For the Laughs - Ray Tabler

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings

For the Laughs – Parody in Science Fiction and Fantasy

By Ray Tabler

A sign of a healthy fandom is the ability and a willingness to laugh at itself. Thus, is born the parody. Depending on the size of the fan base, parodies of a book, TV show, movie, or franchise can loom large on its own. Here are some parodies in science fiction and fantasy. I have surely missed some. Please feel free to point those out.

In my view, a true parody must come from the outside. A franchise can make fun of itself, and be hilarious. Star Trek Below Decks is an entire parody series of the Star Trek canon. The French Mistake episode of Supernatural, where the characters find themselves in an alternate time line in which their lives are the subject of a popular TV show, is a case in point. Both are great. But they are exceptions which prove the rule.

Parodies come in several flavors. A direct parody is an obvious lampoon of a specific story, Galaxy Quest (Star Trek), Spaceballs (Star Wars), Land of the Lost (Land of the Lost). An indirect parody takes aim at a type of story, Ideocracy, 5^th Element, Young Frankenstein. Then there is the pseudo or reverse parody, Darkstar, Groundhog Day. More on each below.

Direct Parody – This is the sure-fire bet, because they come with a built-in fan base. At least, as certain as any creative endeavor is of success. Galaxy Quest drafted off of Star Trek, poking good natured fun at an avid fandom. And it managed to affirm the underlying message of Star Trek in the process. Not an easy task for a parody. Spaceballs is a mostly shot-for-shot lampoon of Star Wars. Mel Brooks, the producer plays it strictly for laughs, as always. Brooks is Mr. Parody, and more on his work later.

Deserving special attention is Bored of the Rings, a send up of Lord of the Rings. It used to be a book known only to the hard-core Tolkien fans, tattered, dog-eared paperback copies of the Harvard Lampoon work passed around during breaks from serial die rolling. But, with the popularity of the Peter Jackson films, a much wider audience guffaws at the jokes. Examples? Characters Frito, Goodgulf, Arrowroot (son of Arrowshirt), Gimlet the dwarf, and Legolam the elf. They’re traveling to the Land of Fodor, which is adjacent to the Land of Two-dor. The capitol of Two-dor is a city named Minas Troney. There’s a Nordic shield maiden named Eorache, from who Arrowroot has a lot more to worry about than foul-tasting soup. Written in 1969, the book’s a bit dated, but still hilarious.

The 2009 movie Land of the Lost is a direct parody of the 1970s TV show of the same name. In both, a trio falls through a portal to a pocket universe (?) littered with missing people, animals, and things from history. The TV show is for kids. The movie is definitely not, featuring a disgraced scientist, his beautiful assistant, and some trailer park resident picked up along the way. (“Little rule l live by, Never trust a dude in a tunic.”) Sounds weird, but it works.

The Robin Hood legend has been redone, rebooted, and re-imagined more times than I can count. There are even a couple of parodies. Robin Hood-Men in Tights is a Brooksian retelling of two different movies rolled into one, The Legend of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn, 1938) and Robin Hood-Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Costner). It does not disappoint. Mel Brooks also produced a short-lived Robin Hood TV show, When Things Were Rotten.

Indirect Parody – Indirect parodies focus on a type of story to lampoon, possibly to avoid lawsuits. The movie Ideocracy is a “sleeper awakens” story, a sub-sub-genre of science fiction based on a book called, appropriately enough, The Sleeper Awakes. H. G. Wells wrote this novel in 1899, about a man who sleeps for 200 years, coming to in a steam-punk 22^nd century. Dystopian adventure ensues. This is just too good a setting, and numerous other works use it for inspiration. Including a few parodies.

The protagonist of Ideocracy, thanks to a suspended animation experiment, wakes up in a future when the average intelligence is…lower. I highly recommend. In the movie Sleeper, Woody Allen meets a similar fate. Among other differences, people in the Sleeper future think a low fat, high fiber diet is extremely unhealthy.

