14 items
MTV's fake boy band that worked exactly like a real one: five archetypes assembled by a manager, a February 2000 TV movie, a sitcom, and "U + Me = Us (Calculus)." The joke album reached No. 35 on the Billboard 200, the follow-up reached No. 15, and the band opened for Britney Spears in character. It ended in January 2001 when Michael Cuccione, the Cute One, died at 16.
Mike Myers as the swinging spy, the bald nemesis, and eventually half the cast — a three-film Bond parody whose catchphrases colonized every schoolyard in 1999. The humor ran racy for its era; the craft underneath is what stuck.
Beyoncé as Foxxy Cleopatra, Michael Caine as Austin's dad, a Dutch villain with a gold-plated problem, and an opening sequence in which Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Gwyneth Paltrow play the cast. The 2002 threequel had the biggest July opening ever at the time and a title the Bond people tried to take away.
Will Ferrell's exasperated Alex Trebek, Darrell Hammond's leering Sean Connery and Norm Macdonald's Burt Reynolds demanding to be called Turd Ferguson, playing a game nobody on the panel could or would play. The Saturday Night Live sketch ran twice a season from 1996 to 2002, and its categories got so dumb the real Jeopardy! started using them.
Kids' WB's manic 1995 superhero: a computer bug turns nerdy teenager Dexter Douglas into Freakazoid, who knows everything on the Internet and has no self-control. It was the third Spielberg–Warner Bros. cartoon, after Tiny Toons and Animaniacs.
The washed-up cast of a canceled space show gets abducted by aliens who watched the reruns and thought they were documentaries. "Never give up, never surrender!" The Star Trek parody so good that actual Trek fans voted it one of the best Star Trek films — and it isn't one.
The washed-up 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero who traded crime-fighting for a law degree and spent twelve minutes a week defending Fred Flintstone, Shaggy and the rest of the Saturday-morning gang in court. Adult Swim's surreal legal sitcom premiered the night the block launched in 2001, with Stephen Colbert voicing both the deranged boss of the law firm and a paranoid prosecutor.
Tim Burton's $80 million love letter to a gory 1962 trading-card set: cackling bug-eyed Martians vaporizing Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, and half of Hollywood — until Slim Whitman's yodeling makes their heads explode. Five months after Independence Day played it straight, this played it very, very weird.
John Hughes High, the slow clap, the makeover that takes off her glasses and ponytail, and conjoined twins for prom queen. The 2001 spoof put two decades of teen movies in a blender, cast Chris Evans as the jock, and led its soundtrack with Marilyn Manson's "Tainted Love."
A shameless parody of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Matrix, and half of Hollywood, powered by Wayans-family comedy and the breakout of Anna Faris. It opened to $42.3 million — the biggest R-rated opening weekend ever at the time — and taught the 2000s that no movie was safe from a spoof.
PBS's answer to math phobia: a half hour of sketches, parody game shows and music videos about percentages, capped every day by Mathnet, the Dragnet spoof whose detectives carried calculators instead of guns. Five seasons, 230 episodes, and a generation of adults who forgot every formula but can still sing the theme.
Fox Kids' superhero parody: a huge, blue, nigh-invulnerable hero who isn't very bright, his sidekick Arthur, a former accountant in a moth suit, and a battle cry of "Spoon!" It was made for kids, and adults turned it into a cult hit.
Adult Swim's saga of a failed super-scientist, his two dim teenage sons, their secret-agent bodyguard Brock Samson and a butterfly-themed archnemesis who gets his arching assignments from a villains' guild. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riff on Jonny Quest grew from a 2003 pilot into seven seasons of comics-nerd world-building, all of it, as Hammer put it, about "beautiful sublime failure."
The king of musical parody, Alfred Matthew Yankovic turned accordion jokes and lyrical hijinks into a decade-long MTV empire. He made fun of the songs everyone loved—and everyone watched him do it.