10 Incredible Movie Parodies Nobody Noticed
3. The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride is such a damn delightful example of a romantic medieval fantasy story that it's easy to forget it's also designed as a parody of it - albeit a clearly very warm and loving one.
Rob Reiner's classic fantasy-comedy gleefully indulges in every medieval fantasy trope under the sun, and yet proves such a fun time that it's easy to forget. In his original 1987 review, Roger Ebert perhaps put it best:
"The Princess Bride reveals itself as a sly parody of sword and sorcery movies, a film that somehow manages to exist on two levels at once: While younger viewers will sit spellbound at the thrilling events on the screen, adults, I think, will be laughing a lot. [It] looks and feels like Legend or any of those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies - and then it goes for the laughs."
Nobody will be surprised that The Princess Bride is an incredibly witty and funny piece of work, but Ebert's absolutely right in suggesting that younger audiences in particular will simply get swept up in the honest majesty and verve of the story, without appreciating that it's a tongue-in-cheek pastiche.