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Biting the hand...

Characters from Team America: World Police
  • Posted at 5:00pm
  • 06 June 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the movies it's parody rather than imitation that counts. You know your film has entered the wider public consciousness when someone is prepared to invest manpower and money in taking the Michael out of it.

For me, timing is everything, and not just in terms of the jokes. The self-explanatory Superhero Movie, now in cinemas, parodies Spider-Man, an ongoing franchise, as well as other comic-book staples, and strikes me as opportunistic.

Team America: World Police, an exquisitely executed and scurrilous send-up of the string-puppet likes of Thunderbirds from the team behind TV's South Park, puts a modern geopolitical spin on a technique that's 40 years old. You can hardly accuse them of cashing in on a current trend.

Likewise the entertaining Galaxy Quest, which lampooned not Star Trek itself, but the convention circuit that keeps it alive. Even William Shatner thought it "very funny".

The movie spoof can be a thing of observant, subtle wonder, if it's done right - see such pivotal entries in the canon as This Is Spinal Tap, Airplane! and anything by Mel Brooks in his 1970s heyday - Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein (which was so affectionate it even used some of the original lab props from the 1931 Frankenstein).

Brooks even pulled some kudos back in the early 1990s with Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

The feature-length parody can also be a cheap, parasitic shot aimed at the easily pleased demographic - I'm thinking of the voracious (and successful) Scary Movie franchise, whose shoddiness is all the more galling for the involvement of producer/director David Zucker and writer Jim Abrahams, who worked on Airplane! and the Naked Gun films.

Speaking of which, Leslie Nielsen, who has enjoyed a second career in such send-ups, cameos in Superhero Movie.

The spoof is not new. Abbott and Costello sent up classic Universal horror movies - Frankenstein, The Mummy and others - for Universal in the 1940s and 50s. And by the time of 1969's Support Your Local Sheriff!, some say that the western had descended into parody anyway.

I'm waiting for somebody to make a movie spoofing movie spoofs - that should put an end to it.

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