Another, little-known, Sleeper Awakes parody is the 1930 movie Just Imagine. A man falls asleep in 1930, and wakes up in far future time of 1980. There’s singing and dancing. People have numbers instead of names, and fly around in small, personal airplanes. Been a while since I’ve seen this movie, but one memorable aspect is a bit of dialog about hoping to have prohibition repealed soon, almost 50 years after it was actually scrapped.

The 5th Element is a parody of space operas. Bruce Willis plays a cashiered, down on his luck, special forces operator, reactivated for a mission to save a beautiful alien being, and defeat nasty, evil forces on an art deco future Earth. The film Ice Pirates plows similar ground. Buckaroo Bonzai, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Pluto Nash, and Space Truckers all seem to be lampoons of other tales, but you can’t quite put a finger on which. They are parodies of science fiction tropes, and all are funny in their own way.

Parodies of fantasy tropes exist as well. The above-mentioned Bored of the Rings aside, I can think of five. The Princess Bride is a very popular send up of the bed-time fairy tale. As is, Ella Enchanted. (I know. Mainly Cinderella, but there’s more thrown in.) Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a dudgeon crawl, hijacked by Monty Python and the Three Stooges. Your Highness, with Danny McBride, is entertaining, but probably owes any success to Natalie Portman in a chain-mail bikini. Galavant was a fantasy TV show, which fits the definition of a parody. But Galavant stands on its own as a story, an oddity for parodies.

And then there’s monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolves, all heavily parodied, may have started out as distinct stories. But they are so intertwined with our culture now, and each other, that it is impossible to separate them. Mel Brooks, Mr. Parody, lampooned Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein, and Dracula in Dead and Loving It. Vampires are the subject of Love at First Bite, and the What We Do in the Shadows TV show. Teen Wolf looks at the humorous side of being an adolescent werewolf. And The Munsters includes vampires, Frankenstein, and werewolves all in the same “average” American family.

Pseudo or Reverse Parody – Some parodies aren’t parodies, until later on. The movie Groundhog Day is about a man caught in an almost inescapable time loop. Time loops were not unknown before this movie, but Groundhog Day opened the sluice gates for a flood of copycat tales. The concept is very adaptable, adapted to horror (Happy Death Day), science fiction (Edge of Tomorrow), and rom com (50 First Dates). Hence, I think of it as a reverse or pseudo parody.

Another film which falls into this category is Darkstar. John Carpenter made this low-budget movie as a student project in film school. It’s the story of a long-duration space mission, tasked with blowing up alien planets which (someday) might threaten humanity. The ship’s falling apart. The crew’s demoralized. And they have a bunch of planet-busting smart bombs in the cargo hold, which (truth be told) are a bit too smart. (“Bomb 27, ready to explode!”) Some think that Darkstar inspired aspects of the movie Alien. The producers of Red Dwarf admit that Darkstar provided the seed for that TV show.

Groundhog Day and Darkstar are parodies which came first.

Science fiction and fantasy are genres which lend themselves to parodies. Because there are no limits to how crazy the settings and events depicted can get. That can be used for purposes of social satire, or the author can just play it for laughs. In fact, you can do both at once.

END.

Reference links:

· Galaxy Quest https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_4_tt_7_nm_0_in_0_q_galaxy

· Spaceballs https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/

· Bored of the Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings

· Land of the Lost https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457400/

· Robin Hood

o Legend of Robin Hood (1938) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029843/?ref_=nm_knf_c_1,

o Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102798/

· The Sleeper Awakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes

· Ideocracy https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

· Sleeper https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/

· Just Imagine https://zipcon.net/~swhite/docs/filum/sci-fi_30s.html#just_imagine

· 5^th Element https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/

· Buckaroo Banzai https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/

· Ice Pirates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Pirates

· Attack of the Killer Tomatoes https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080391/

· Pluto Nash https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180052/

· Space Truckers https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120199/

· Princess Bride https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/

· Ella Enchanted https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327679/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_49