Movie parody
A film parody is a film comedy that imitates known scenes or storylines from other films or also common clichés of entire film genres as a parody humorously distorted, exaggerated or mocking.
style
In the film parody, a model is usually imitated and reference is made to individual scenes from it or from other works of the same genre. The scenes, which are mostly serious in the original, are exaggerated into satirical or caricatural aspects or are humorous modified with slapstick inserts. The comic effects are greater, the greater the height of fall from the parodied to the parody. The film parody depends on the audience being able to relate to the parodied work. In addition to the humorous claim, the comedy is sometimes a means of dark and shrill criticism of society or the system.
Figures from the parodied work are sometimes presented in a humorous form, which can be understood as a caricature or an homage . Occasionally, the humor of the parody is also generated by guest appearances by actors from the work parodied in the corresponding scene, e.g. B. Bruce Willis ' cameo in Loaded Weapon 1 in the look of his role as John McLaine in the films of the film series Die Hard or the short appearance of James Doohan as engineer Scotty in the same film.
history
As early as 1905, The Little Train Robbery, the very first western The Great Train Robbery from 1903, was parodied. In addition to the example in the picture Mud and Sand , there was the parody of Die Karawane , which satirized the original English title The Covered Wagon with The Uncovered Wagon .
Also the films of the Carry-on ... film series made in the United Kingdom from 1958 onwards , which include agent films ( Ist ja crazy - Agents on the powder keg , 1964), pirate films ( Ist ja crazy - 'ne abbeckelte frigate , 1963) and monumental films ( It's crazy - Caesar loves Cleopatra , 1964) parodied, but without taking direct reference to individual films as a “role model”. From the end of the 1960s, the British comedy group Monty Python first shaped the genre on European television with Monty Python's Flying Circus , later also in several films (e.g. The Knights of the Coconut (1975) as a parody of The Knights of the Round Table ) the movie parodies. For the American film industry, Mel Brooks was a well-known film parodist, who created the western parody The Wild Wild West in 1974 and parodied the Star Wars series with Spaceballs in 1987 . At the beginning of the 1980s, the team around David Zucker , Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker ( ZAZ ) became known through the disaster film parody The Incredible Journey in a Crazy Airplane , which went on until the 1990s and later. a. with the film series Die Nackte Kanone and Hot Shots! remained successful.
Since the 1990s it was common for successful film productions to result in parodies. In 1993, Lethal Weapon became the parody Loaded Weapon 1 , and the horror films in the Scream series (from 1996) became the parody film series Scary Movie (since 2000). While the commercially successful parodies of the 1980s and 1990s received mostly positive reviews, newer works in the genre, such as the film Meine Frau, die Spartaner und I (2008, a parody of 300 ), were often denied any quality. Even commercially, current parodies such as Date Movie (2006) or Disaster Movie (2008) could not tie in with earlier films of the genre. Nevertheless, up to the present day, film parodies of the latest possible film productions are regularly published, for example, Die Pute von Panem appeared in early 2014 as a parody of the current and commercially successful film series The Hunger Games .
In German-speaking television, the concept of the film parody found its equivalent in programs such as Kalkofes Mattscheibe and Switch reloaded since the 1990s . In German cinemas in 2001 Michael Herbig achieved an artistic and commercial surprise success with the Winnetou parody Der Schuh des Manitu , an indirect sequel in 2004 with (T) Raumschiff Surprise , a parody of Star Trek , Star Wars and numerous other films found. The success of Der Schuh des Manitu drew further film parodies in German cinema such as Der Wixxer (a parody of the Edgar Wallace films ) or the fairy tale film parody Seven Dwarfs - Men Alone in the Forest (both 2004). Also in 2004, emerged in the Switzerland with The Ring Thing , a low-budget parody of the Lord of the Rings -Filmtrilogie . In 2008, the German TV station Pro Sieben produced four parodic TV films with the Funny Movie series ; two more films in the series followed in 2011, but were no longer able to match the ratings success of the first four films.
literature
- Wes D. Gehring: Parody as film genre . Westport, Conn. [...]: Greenwood Press 1999.
- Dan Harries: film parody . London: British Film Institute 2000.
- Cécile Sorin: Pratiques de la parodie et du pastiche au cinéma . Paris: L'Harmattan 2010.
Web links
- Philipp Brunner: Parody in the dictionary of film terms.