What parody surpassed what it was trying to parody?

Idiocracy started as a parody, and is now becoming a reality.

Blur - Song 2 was intended as a parody of American rock and is laden with nonsense lyrics. It's their most known song in America by a wide margin and might even be their most known song globally.
Woohoo

Yugi Oh The Abridged Series
- Same should be said for DBZ Abridged. I seriously do a double take every time I see an original episode now, as the voice actors and characterizations from Abridged have replaced the canon ones in my head.

Bugs Bunny far surpassed It Happened One Night. His manner of speaking, saying “doc,” and his obsession with carrots are a direct parody of Clark Gable’s character from that movie, but modern audiences don’t realize he’s a parody at all and instead assume the carrot thing it based on rabbits’ real dietary preferences.

Spaceballs.

Weird Al's White And Nerdy, so much better than Ridin Dirty.

Galaxy Quest!
- Still the best star trek movie

Airplane parodying the airliner movies like Zero Hour
Dr Strangelove parodying atomic terror movies like Fail Safe
- Dr Strangelove parodying atomic terror movies like Fail Safe
  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.

r/TheDonald. If I remember right, it started as a meme sub before he actually ran, then it was overtaken by actual supporters.
- It was so weird watching that live.
  
  I'm sad I missed that, actually.

Kung pow: enter the fist
- Steve Oedekerk, the writer/star of King pow: enter the fist, is amazing in every way - especially if you were consuming media in the 90s. He
  wrote and directed when nature calls
  cowrote the nutty professor
  wrote including Patch Adams
  wrote Nutty Professor II: The Klumps - wrote and directed Bruce Almighty
  created thumbnation
  executive produced Jimmy Neutron and his studio gave us two Jimmy Neutron movies
  
  I weirdly dislike most of these things. Nature calls was fine.
  Still glad people found joy in his work though. Obviously talented.

Cunk - parodying Attenborough and cosmos style docs
Starship troopers - more of an active ignorance of source material
Happy Gilmore

Pretty much everything from Weird Al.
- Definitely White and Nerdy, and Like a Surgeon and Amish Paradise are on par.
- Word Crimes for taking a song about dubious consent and changing it into a legitimately educational song.

Hot Fuzz is the best buddy cop movie I've ever seen.
- Hot Fuzz is one of the better examples in this thread, because it doesn't run solely on ribbing buddy cop films. If you've never seen a buddy cop film in your life, Hot Fuzz is still a perfectly good comedy with some surprisingly touching moments.
  Knowing what it parodies makes it better, of course, but it doesn't look down at them.
- Just as Shaun of the Dead is the best zombie movie (come fight me)

Blazing Saddles. It killed the western genre for a long time because of how well it parodied them
- Austin Powers did nearly the same with Bond/spy flicks for a while. From Wikipedia:
  Daniel Craig, who portrayed James Bond on screen from 2006 to 2021, credited the Austin Powers franchise with the relatively serious tone of later Bond films. In a 2014 interview, Craig said, "We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us", making it "impossible" to do the gags of earlier Bond films which Austin Powers satirized.
- Truly understood the bleak outlook of a gunslinger

Idiocracy.

Airplane! lapped Zero Hour! so hard most people don't know about the existence of the latter
- TIL Airplane! is a parody.
  
  It’s such a close parody that they actually secured the rights to remake it. Much of the dialogue is exactly the same.
- it also spawned the whole genre and although Leslie Nielsen made lots of movies before this, his legacy is this as well as the other parody movies

For my wife Spaceballs is the original and Star Wars is the spoof.
But more seriously, too many people didn't register that Scream was a parody. That way it managed to surpass older slashers.
- Can confirm scream was one of the first horror movies I watched and I just figured the rest were like that.
- I wouldn't call Scream a parody. Scary Movie was the parody. Scream was just self aware that it was a scary movie in a universe where scary movies exist.
  
  I watched the original Scream years after seeing Scary Movie, and realized Scary Movie is just Scream on cocaine. A lot of the jokes are the same or just slightly different.
  What's the line between being self aware and a parody?
- I saw Spaceballs before I saw Star Wars. I cannot take any Star Wars movie seriously now.
- Before Spaceballs, contemporaneous with Star Wars, we had "Hardware Wars":
  https://youtu.be/WUDEUQMCyKE
  
  You'll laugh!.You'll cry! You'll kiss three bucks goodbye!
- My gf used to believe that Scary Movie was the original. She didn't had idea that there was an actual movie called Scream.

The best parodies are humorous takes that treat the source material with repect.
Shaun of the Dead
Galaxy Quest
Army of Darkness (person out of time becomes a leader against evil)
- Galaxy Quest belongs at the top of any such list. It's widely considered to be one of the best Star Trek movies.
  
  By Grabthar's hammer, what a movie.
  
