Stephen King is not only a great author, but a man who has given us a canvas on which we can create beautiful works of parody, and in this blog I'm going to explore five cartoons that have done adaptations of his work. I'm also going to delve into the art of the parody itself, and go off on a whole lot of tangents. And don't worry if you are not familiar with these Stephen King works or these shows, because Mandie's gonna walk you through it.
In this little journey, I've encountered three types of parodies:
A. Drew inspiration from an existing property but can stand on its own
B. Is a very overt, often mocking parody of an existing property
C. Is a letter of love to maybe a lesser-known property that someone on the writing staff must really, really like and wants to generate more buzz about
And I'll be classifying each of the shows I discuss. Alright, enough preamble, let's dive in!
5. Thinner - American Dad
Thinner is a book that King wrote in 1984 as his alter ego, Richard Bachman. I've read a few books he wrote under Richard Bachman, including this one, and don't really get why he used an alter ego, because the genre and the voice are pretty much the same. Well, I guess Rage is super banned, so I can see why he'd want to distance himself from that one, but I remember The Long Walk being pretty good, and Thinner being, well, okay.
Thinner follows the story of Billy, an overweight lawyer who accidentally hits a Romani woman with his car. A member of her family touches his arm and utters the word "thinner." Billy then begins rapidly losing weight. At first he thinks there might be a medical explanation, but as he continues to lose weight to the point that he is running out of time and his appearance is horrifying to others, he realizes he was cursed and needs to track down the Romani family. The book and the movie have slightly different endings, but in both, he is told that the curse can't be gotten rid of but must be passed to another, and he gleefully goes home to pass it on to his annoying wife.
It's an interesting side note that Stephen King has written two books about a fat man starting to rapidly, inexplicably lose weight in a manner that would lead to his demise. But 2018's Elevation is very different, with the main character not visibly changing despite his weight loss. He knows when he's going to get to zero and gravity is not going to be able to hold him to Earth, and he accepts his fate. Knowing his time is limited, he makes peace with himself and with his neighbors, and it's a really touching story. Unlike Thinner, where the solution the main character lands on is that he's going to kill his wife.
But we're not here to talk about Stephen King's reimaginings of his own work. We're here to talk about American Dad's. Based on the source material being called Thinner, you might imagine I'm going to talk about the infamous body dysmorphia episode "The American Dad After School Special." But, no, I'm going to talk about "Old Stan on the Mountain," which was directly inspired by Thinner, even if it is the loosest parody on this list (the other four all literally say the name of the King work they are parodying).
Has Thinner been parodied in adult animation before? Yes, in a very mean-spirited Family Guy cutaway we're not going to talk about. But in American Dad, it's the premise of the entire episode. Stan goes really overboard insulting an old man who is taking too long to check out at a store, basically berating him for being old, and the old man lays a hand on him and cursed him. Rather than rapidly dropping the pounds, though, Stan starts rapidly adding the years.
"Oh, good," you think. "They're going the non-racist route with this adaptation."
Just wait.
Stan decides that to lift the curse, he needs to climb a mountain. And also, at one point, decides he needs to kill his son, but he falls asleep mid-stab because he's old, so Steve is fine. The curse is not lifted until Stan is berated for being old by a stranger and realizes that he has just done something incredible and that old people are useful. So, the curse is lifted, but Stan ... doesn't go completely back to normal. Let's just say he offended two people the day that he was cursed. Great job, American Dad.
It's a common theme in stories like Thinner that people in a position of power take that power for granted and when they offend or hurt someone they see as below them, it comes back to bite them tenfold. In Thinner, a lawyer with a pretty easy life is able to get himself off when he hits an elderly Romani woman with his car. In this American Dad episode, eternally pompous Stan thinks it's fine to publicly berate someone who is older than him. And I'm also reminded of the movie Drag Me to Hell, very thematically similar to Thinner, in which the main character doesn't give an old woman an extension on her loan, even though she could have, and as a result gets cursed. They're all cautionary tales about relying too much on privilege.
