. Of course, the Pokémon review begins with about two straight minutes of extremely confused Doug:
Okay, what's a Pokémon? Who's Giovanni? What are those things? Who are you?! Where are we? What, you mean like bring people back from the dead and stuff? What's that thing? Where am I? Is this Earth, are we in another dimension? Is this the past, the future, the present? What's going on, when does this even take place? Oh my God, I'm like one minute into this movie, already I'm totally lost!- An episode of Demo Reel has him parodying the "shooting contest" scene in Skyfall by having Bond simply shoot the guards with the pistol he's given rather than take part in the contest. Even a cursory viewing of the original scene reveals that Bond was given an antique single-shot flintlock, and he was being held at gunpoint by multiple guards with modern pistols, and that Bond actually does escape the scene, in part by using a flintlock to shoot one of the guards.
- His review of the film version of The Wall ends up becoming this, as Doug regularly displays a clear lack of understanding of the album and the era in which it came from.
- He accuses "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" of just pandering to rebellious high schoolers who resent being made into productive members of society and want to feel victimized by their teachers. Pink Floyd's depiction of a school where students are abused and brainwashed into uniform clones devoid of individuality is startlingly accurate of UK boarding schools of the time (in fact, the teacher in charge of the children's choir in the song had to keep the recording a secret for fear of the head teacher shutting it down), and the film includes a scene where a teacher physically beats the young Pink for writing poetry (which was based on an actual event in Waters' youth). He also declares that the film is saying that all teachers are sadist teachers, despite "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" only claiming this to be the case for "certain teachers" and surmising that the Schoolmaster is who he is because of his decaying, abusive marriage. Roger Waters clarified that he's actually for education; what he's against is the kind of education shown in the film, steeped in rote memorization, squelching creativity, and allowing or even encouraging teachers to mistreat their students.
- He refers "Goodbye Blue Sky" as an "Oscar bait song" when it was one of the tracks on the original album and thus wouldn't have qualified for an Oscar when it was made. He also accuses the song's placement as insensitive due to being a song about World War II coming right after "Another Brick in the Wall", a song about high school (claiming it's arguing high school is as bad as the Holocaust). In all versions, there's at least one song separating the parts of "Another Brick in the Wall" from "Goodbye Blue Skies"—on the album, it's "Mother", in the film, it's "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "When the Tigers Broke Free" (these do both deal with school and World War II, but again, it's a film about a British boy born in the early 40s whose father died in the war; those two topics would overlap a lot).
- When discussing "The Trial", Fennah accuses the monsters as being underdeveloped and existing only for spectacle. In the film, none of the monsters in "The Trial" are actually meant to exist beyond being personifications of Pink's self-loathing, meaning that accusing them of not being well-developed is rather baffling when they're not meant to be characters at all. Indeed, three of the five are pretty clearly just preexisting developed characters from the film run through a monstrous filter (the puppet is Pink's schoolmaster, the scorpion is his wife, and the bomber is his mother). The film doesn't even try to hide this, as the line right before the first verse is "Call the schoolmaster!"
- Peter Coffin's parodies of the New Moon trailers are the Tropes Are Not Bad version of this trope. It's also justified, as the intention was to fool Twilight fangirls into thinking they were the real trailers — so he had to make them right after said trailers were first released. And it works; if the videos themselves aren't hilarious enough for you, the angry responses from fans about how they were TRICKED!!!!1111 will be.
- There was an animated parody of The Fine Brothers' React videos that mocks the several React shows they have, but it just devolves into a poor attack on The Fine Bros' business that could just as easily apply to several bigger media companies. There also wasn't even basic research about the shows themselves; there's an angry elderly character named "Richard Fine" who is portrayed as the Fine Bros' father, but the brothers' real father Yehuda Fine has appeared several times on Elders React and is much more of the mellow and Genre Savvy type.
- When the trailer for Unfriended was released, Shane Dawson created a parody of it in which the main joke is that the kids are Too Dumb to Live because they won't just turn off Skype. In the actual film, a major plot point, and one of the very first things the viewer learns, is that Laura is manipulating the characters' computers so that they can't disconnect — and when they try to do so, as in the case of Ken, she kills them almost immediately for it.
- The official Twitter account for the US Marines featured a parody video of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate set to stock footage of Marines, but their only frame of reference appears to be the "A Piercing Screech" trailer for Ridley, as all the character reveal phrases are "...Hit(s) the Big Time!" Such phrases are supposed to be unique to each character, and relevant to them in some waynote . For example, the reveals for Simon Belmont, Richter Belmont, and King K. Rool were accompanied with the phrases, "...Lashes Out!", "...Crosses Over!", and "...Comes Aboard!"
- After the "Everyone is here" trailer for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out, many spoofs featuring random characters came out. While most of them were on point (with the only flaw being that some of them used bits from the original trailer in, so that many times it happened that the wacky casts still feature Mario, Snake, Pichu and Jigglypuff), out of nowhere a subbranch of the meme came out called "Everyone joins the battle!" that... looks nothing like the original trailer, and is just a slideshow of newcomer reveal phrases set to the main theme from Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
- Vinesauce Joel's Garten of Banban video opens up with "The Official Banban Song", which just consist of him listing Mascot Horror characters, including from other series like Poppy Playtime and Choo-Choo Charles, ending with a heavy metal version of the Toreador March. Joel then immediately admits that he made the song without knowing anything about Banban, with the song actually being based on an edit of a video where a kid looks at Mascot Horror characters in Roblox, making this a very much intentional case of this trope.
- The "What if 4Kids got X" meme is based on doing ridiculous edits on anime as a Take That! on 4Kids's practices. Instead of doing things 4Kids actually did such as censoring acts of violence and generally making things culturally neutral, however, a bunch of people think that all you need to do it is just replace the audio on the chosen anime's opening with the "Mew Mew Power" theme song or change their names to a similar sounding western name. Another part of these parodies is applying the same treatment to anime that were never intended for kids in the first place, like Higurashi: When They Cry becoming Casey and Friends, rather than the Shonen and occasionally Shoujo series that they actually licensed.
