There’s a curious phenomenon in movies where movies which are spoofs of a genre can be some of the greatest entries in the genre and even epitomize it. Examples aren’t hard to come by: Galaxy Quest is one of the best Star Trek movies ever made. True Lies is an excellent James Bond movie. Last Action Hero is one of the great 80s action flicks. Support Your Local Sheriff is a fantastic western. Hogan’s Heroes (admittedly, TV series) is a great entry in WW2 storytelling.

Not all spoofs are good entries in their genre, though. The example which leaps to mind is Scary Movie, which wasn’t a good horror film (though this might be related to it not being all that good of a movie). Perhaps more relevant, since it was a good movie, is Spaceballs. Though a great Mel Brooks movie, it was not a good space opera movie1¹.

So what is the difference? Or, to shift the emphasis a bit: what is it that makes a spoof the epitome of its genre?

Truth to tell, I’m not entirely sure, but I think that the key ingredient is that the spoof must take its jokes seriously. To use Galaxy quest as an example: the central joke is that aliens watched episodes of an old Star Trek style show, thought it was real, built a copy of the ship they saw from the “documentaries”, and then found the “crew” in order to operate it in order to defeat the bad guy trying to conquer them. The hilarious absurdities in the show generally all follow from taking this premise seriously; a collection of actors tries to learn how to do what they had pretended to do in order to not be killed by the entirely serious evil alien who wants to conquer them. The movie is filled with jokes, but they always work with the story being told. For example, when the characters have to go through a hallway which has periodic jets of flame and large stomping… things… that require one to run and pause with a particular sequence, it’s absurd and the actors curse the writer who added this to an episode, but they are cursing the writer precisely because they have to now do it for real or get burned to death or stomped to death. Thus when the actors get through (with the help of a phone call to some obsessed teenage fans who have every episode on tape and walk them through the sequence), it’s genuinely exciting and means something to the characters who are now not dead but who could easily have just been dead (within the pretend of the movie, of course). While the scene is hilarious, it is also satisfying as space opera where people who are unprepared have to survive technology far outside of their normal experience.

Contrast this with the scene in Space Balls where the heroes are running away, dive through a closing door, and get captured in a nearby room. As the captain is telling them that it was a nice stunt but all for naught and they can never win, they turn around and are clearly not the main characters. He he stops mid-speech, then shouts at the guards, “these are not them, you idiots, you’ve captured their stunt doubles! Search the area!” In context, it’s extremely funny, but it is in no way satisfying as space opera. Stunt doubles are explicitly a reference to the fact that this is a movie, shattering the suspension of disbelief. Even apart from that, capturing a group of people while thinking that they’re another group of people is neither common in space opera nor related to the central theme of fantastic yet relatable worlds. Again, just to be clear, this doesn’t make it bad. It only makes it not-in-the-genre.

I think, then, that when a spoof takes its premise completely seriously and derives the humor primarily through exaggeration, often from a highly exaggerated premise, it can epitomize the genre precisely because, being a spoof, it tries to cram in as much as it can of what is common to movies in the genre. This will tend to bring in the essence of the genre.

Which is almost the opposite of what normal movies in a genre try to do.

Each real movie in a genre is trying to distinguish itself from the others in the genre. It seeks to explore something not yet explored, or to look at the genre from a new perspective. Each movie justifies its existence by being a little different. One might be tempted, therefore, to look to the first movie in a genre, but it frequently does not realize that it’s in its own genre. More rare, still, is that initial movie understanding all of the implications of its genre.

Consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Is it the first of its genre? It’s the first of a sub-genre, perhaps. It was meant by George Lucas as a throwback (or homage, if you prefer) to older science fiction stories, like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. But if you watch the original Buck Rogers—or go back further to the original comic strips—you’ll find that it’s not what you think of us as typical Science Fiction. There is, after all, a reason why it’s not commonly watched anymore.

Which yields the curious conclusion that if anything is going to be the epitome of a genre, the most likely movie to be the epitome of a genre is a spoof.

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1. I love Spaceballs and have watched it many times; it’s not a criticism of the film to say it wasn’t good space opera since it wasn’t trying to be. ↩︎