Figure out what cannot or should not be done as you go.
With my trial and error, I have previously worked with what was ultimately a thoroughly problematic cast of characters. Their name was the Comic Five. This page presents their unhelpful ideals and advises what you should do instead.
Any song we did not write is imperfect and can be improved by our writing our own lyrics to its tune, provided our creator likes the song enough to allow us to do so.
No canon Pirates of the Caribbean character comes close to the arrogance of the Comic Five - which is really saying something, and is the main reason they were inappropriate in so many ways. They lacked respect for anything or anyone, as well as the belief that they needed it. They could never improve their work, because they thought doing so was impossible to begin with. They thought themselves incapable of ever being wrong about anything, meaning they kept to their preconceived notions and hated anything that bore evidence or suggestions to the contrary, which included almost everything. Their lack of creativity was the only reason they had any use for other people. Even so, no method of getting me to give them more material was too harsh for them to try.
I generally contend that keeping track of reasons why is always important. Lose sight of the purpose of something, and it gets reduced to an obsession, tugging at your mind and telling you to do something for the sake of it - in this case, change lyrics just to change them, and look what happened there.
When you get to the parodies that are on the site in their complete forms, you will find they are written with consideration of what makes them as good as or better (at least in my opinion) than the original lyrics, as well as judgment that I better just leave some songs be.
You should wait to create until the last minute to maximize the amount of time for something that can help give you an idea to happen.
The Five limited themselves to the LEGO game for material, which it did not provide much of to begin with. This left them in a constant material shortage and meant they would resort to just about any joke they knew my readers would get, no matter how much it did not suit them. Their discography shows the problems with doing all the developments of a parody in a single sitting: words less well smithed, no time to take into account whether the parody was actually entertaining, and a few cases of writing something an 18th century character would not know, evidently without realizing it.
The beginning of the end of doing everything on the day came when I was memorizing the Styx album Equinox and the idea for Going Wild
started brewing well ahead of time. Equinox went on to be both the first parody album I wrote in advance and the last one the Five worked on. I believe their style was brought to its knees because they tended to rely on what had happened in the strips leading up to the one in which the parody appeared and which random character(s) the strip showed to be singing the parody to decide what to make it about, and not originally writing the parody inside the strip made both of these things impossible. (Of course, in doing so, it made the point that you should not base your choices on such arbitrary things anyway.)
Another problem with the Five was having to draw a strip every day, to make the daily strip premise work for a personal audience. If multiple strips were drawn, then they could all be read on one day. In 2019, I worked around this by coming up with a cover, made of a paper clip and a piece of construction paper, to keep the portion of the page with the strip that is not to be read until tomorrow hidden. In doing so, I freed myself from yet more Comic Five fates, as I no longer had to draw a strip every single day, and in turn, if I had multiple ideas, no longer had to wait to write them all. From my experiences, even if you do embark on a project that involves delivering daily, I very strongly recommend finding a way so you do not actually have to create daily.
When it comes to what your parody will be about, you should know what you are doing hours, if not days before you actually do it, if possible. This, in fact, can be said for many things.
Be funny or be nothing at all.
Even in places where being funny is at the top of the menu, it should never be the only thing on. One should never allow oneself to become desperate to be funny, as doing so just reduces the chances of success. Remember, as Terry Pratchett wrote in the novel A Hat Full of Sky, Things that try too hard to be funny often aren’t.
The category of pleasant parodies exists for a reason. There are not a lot of laughs to be had at them, but only the most single minded audience would complain about that fact.
Not knowing things is for fools.
Among the many things the Five were notorious for was leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. They never left anything open to interpretation (the exactness of what they were talking about being especially problematic because of their extreme inside-jokiness and tendency toward vague phrases), and in their strips, they often acted as their own voice overs, which presented a number of problems.
First, if the characters feel they need to narrate themselves, either their work is incomprehensible (as I have discussed with a friend, it is usually not a good sign when a movie resorts to a voice over, because that is a sign that the film does not make very clear what is supposed to be happening), or they are just hogging attention. Second, it is not always beneficial for the creator and the audience to be on the same page. They should both be there together in the end, sure, but until then, if the reader knows everything as soon as they can, there will be no tension or surprises, and they therefore are less likely to be intrigued or laugh. Third, it meant the Five themselves knew too much of what was outside the fourth wall.
And then, they were hypocrites about their thing for knowing everything (and making a mockery of their enemies not knowing things) with their attitude towards info that did not originate from them. If my readers did not know something, the Five basically decided it was not true or did not exist, and thus left my readers lacking useful information. For example, they knew my readers did not know the name of the Flying Dutchman, and instead of informing them, they did everything in their power to avoid using the name.
All this led me to the conclusion that there was an inverse relationship between how helpful information was, and how much of it the Five knew.
Nothing is always the worst thing you can create.
The Five merely existed for the sake of it. They came back every day for the sake of being there. They would call it survival. I call it hogging the spotlight and being too focused on their own mortality.
The Black Pearl Crew do not rely on regular readership to stay in existence and are wise enough to realize that they neither can nor need to control the lengths of their lives. They know there is no particular basis on which they must parody, and they would rather not parody a song at all than go against any of their rules.
The spotlight should always be on us.
The first problem with them hogging the spotlight was that little if anything could be seen of any character outside the five of them, and the limits that imposed on the strip. (Look what I could do once this restriction was no more.) The second problem was that we had to see them even when they had nothing to do but complain about how bored they were.