Weird Al's White And Nerdy, so much better than Ridin Dirty.
Bugs Bunny far surpassed It Happened One Night. His manner of speaking, saying “doc,” and his obsession with carrots are a direct parody of Clark Gable’s character from that movie, but modern audiences don’t realize he’s a parody at all and instead assume the carrot thing it based on rabbits’ real dietary preferences.
The Onion is way better than real life, especially currently.
As an animation nerd I gotta mention Shrek. As a parody of "Disney princess movies" it killed the entire genre dead.
The only time Disney tried to play the tropes somewhat straight again was the Princess and the Frog, and THAT was a major flop (though racism probably also played a part in that).
Since then Disney only made remakes or titles like Frozen that spend 70% of their runtime mugging at themselves and poking fun at their own tropes (... While still circling back to them anyway and failing to make any point or commentary)
On a less "this made a major cultural impact" note and more of a "this personally completely altered my entire sense of humour and replaced the original in my heart" -- SnapCube's Realtime Fandub Games Sonic Adventure 2
Oh oh ohohoh! Just remembered JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Very much a manga that was poking fun at contemporaries like Fist of the North Star... And while it didn't outlive or outdo them per se, it definitely gained a life of its own, continuing to this day and actually being quite influential in its own right.
Idiocracy.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is better than Hamlet. Sure, it had the benefit of an extra couple of centuries of progress in art, but I think it still counts.
Don Quixote
The Princess Bride
Cold Comfort FarmDiscworld
FourStar Dragon Ball abridged parody
I think a lot of Whitest Kid's U Know stuff genuinely transcends the topics its mocking by how good it is.
For example: WKUK - Kennedy Assasination
That song at 3:41 swims into my head from time to time, when I'm feeling stressed or overworked or uncertain about the future:
Somewhere out in space there is a place,
Where I can do what I want to,
And all at my own pace.Somewhere out of time I hope I'll find,
A place where I can just unwind,
And work on my own mind.Oh send me a signal, oh give me a prayer,
I just need to know that there's some spot out there,
Where I could be me and you could be you...Just a pure sentiment longing for free time, personal agency, co-existence, brotherhood, and harmony -- which I think are topics everyone can click with.
This does not fit the criteria so im sorry in advance, but it reminded me of the "Somebody That I Used To Know" song and that there is a really cool "5 people 1 guitar" cover that has 200M views which is a good 8% of the original video with 2.4B views.
They actually use 9 hands on that guitar (10 if you consider the one holding the top end)
the onion
people keep saying Idiocracy but i wouldnt consider it a parody, but a satire, and also i cant help but complain that the film makes more of an accidental pro-eugenics statement than anything about authoritarian politics
On Cinema has better story telling and character development than most of Hollywood.
Does it count if I only read summaries of both works, not the works itself?
"A true story" is a parody on the "travelogue" that were popular in ancient Greece, like Homer's Odyssey and Illiad. 800 years later, they had a resurgence in the Roman Empire, like when Virgil wrote the Aeneid. Still 200 years later, A True Story was written by Lucian.
In the preface, Lucian complains that the genre was ruined by authors making up unbelievable tales to trick their dumb readership. So he thinks it better to just admit that all he says is a lie.
The story goes on how Lucian then set sail across the Atlantic, got caught in a storm so terrible it blew him to outer space, and meet the all-male civilisation that lives on the moon, who carry their children through the calf of their leg.
Lucian and his crew return to Earth, get swallowed by a whale, explore the Islands of the blessed, see the Sinners being punished (the ones who lied in their stories being punished the hardest) and reach a distant continent. Lucian says what happened there will be shared in the sequel, which a comment describes as the biggest lie of all.
Gintama.
Took me a while to realize the whole post-war samurai living in an era of peace premise was just Kenshin but with aliens.
Family Guys "Blue Harvest"
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is a satire of Gothic novels in general, and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe in particular. Several others are referenced by name in the story and for many of them it's probably the only reason they are even remembered today.
Might not be exactly what you're asking for, but if you've seen ever seen Rocky and Bullwinkle, you'll know the villain "Boris Badenov," but you might not know his name is a pun of a historical figure, "Boris Godunov". Old cartoons like that are great because they're full of these super obscure references and jokes that completely fly past you until years later when you encounter something in a history class and suddenly burst out laughing. Another example I remember from that show is "The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam," a reference to "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."
Thagomizer, it’s the end of stegosaurus. There was no scientific name for the spiked end, the paleontology side decided the Farside comic called it Thagomizer so let’s use that