Isn't it weird, though, that of those three fictional characters, American Dad's Stan seems to be the only one to have learned a lesson?
4. Gerald's Game - Solar Opposites
Parody type: C
You might think that from Solar Opposites, I would choose "The Fog of Pupa," which is a parody of King's The Mist. But, I've already written about The Mist. You know what I haven't written about? Gerald's Game, one of the most harrowing movies I've ever seen. During the climax of the movie, I had to get up and walk out of the room. Except, I was living in a studio apartment that was just one room, so I just kind of ran into the wall.
In the universe of Solar Opposites, apparently everyone is familiar with Gerald's Game to the point it is commonly used as a verb, but for those of you who are not familiar, here goes. Gerald and his wife Jessie are trying to spice up their dying marriage by going to a remote lake house and trying some freaky stuff, the first thing being handcuffing Jessie to the bed. Jessie balks once handcuffed, and they have a struggle that results in Gerald having a heart attack and dying on top of her. So now Jessie is handcuffed to the bed and alone ... except she's not alone. There's a horrifying other presence in the lake house. As Jessie attempts to figure out a way to escape, she remembers childhood trauma and also hallucinates her dead husband guiding her.
The book Gerald's Game was long thought to be unfilmable, and, having seen the movie, I'd think it would be impossible to do a comedy parody. But, Solar Opposites did it. And, unlike when they did The Mist and they never really said "The Mist," when someone first mentioned mist Korvo said, "No, it's a fog," they constantly say the words "Gerald's Game" in the episode "The Earth Rake."
For those unfamiliar with Solar Opposites, the main characters are four aliens on a mission forced to live as a family (think 3rd Rock from the Sun as a cartoon), and despite not having normal human genitalia, these aliens are THIRSTY. No one is hornier, though, than Terry. He has a lot of romantic encounters over the course of the show, but most of his lust is for his mission partner Korvo.
In this episode, Terry has been promoted at work and Korvo is jealous, and also thinks his mission partner, who is, kind of dumb, is going to screw up an important business pitch meeting. So Korvo goes to visit Terry just before the meeting, says it's so sexy that he's in a position of power now, and they should go fool around in the hotel room. He then handcuffs Terry to the bed.
Terry: Wait, are you Gerald's Gaming me?
Korvo: You're the one who taught me to use mid-tier Stephen King plots to get what I want.
Korvo doesn't die, he just leaves Terry there and goes to replace him at the meeting. Terry, meanwhile, uses his foot to call the hotel receptionist.
Terry: Help me, I've been Gerald's Gamed!
Receptionist: If we sent help for everyone who got Gerald's Gamed, we'd have no time to sniff your boxers.
But, a hotel employee is sent, except he didn't take his meds today and ran up the stairs while eating a giant sandwich, and immediately has a heart attack and dies on top of Terry, who cries, "This is now exactly like the poster for Gerald's Game!" The next time we cut to Terry, he is covered with a multitude of dead bodies, because everyone who comes to see him ends up dying directly on top of him from "tripping or heart attacking or peanut allerging" and the weight of the bed is so great that it crashes through the floor into the room below him, which is occupied by another person handcuffed to a bed. Terry asks, "Are you being Gerald's Gamed too?" When the person nods, he says, "We're Bachman buddies!"
Have you been keeping track of the number of times people said "Gerald's Game?" I think I got most but not all of them. And also, the mention of both Stephen King (so you know this is a Stephen King thing) and his alter ego Bachman. Whoever wrote this episode is a Stephen King NERD who maybe someone owed a special favor. Here's what it looked like in the writing room:
Staff Writer: I really think the people want more Gerald's Game. I think we need a Gerald's Game parody.
Head Writer: You are always going on about that movie that was on Netflix several years ago. I don't think people will get it.
Staff Writer: They will if we say "Gerald's Game" in every other sentence and also make sure we mention both names of the person who wrote it. The world needs to know how good this movie is. Can we also mention that it's on Netflix?
