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Can you give an example of what you would consider to be an actual parody? Because I think that 'The Saga Begins' is indeed making fun of 'American Pie.' Weird

Can you give an example of what you would consider to be an actual parody? Because I think that 'The Saga Begins' is indeed making fun of 'American Pie.' Weird Al is not simply adding any lyrics over the song but instead chose a long and convoluted story arc that awkwardly fits into American Pie's song structure. By including so much story detail from Star Wars into the song Weird Al effectively points out how ridiculous the profound but ultimately meaningless character archetypes are in the original song.

jameshart 6y ago
No he’s not. He’s just using a song that starts with the line ‘a long long time ago’ to tell a story that starts ‘long ago in a galaxy far away’. American Pie is filled with metaphors and allusions and is an impressionistic tale of the declining optimism of the sixties after the original exuberant promise of rock ‘n’ roll was lost in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. The Saga Begins is a literal retelling of the story of The Phantom Menace - it doesn’t allude to themes or disillusionment or draw a clever parallel between the narratives. It doesn’t comment on American Pie or even on The Phantom Menace. It’s just a ‘humorous’ cross-cultural mashup of two copyrighted properties. But that’s irrelevant, anyway. The point isn’t what I consider constitutes parody, but rather what the law considers as parody, which is specifically that if you are critiquing or lampooning a work, you are permitted to do so by borrowing from it and using elements that otherwise you would not be permitted to under copyright law. Its intent is not to say that ‘anything that’s just intended to be funny is exempt from copyright requirements’, it’s specifically to prevent copyright owners from suppressing criticism of their work using copyright law. So if you wrote alternative lyrics to American Pie that, for example, drew attention to the fact that its rose tinted view of sock hops and rock ‘n’ roll at the end of the fifties is rooted in a privileged white perspective, Don McLean would not be able to use copyright law to stop you publishing that. But if you decided to just tell the story of a movie using Don McLean’s music, he is well within his rights to tell you you can’t (or come to a license agreement with you so that you can). Weirdly, though, now that Weird Al has been there and done that, if you were to write an alternative set of lyrics to the Saga Begins that told the story of some obscure art house movie, say, parodying the way Weird Al used the song to just retell a movie plot... you might have a parody defense.

jameshart 6y ago

No he’s not. He’s just using a song that starts with the line ‘a long long time ago’ to tell a story that starts ‘long ago in a galaxy far away’. American Pie is filled with metaphors and allusions and is an impressionistic tale of the declining optimism of the sixties after the original exuberant promise of rock ‘n’ roll was lost in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. The Saga Begins is a literal retelling of the story of The Phantom Menace - it doesn’t allude to themes or disillusionment or draw a clever parallel between the narratives. It doesn’t comment on American Pie or even on The Phantom Menace. It’s just a ‘humorous’ cross-cultural mashup of two copyrighted properties. But that’s irrelevant, anyway. The point isn’t what I consider constitutes parody, but rather what the law considers as parody, which is specifically that if you are critiquing or lampooning a work, you are permitted to do so by borrowing from it and using elements that otherwise you would not be permitted to under copyright law. Its intent is not to say that ‘anything that’s just intended to be funny is exempt from copyright requirements’, it’s specifically to prevent copyright owners from suppressing criticism of their work using copyright law. So if you wrote alternative lyrics to American Pie that, for example, drew attention to the fact that its rose tinted view of sock hops and rock ‘n’ roll at the end of the fifties is rooted in a privileged white perspective, Don McLean would not be able to use copyright law to stop you publishing that. But if you decided to just tell the story of a movie using Don McLean’s music, he is well within his rights to tell you you can’t (or come to a license agreement with you so that you can). Weirdly, though, now that Weird Al has been there and done that, if you were to write an alternative set of lyrics to the Saga Begins that told the story of some obscure art house movie, say, parodying the way Weird Al used the song to just retell a movie plot... you might have a parody defense.