  Yeah! The wild part is that many hardcore Trek fans - myself included, of course - just take it for granted that Galaxy Quest will be included, and toward the top end, of any ranking of Trek films.
- Army of Darkness (person out of time becomes a leader against evil)
  So an isekai
  
  How dare you‽ You're right, but how dare you‽
  
  thanks i hate it
- Hot Fuzz is up there for me too

Naked Gun.
Austin Powers.
Team America: World Police
- The dicks, pussies, and assholes speech was based on an actual speech.
  
  by who? where can i read it? how did i not know this? this sounds fascinating!
- I'm Matt Damen!
- Gary?

This does not fit the criteria so im sorry in advance, but it reminded me of the "Somebody That I Used To Know" song and that there is a really cool "5 people 1 guitar" cover that has 200M views which is a good 8% of the original video with 2.4B views.
They actually use 9 hands on that guitar (10 if you consider the one holding the top end)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9NF2edxy-M

The Orville
- I don't even consider that show parody, I consider it Star Trek with a different brand name
  
  Season 1 was basically Seth MacFarlane's TNG fan scripts... it's a Star Trek series through and through.

Spinal Tap. The reactions to it are telling enough: allegedly Steven Tyler didn’t think it was funny, and the Edge just wept.
- They were just jealous they couldn't go to 11.

I have not seen the original, but Airplane! for sure.
- There's a great video on YouTube where some of the relevant scenes from the original, Zero Hour, are played alongside their equivalents in Airplane!. Some of it is basically word for word the same. Will try and find it and add as an edit...
  Turns out there are lots of such videos! Not sure if this is the one I saw or not, but it's very similar, if not, https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally a parody of Daredevil. I think they have surpassed it in popularity.
- I had no idea, that's awesome!

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
You'll never look at a music docu-drama the same.
- It basically killed music biopics for 10 years or so.
  
  It should've buried the genre entirely imho. So many inaccurate biopics got released since, with that Queen one being one of the worst offenders (breaks the real world timeline of events for dramatic story telling reasons, clearly biased from one member's perspective, and with piss poor editing throughout).
- One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Dan Bern, wrote many of the songs for that movie. Just an extra reason for me to love it.

Sometimes the Simpsons parodied things so well, that it's only later on in life that I realize iconic and hilarious Simpson moments were actually parodies.
The Cape Fear episode. The Citizen Kane episode. The Thelma and Louise episode. The Planet of the Apes musical.
fuckin' classics
- The Planet of the Apes musical.
  This one threw my head for a spin. Had to take a deep dive to disentangle what was original and what the Simpsons added.
  And frankly, some of the Simpsons musical numbers would have done the original films credit.

Does idiocracy count?
- No, it's satire. Or it used to be anyway. But it's not a parody of anything.
- It’s not a parody it’s a documentary so no.
- I think we're seeing things happen that not even Idiocracy could predict.

It's been a while, but as far as I can remember, I liked Hot Shots way better than Top Gun.

Discworld

Not really a parody but "happy but beats 2 and 4 are swapped."
The truth is this: oof!
- Just listened to it, I elfe keli eninglist ot ti kebro ym inbra

Dragon Ball Abridged
- I need an adult.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfLHfzrV-zU
  
  Man if only we got a full Buu saga
- Muffin button!
  
  I hate that joke with a passion because one of the members of our D&D group said it constantly in game and it never worked with the scenes. One of the many reasons the group "disbanded" but still met without him.
- I'm gonna deck you in the snoz

Steamboat Willie was a parody of Steamboat Bill Jr., a Buster Keaton film.
- ...no kidding?
  
  No kidding.

Don Quixote
The Princess Bride
Cold Comfort Farm

I think a lot of Whitest Kid's U Know stuff genuinely transcends the topics its mocking by how good it is.
For example: WKUK - Kennedy Assasination
That song at 3:41 swims into my head from time to time, when I'm feeling stressed or overworked or uncertain about the future:
Somewhere out in space there is a place,
Where I can do what I want to,
And all at my own pace.
Somewhere out of time I hope I'll find,
A place where I can just unwind,
And work on my own mind.
Oh send me a signal, oh give me a prayer,
I just need to know that there's some spot out there,
Where I could be me and you could be you...
Just a pure sentiment longing for free time, personal agency, co-existence, brotherhood, and harmony -- which I think are topics everyone can click with.
- I've spent the last couple of hours re-watching WKUK skits because of you.
  Man those guys are funny.
  
  Great actors too, Trevor himself had just such a way with expression delivering lines both wacky and straight
- RIP local sexpot.

Gintama.
Took me a while to realize the whole post-war samurai living in an era of peace premise was just Kenshin but with aliens.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is a satire of Gothic novels in general, and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe in particular. Several others are referenced by name in the story and for many of them it's probably the only reason they are even remembered today.

SOA Abridged
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged

Family Guys "Blue Harvest"

Idiocracy