10 Incredible Movie Parodies Nobody Noticed
5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
From children to adults, just about everybody failed to notice that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics - and by extension their various film adaptations - are actually parodying one of the most iconic superheroes of all time.
The TMNT comics were created as a dew-eyed parody of Frank Miller's dark, gritty run of Daredevil comics throughout the 1980s.
For starters, the Turtles similarly gain their powers from the same radioactive isotope as Matt Murdock, Splinter is a play on Murdock's mentor Stick, and The Foot clan are a send-up of Daredevil's criminal ninja clan The Hand.
The delicious irony, of course, is that the Turtles media empire quickly overtook Daredevil in popularity and revenue, enough that unless you were a huge comic book fan at the time, you almost certainly had no idea that TMNT was making polite fun of anything at all.
And nearly 40 years after TMNT's creation, the majority of Turtles fans are still blissfully unaware.