Head Writer: No! We're on Hulu. We're definitely not doing this.
Staff Writer: I pulled your son out of a burning car
Head Writer: Ok, we'll do everything but the Netflix thing
This may seem like a critique of this Solar Opposites episode, but it is a loving one, because this hypothetical staff writer is, let's face it ... me. We love to share things that we love with other people, and this is exactly the type of comedy I write. Have you read my book American Crime Beauty Horror Story? Of course you haven't, unless you're my parents, who are also the only people who read my blog, so of course you have. It's FULL of media references and they range from widely known to pretty durn obscure, and my hope is that readers would be enjoying my book SO DANG MUCH that they'd want to at least Google what I was talking about. I've done stuff like that before. For example, when I edited my good friend Paul's book Yes And (Ish), there were a lot of references to the movie City Lights, and I watched it for the first time so I could understand the references, and I loved it. Maybe other people will watch it after reading his book, and maybe they'll love it too.
3. Needful Things - Rick and Morty
Parody Type: A
Don't worry, this is the last fairly under-the-radar Stephen King work I'm going to discuss. You'll definitely be familiar with #2 and #1.
I myself have read Needful Things and seen the movie, but it was a long time ago and I don't remember either very well, it's not one of my favorite Stephen King properties by a long shot, so this is going to be a really brief recap. Some mysterious dude named Leland shows up in Castle Rock, Maine, and opens a store called "Needful Things." It's just a random junk/antique store kind of like the one that STEPHEN KING HIMSELF is operating in THE BEST CAMEO EVER in IT: CHAPTER TWO, but everyone in town who goes into the store finds something that seems specially meant for them. And it's incredibly cheap. They buy their items, and they love them. The stupid, fat mom character (a lot of Stephen King books have those) buys, I think sunglasses, that make her think she is having sex with Elvis Presley. The religious fanatic (a lot of Stephen King books have those) buys a piece of wood she thinks is from Noah's Ark. The main character's love interest, who has arthritis in her hands, buys a pendant that makes her arthritis better (it's full of spiders). But the thing is, they're paying with THEIR SOULS. Once they buy an item, Leland takes control of them and turns the city into a den of chaos and violence.
Needful Things could be read as a commentary on greed, and on people believing things that logically could not be true, just because they want so badly to believe. The Rick and Morty episode "Something Ricked This Way Comes" touches on this in their A plot, but arguably much more in the B plot. Don't worry, we'll get into that.
"Something Ricked This Way Comes" doesn't come right out and say what it's parodying, like my #4, #2, and #1 entries, but it's pretty obvious. Summer gets a job working in a Needful Things-esque shop for a guy named "Mr. Needful" who is actually the devil. Since the book Needful Things came out in 1991 and I'd guess most Rick and Morty fans weren't even born then, I'm not sure how many viewers knew this was a parody, but I sure did. Everything in Mr. Needful's store is free (how does he pay Summer, who is his only employee?) but comes with a curse. There's the typewriter that automatically generates bestselling crime novels but then the crimes happen in real life, there's the face cream that makes you beautiful but also blind, there are the shoes that make you the fastest runner on earth but you have to run until you die.
One day, Morty's unlucky-in-love math teacher comes into the store trailed by three women, complaining, "The aftershave you gave me to make me irresistible to women also made me impotent!" Rick then shows up and jabs him with a needle, saying that this serum should take care of it. He's now un-cursed and he and the ladies head out to have presumably a good time.
And now the jig is up. A woman comes in and grabs a bunch of items from Mr. Needful's store, saying, "All of this is free, right?"
Mr. Needful says, ominously, "Yes, you don't pay for these items ... with money."
The woman responds, "Oh, yeah, I know. You pay with the curses, right? That's fine, I'll just get the curses removed at the place across the street." And we see that Rick has opened up a curse-purge shop across the street from Mr. Needful's store.
