Parody And Satire – Hope Mitchell

“How Bumblebee Should Have Ended” is a video that makes fun of my cultural artifact, the movie Bumblebee. This video is a parody because it mimics the original work Bumblebee to make fun of it. This parody uses animated drawings of many scenes from the movie, changing what happens to how the How It Should Have Ended YouTube channel creators think Bumblebee should have ended. I will just explain one of the parodied scenes from this video (timestamp 1:00-1:33). In this scene, in Bumblebee, after the final action sequence ends, Bumblebee and Charlie (the human protagonist) stand by the Golden Gate bridge, and Charlie says “You’ve got people out there that need you, and so do I. I gotta let you go, Bee,” so they leave each other to live their own lives. In the parody, at the Golden Gate, Charlie says almost the same quote as the movie, but then, instead of separating like in the movie, Bumblebee simply uses his radio to say they should stay friends. This makes fun of the movie for making them unnecessarily separate, when they could just stay together and both be there for those who need them. Each of the parodied scenes hints that Bumblebee opts for the dramatic and heartbreaking movie ending/sequences instead of just logically letting the pair stay together or taking the easy (but less interesting) way out of problems. Therefore, this parody uses conventions of the movie, such as animations of scenes’ characters/locations and some movie quotes, to make fun of it. This parody is successful at commenting on the original movie because it blends those movie similarities with funny additional jokes/conversations/actions, revealing Bumblebee’s plot holes and dramatics to explain how much could have been avoided.