Those responsible (who did not even seem to know the meaning of the word!) for making song parodies warlike have been sacked. A much more capable and stable cast of characters has taken their place.
The Comic Five were the original cast of characters I wrote my parodies from the perspective of. They were based on the LEGO video game versions of Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, Elizabeth, Mr. Gibbs, and Barbossa.
To make a long story short, they lived by exaggerated versions of my opinions, working in black and white, making establishments of things I like to do being good and things I dislike (notable examples include barnacled mutant sailors and pipe organ music) being bad. They were aggressive in every sense of the word, and I thought it all suited me until I discovered a pipe organ ridden rocker likening the sad life of a father to sailing eternally - over an acoustic guitar solo, no less. No more of the Five, with their endless complaints and lack of regard for what really suited old times or canon Pirates of the Caribbean material, I decided. This was final.
For more information on their many flaws, see this summary and these quotes.
After my completion of the main story in the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean video game, I began goofing off in the hub areas. There, characters you had met would appear and you could buy them into the characters you could play, even your former enemies, though those characters you had to fight first. Once such a foe was down to one hit point, he would become invulnerable and you would have the option to buy him.
But I did not want to buy the crew of the Flying Dutchman. I wanted them gone from my sight. Fortunately for me, it turned out there was a way to accomplish this. The hub areas provided torches for some of its activities - one of which involved using a cannon, another had a barrel of explosives to detonate. Those torches could also be used as weapons that dealt double damage, so I could use one to knock an enemy straight from 2 hit points to 0, thus killing him without having to buy him. They never stayed dead, however.
I then turned these killing sprees into a creative outlet at the end of August 2011 by starting a daily comic strip based on them, LEGO Pirates. That was fun for a few months, but did not provide much material to begin with. Also, LEGO games are exceptionally unconcerned about making sense, even by video game standards, so trying to play roles based on them poses great problems. How can a torch be more dangerous than a sword? Why do characters come to be bought (at least I think they want to be)? When you buy a character, who are you paying? Apparently we will never know.
The first issue with the Five that caused a major problem was their weak grip on existence. They seemed like they were born the day the strip started and did not exist at all when we were not seeing them. When I found myself running out of ideas in the spring of 2012, the Five began to panic, convinced they would vanish as if they had never been if they could not keep making regular appearances. Their will to survive made them put up quite a fuss, constantly breaking the fourth wall, even going so far as to write strips saying my readers and I should play the LEGO game they came from in search of more material.
By late June, I had been listening to the Styx albums Kilroy Was Here and Paradise Theater a lot, so I offered the Five those as potential sources of ideas. They settled on Snowblind, getting to wonder what would happen if cocaine existed in their world, then began playing with changing the lyrics to said song to be about the premise they created. That seemed to satisfy them, as their complaining was never quite as bad again.
A week later, one of my readers came up with the following parody titles. First, though, I should explain that Squidbeard and Homo oceani were my own names, used by the Five, for Davy Jones and his crew, respectively. Now, the list:
I then wrote full parodies to go with those titles from the perspective of the Comic Five, and the Five went on to write many more parodies, mostly of songs related to ones they had already done. You can find out more on their discography page. However, I generally deemed their work unpublishable, partly because their parodies turned out to be generally dark and not terribly funny, but mostly because they did not have the slightest concern about anyone except the readers I already had being able to understand them. Consequently, their parodies were all about whatever was going on in my strip at the time.
In September 2013, I began expanding my library of Styx songs, and having my readers learn them too. Late in the month, the non-LEGO counterparts of the Five, the Black Pearl Crew, emerged as the voice of reason, saying to do away with the Comic Five restriction that only songs my readers and I had all known for years could be parodied. New lyrics could be taught, and were easy enough to learn. The Five accepted that they could have more material this way, and thus took stabs at Queen of Spades and Renegade, then did Suite Madame Blue about a month later, before starting on a parody album of The Grand Illusion.
The Five never truly worked with anything or anyone, however. They rather lived off of the Crew, whom they had appear as LEGO characters so there was no way to tell a Crew member from a Five member just by looking at them. At the time, even I did not realize two distinct personalities were at work here - that became much easier to see in retrospect. The Five wanted us to believe they gave us the parodies Blights,
Apple Delivery,
Heartless Blight,
Icky,
Horrible Things,
Blue Hat Man,
Going Wild,
and Big Blight Fright,
but I ultimately figured out that was not true. (But I am getting ahead of myself).
Now, a word on what set the Five apart. The Crew wanted their parodies to be accessible to anyone familiar with Pirates of the Caribbean, while the Five took their liberties with that canon, often at the expense of their barnacled enemies. One of their recurring insulting notions was an unlikely theory that the crew of the Flying Dutchman were transformed by a disease caused by being breathed on by the Kraken that could have been cured, but their captain was too dumb to go to port to get help.
The Crew and the Five soon did two more Styx albums together, Cornerstone and Pieces of Eight. This Styx exploration involved the discovery that a pipe organ made an appearance in a song from the latter album, I’m O.K. The single-minded Five took this to mean that the Flying Dutchman had made an intrusion, with Jones blasting his organ into the song. In a move that would soon play a part in their downfall, the Five dubbed the organ-ridden song a music war,
and refused it to be allowed to wait and be parodied once everyone had the whole album down, which was about a month away at that point. They rushed the song they saw as aberrant into being parodied, thinking they were making an improvement that desperately needed to be made.