Summer sides with Mr. Needful rather than with her grandfather (granted, Rick doesn't treat her very well) because Mr. Needful makes her feel important and she turns a blind eye to the evil. That kind of captures the message I think King was going for in Needful Things, but in my opinion, the B plot does so even more.
Jerry, the father of the Sanchez-Smith family, is an idiot, and everyone knows it, so any time he is allowed to feel important or superior, it goes right to his head. He's also constantly butting heads with his father-in-law, Rick. Rick hates Jerry for being too stupid for his daughter, and Jerry hates genius scientist Rick for making him feel stupid in comparison. So when Morty needs to do a science fair project, Jerry insists that he help Morty out as a father-son activity. And he decides they are going to make a solar system model, with the nine planets. Morty points out that Pluto is not a planet. Jerry flips out.
Jerry insists that he learned in third grade that Pluto is a planet, so it must be one. Granted, he has extra reason to be upset about being corrected by his son because he is always made to feel like the stupid one in the family, but this is just an example of something that often gets to me: people clinging to things that are not correct just because "that's what they've always been told."
There are some really minor examples of this that I've encountered, and some really major ones that the world has encountered. For example, a couple times when coworkers at various jobs have used the phrase "Central Standard Time" and we're actually in Central Daylight Time, I've attempted to educate them so if they are working with a client who is a freak like me, they won't sound unprofessional, and told them, "Central Time" is the easiest way to go. I've sometimes gotten the response, "I've always said Central Standard Time, and I'm going to keep saying it, it sounds smarter."
And then when the Sears Tower changed to the Willis Tower, Chicago practically went up in flames (again). So many people were getting mad when it was referred to as "Willis Tower." They were like, "I've lived in Chicago my whole life and it's always been the Sears Tower and no one will ever change that."
Me (in my head, I'd never address this one out loud): I mean, if you say Sears Tower, I'll know what you're talking about, but people younger than me might not. It's owned by a different company now. You shouldn't take it as a personal offense when people call it what it is called.
These are the kind of change averse people that I can see going into that Starbucks that used to be a Pizza Hut and having a conversation like this:
Customer: I want a pizza
Starbucks Employee: This is a coffee shop, we don't have pizza. This space was bought by a different franchise
Customer: NO IT WASN'T! I HAVE LIVED IN THIS CITY MY WHOLE LIFE AND THIS SPACE IS INHERENTLY A PIZZA HUT AND ALWAYS WILL BE! YOU ARE WRONG! MAKE ME A PIZZA OR I WILL TURN YOU INTO ONE!
That's basically how Jerry reacts to Pluto not being a planet. As Morty miserably works on the solar system model, Jerry is on the phone with NASA, screaming, "I want to file a declaration that Pluto is a planet! If that doesn't happen, my son is going to fail his science class, and I'm suing you first!"
Things take a turn when we find out the inhabitants of Pluto had been monitoring his conversation with NASA, and they beam him and Morty to Pluto, where he is celebrated "Earth scientist" Jerry and is hob nobbing with Pluto's wealthiest, being celebrated for defending its planet status. It goes right to his head and he smugly soaks it all up, dropping little gems like "My very eager mother just served us nine pickles, and guess what the pickles is. And it's Pluto" and getting wild applause.
One of the Plutonians, though, pulls Morty aside and tells him that Jerry's message is actually incredibly harmful, because Pluto is shrinking due to the wealthy corporations drilling plutonium and it's causing Plutoquakes and sinkholes, and if they think Pluto is a planet they'll just keep going. The wealthy Plutonians are celebrating Jerry because promoting him benefits them.
Plutonian: He could cost us billions of lives.
Morty: The thing is, though, my dad is really insecure-
Plutonian: Is everyone in your family an idiot?
Morty: Well, for sure me and my dad are, but-
So, in a way, both the A plot and the B plot in this episode reflect the themes of Needful Things. The perils of greed, and the perils of believing something that's too good to be true, just out of willful ignorance. Good thing that doesn't happen in real life.
