TV-14 | 1h 47min | Comedy, Satire, Parody, Biography | 4 November 2022 (USA)
Arriving in tandem with the advent of MTV, “Weird Al” Yankovic was a custom glove-fit for the burgeoning audio-visual music revolution, yet he was unlike anyone else making music or videos at the time. Accompanying himself on accordion with a traditional guitar-bass-drums backing band, Yankovic’s stock-in-trade was in parodying other people’s songs. Not covers or novelties, just parodies.
For those born after, say, 1960, Yankovic was regarded as a trailblazing rebel; a guy willing to mock the self-serious nature of “musical artistes” while making himself part of the joke was something far more difficult to pull off than it might seem on the surface. Truth be told, musical parody has been around since the late 16th century, some 200 years before Mozart was even born….