Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a parody of a book by Peter George called Red Alert.
The book plays it perfectly straight. They started to adapt the book into a movie, but found they kept having to cut elements out to keep it from being absurd or funny because of the sheer…bullshit that is mutually assured destruction, so they leaned into it and made it a farce. And now just about no one is aware of Red Alert.
Airplane parodying the airliner movies like Zero Hour
Dr Strangelove parodying atomic terror movies like Fail Safe
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a parody of a book by Peter George called Red Alert.
The book plays it perfectly straight. They started to adapt the book into a movie, but found they kept having to cut elements out to keep it from being absurd or funny because of the sheer…bullshit that is mutually assured destruction, so they leaned into it and made it a farce. And now just about no one is aware of Red Alert.
I legit didn’t know it was parodying something else. I thought it was just gallows humour.
Nobody watches the other airliner movies, but at least with Airplane! you know you’re watching a parody.
Edit: Per other people in this thread, apparently not.