2. The Shawshank Redemption - Family Guy
Parody Type: B
I don't have to recap The Shawshank Redemption, do I? Everyone's seen this movie, right? And I'm going to be perfectly honest, I never want to watch this movie again. Or The Green Mile. I don't even like talking about the latter, but the first time I saw The Shawshank Redemption, I was I think 12 years old and I knew nothing about the movie, so everything that happened was a surprise. I know the part that killed a lot of people was "Brooks was here," but the part that shocked me and cut me absolutely to the core was the murder of Tommy. I was miserable for the rest of the movie, until the, well, redemptive ending, which made me think, maybe I did like this movie? But I think anyone who cites this as their favorite movie is looking to experience misery and then achieve catharsis at the end, much like Andy DuFresne.
There are plot holes in this movie, and I've never read the book, so maybe they're explained in the book. One is that Andy's escape defies the laws of physics. Peter points this out in this clip:
Not only would it be impossible for him to reattach the poster after his final escape, but he'd have to be detaching and reattaching his poster every day for years and have the poster appear perfectly taut and unwrinkled for no one to suspect anything. And this was a terrifyingly strict prison with close surveillance and one where Andy spent a lot of time in solitary.
The thing is, some of Stephen King's stories just aren't meant to be plausible, they're meant to be affecting stories that provide escapism and, in some cases, catharsis. He's very good at making us emotionally bond with his characters. I'd only gotten a few chapters into Firestarter, for example, when I was like, if anything happens to this little girl and her dad, I'm going to go all Firestarter and burn down the horror section of the library. And. Don't. Even. Get. Me. Started. On. The. Dark. Tower.
The Family Guy episode "Three Kings" parodies Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption. The parody of Shawshank Redemption actually wasn't as mean-spirited as I remembered, but it did point out some plot holes, and make fun of some aspects of the movie that were actually pretty serious, or tragic. There was no Brooks and there was no Tommy (a good thing, plus this was just 1/3 of an anthology episode so they didn't have the time) but they definitely covered Andy's assault by Bogs and Bogs' subsequent crippling. Though, crippling Joe in every single anthology or flashback episode is something the writers like to do.
Watching parodies like this kind of begs the question, when does a parody cross the line of lovingly roasting or being mean-spirited? I'm going to say that "Three Kings" sides on "lovingly roasting" (other than that joke they made about Joaquin Phoenix during the Stand By Me segment, which was really out of line). Family Guy can be very mean-spirited, but they also poke fun at properties that the writers clearly love. The best example of a loving roast would be their Star Wars trilogy. Family Guy is clearly in love with Star Wars, but they definitely pointed out plenty of plot holes or plot elements that didn't make that much sense.
Some of their parodies, though, are just straight-up bashing the source material. For example, in the episode "American English," where they parody The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men, they are really just trying to put all the faults of those books on display without really showing any merit (at one point in the Great Gatsby segment, Stewie says, "Yeah, I'm starting to think this isn't a very good book). I feel like they were much kinder to King.
Speaking of that episode, I've never read Of Mice and Men. So I got none of the references in that segment. Sure, it entertained me, it's Stewie and Chris and the other characters I love playing the parts, but I felt like everything was a nod to something that went over my head. That's kind of how Family Guy does parodies. And that brings me to the main point I wanted to make when I started writing this blog - what makes a perfect parody. In my opinion, it would be a parody that gives some winks to fans of the original property but also could be appreciated by someone who didn't even know it was a parody of something (way more on that to come). Does Family Guy's Shawshank parody work if you have never seen the movie? I would have no way of knowing. There are definitely some jokes you wouldn't get, like why is Andy calling the warden "obtuse," and it wouldn't be as funny that rather than playing opera music over the sound system and giving everyone a spiritual awakening, Andy plays "Hollaback Girl." In the original movie, Red, our narrator character, recalls something like, "To this day I have no idea what those French ladies were singing about, but it was beautiful." In Family Guy, he says something like, "To this day I have no idea what a Hollaback Girl is. I imagine it is a filthy thing, crawling with disease."
