Spaceballs
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Host Cecelia Sutton reveals the origins of parody and some famous examples.
Host Cecelia Sutton reveals the origins of parody and some famous examples in both film and literature.
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SATURDAY NIGHT CINEMA is a local public television program presented by KSPS PBS
Spaceballs
Clip | 3m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
Host Cecelia Sutton reveals the origins of parody and some famous examples in both film and literature.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Hey Space Invaders.
My name is Cecelia, and I'm here to present my web extra on the science fiction parody film “Spaceballs”.
This film primarily parodies the original Star Wars trilogy, but it also includes references to Star Trek, Alien, The Wizard of Oz, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes.
One of the most notable references is near the end of the film, in which John Hurt makes a cameo appearance, parodying his character from Alien to recreate the chest burster scene.
Also, keep an eye out for the Millennium Falcon parked outside of the Space Diner.
Parody in cinema is a process of imitating a film for the sake of comedic effect.
Parody is considered to be a subgenre of comedy and has been around since the dawn of cinema.
One of the first parody films, The Little Train Robbery, debuted in 1905 and parodied the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery.
Some contemporary examples of parody include Airplane!, Mars Attacks, Austin Powers, Galaxy Quest, Hot Fuzz, and Scary Movie, just to name a few.
The genre of parody is related to satire.
However, it is different in that parody often represents an appreciation for the source material, where a satire seeks to highlight flaws and shortcomings.
Some contemporary examples of satirical cinema include The Truman Show, The Dictator, The Interview, and Idiocracy.
The Great Dictator is a 1940 American film that starred Charlie Chaplin and condemned dictators, and Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the early days of World War Two.
It became Chaplin's most commercially successful film and is considered to be one with great historical significance.
For this reason, the film was selected by the Library of Congress in 1987 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
While parody in film has been around since the early 1900s, parody in literature originated in ancient Greece.
Parody was often used to make philosophical points as well as to entertain audiences.
In ancient Greek literature, a parodia was a narrative poem which imitated the style of epic poems.
The Frogs, an ancient Greek comedy written by playwright Aristophanes, portrayed the hero turned god Heracles as a glutton and the god of drama, Dionysus, as cowardly and unintelligent.
The Frogs contains a mix of irreverent humor and satire to comment on poetry's moral role in civic and political life.
The first usage of the word parody in English is in Every Man in His Humor, from 1598 quote “A parody, a parody to make it absurd or that it was.” That about sums it up, I think.
Parody exists to make the source material more absurd than it was before.
Over 300 years later, Spaceballs made its debut undoubtably an absurd imitation of some of cinema's biggest science fiction successes.
My name is Cecelia, and this has been my web extra for Spaceballs for Saturday Night Cinema on KSPS PBS.
See you next time.
Bye.
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