So, yeah. This segment is really funny. But how funny would it be if you hadn't seen the movie? If you haven't seen the movie, please go back in time and erase your memory of everything I just said so I didn't spoil anything for you, and then watch the Family Guy episode and get back to me.
1. The Shining - The Simpsons
Parody Type: A +
I know you might think for The Simpsons I would choose the episode "Not IT," a parody of the movie IT, a movie I cherish deeply. But, that episode came out two years ago and I've been watching the IT movies pretty much my whole life, so I couldn't go into that one with a blank slate. So I'm going to talk about a different King parody, one that I watched and re-watched throughout my childhood, and that I loved, despite knowing literally nothing about the source material.
Years after I first saw the "Shinning" segment on "Treehouse of Horror V," I finally watched The Shining as a teenager, and I didn't care for it. I've heard the book is very different and much better, but I didn't care for the movie so I never felt like reading the book. I would rather just embrace the Simpsons adaptation. Sometimes, an adaptation (see: Wicked) or even a parody (see: this episode and, even more so, another one I'll discuss in a moment) can actually replace the source material, not just in your heart but in general cultural consciousness.
I guess I should address The Shining. I don't know if I have to recap this one, either, partly because I don't really feel like it, and partly because it's been parodied in both The Simpsons and Family Guy countless times. A guy named Jack brings his family to a hotel where he is assigned to be the winter caretaker, a hotel where the last caretaker went nuts and killed his family. Jack starts seeing ghosts, goes nuts, and tries to kill his wife and his son, who has a "shining" (mind-reading) connection with the head chef at the hotel. He goes on a rampage with an axe but fails to kill his family and freezes to death.
Again, I hear the book is a lot better. But you know what's really better? The Simpsons. This episode is funny to the point where I wasn't even sure if I wanted to see the original, because I'd rather this be my source material.
I guess, as a kid, I kind of knew it was a parody of something, based on the below exchange.
Willie: You've got the shinning!
Bart: You mean shining.
Willie: Quiet! You want to get sued?
But there's another episode of The Simpsons that I grew up with, one of my favorite episodes, one of a lot of people's favorite episodes, that I reached adulthood not knowing it was a parody of anything. That episode is "Cape Feare."
"Cape Feare" is the best parody of all time. Yes, people who have seen the movie Cape Feare would appreciate all the nods to the movie, but it's, just, it's so hilarious. There's so many ridiculously funny scenes that play to any audience. This was my friend's young daughter's favorite episode because of the scene where Sideshow Bob steps on all the rakes. And, we have evidence that this episode has eclipsed its source material in popularity and cultural ubiquitousness, that being the fantastic play Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play.
In the first act of this post-apocalyptic play, a group of survivors are huddled together around a fire, trying to distract themselves from the horrors happening around them. To find comfort in nostalgia, they try to recall a TV episode that all of them remember, and they start piecing together the plot of the Simpsons episode "Cape Feare." They're not reminiscing about the movie it was based on, but about the episode. (The playwright did some research and this was the TV episode that the most people she surveyed remembered.) And, throughout the next two acts, you find that human culture has been completely rebuilt around a mythology based on The Simpsons and, specifically, "Cape Feare."
That is the power of a good parody. I finally watched the movie Cape Fear two years ago, and I kept thinking, "oh, that's why The Simpsons did that" or, "oh, The Simpsons did a great job turning that into a joke." But, you don't need to even know Cape Fear is a movie to LOVE that episode, much like you don't need to even know The Shining is a movie to LOVE "The Shinning."
And that's my journey through the land of Stephen King being parodied in adult animation. I'll probably have to write a follow-up whenever Bob's Burgers does that parody of Cell where Tina finally gets a cell phone and everyone turns into zombies and murders each other. I think I heard that was in the works. Maybe that's just a dream I had.
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