Not quite halfway through the year, the Five went back to working alone, fully in their own style: using an album we had all long known, Dookie by Green Day, just making each song about what was on their minds (mostly criticizing Disney) regardless of what it was originally about, and planning nothing ahead of time. Being with them, a parody was written the day it ran in the strip, only in that strip. These were the last parodies to be done as such.
Once the Five were done with Dookie I turned back to Styx with the album Equinox. I got the lyrics down pretty quickly, and found I had ideas of what to do with them well ahead of time. It thus became the first parody album I wrote in advance, as well as the last album the Five worked on. It brought their parodying style to its knees, as they tended to rely on what had happened in the strips leading up to the one in which the parody appeared and which randomly chosen character(s) the strip depicted as singing the song to decide what to make their parody about, and writing the album outside the strip at first made both of those things impossible. (Of course, in doing so, it made the point that you should not base your decisions on such arbitrary things anyway.)
After that parody album was done, at the end of July, I finished my Styx collection with two more albums, Edge of the Century and Styx II. Knowing more about the band, I realized the latter album might well feature more pipe organ, and this drove a prompt check to see if there was another track that sounded like the musical work of Davy Jones in his cabin intruding on a rock song. There was indeed a music war
here, known as Father O.S.A, which led the Five to try to give an order (I say try because only they thought they were in a position to do that) to dedicate the first week of August to having everyone memorize the, as they would have put it, abomination so it could be saved
by a parody as soon as possible*.
A particular exampleon this page).
I followed the letter of the demand from the Five, but their spirit lost me. It dawned on me that said song did indeed have a reason I just had to do it, but it had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the lyrics. Hearing them, a certain barnacled father was all I could think of. I wanted him brought to me, feeling my characters ought to get him into my work. The Crew obediently and sweetly got right on it, while the Five just stared at me.
And then one of my readers observed that the line You’ll sail eternally
seemed like something to be manipulated. The Five never would have admitted that, as you would not have known that from the LEGO game, as that made them disinclined to acknowledge it in any case and especially concerned that my readers would not realize its relevance, but that worry was for nothing, and pandering is never a good thing in any case. Clearly, there was no further excuse to change words for the sake of it like the Five did.
Inspiration struck me to do all kinds of things the Five would have resisted - figure the parody out ahead of time, keep it very much like the original song, not be specific to LEGO, let alone my own work, nor make it so you had to know me to know what the parody was about. I realized, excitedly, that as long as I chose the right songs, I did not have to make up a thing to write pirate themed parodies of them, and the results could all be accessible to anyone familiar with Pirates of the Caribbean. Coming away quite pleased with this new direction, I decided that from now on, I was better of parodying without the Five. (Fellow Styx II song You Better Ask certainly supported this conclusion as well, as the Five would undoubtedly have wasted The devil took my soul
and the part about going to the doctor was a Kraken breath disease story just waiting to happen unless I outlawed that topical, nonsensical subject.)
I still hated the thing associated with the organ. But I could not demonize him the way the Five wanted him to be. Especially not when I could easily do something nicer with the song. And what fun would changing father
to bother
have been in any case? (I also went against the style of the Five by making the strip conform to the parody, but that is another story.)
Some conditions imposed by the Five lingered, such as to call certain mutants only by my fan made names for them, as that was what my readers remembered. However, exceptions to that occurred in some parodies. After all, try though they may, the Five could not control the world, and though my readers had forgotten the actual name of Davy for a while, I managed to fix that once and for all. Points were amply proven shortly after I redid Dookie in June 2016, when his lost love appeared in one of my strips and she called him Davy.
The question thus arose, why did I continue to put up with the Five? They were no longer friends with me or the Crew. They were incapable of positive reinforcement. They were just staying around and continuing to enforce an outdated list of prohibitions, none of which were practical to begin with, in a futile attempt to prevent change from happening, which had already failed on many levels. Hence that from the REO Speedwagon parody albums onward, parodies have been written without me caring in the slightest if the Five would foam at the mouth over them. In fact, sometimes I think the less the Five would have liked what I am doing now, the better. They lacked full-fledged minds, so many of their objections were to things that would offend few if any real people anyway.
Thus, the Five are described all in past tense terms, as one could argue that I killed them. I prefer to think I sent those kids dressed as pirates home to their parents, but no matter what you believe their fate to be, we certainly do not hear from them anymore.
The Five are generally referred to all as one, because in many ways they were. Traits they all shared included (but were not limited to) over-the-top aggression towards their barnacled foes, feeling they were equal only to each other and superior to everything and everyone else and could never be wrong (this even led them to think they knew what I wanted better than I did, making them hesitant to carry out some of my orders), an inability to admit or care that they did not know something, an apparently very difficult time telling the truth, and not even being very good at lying either. Everything they told me - who and what they were, where and when they were from, that they were my humble servants, that they cared about other people - all of it was fake, and the giveaways were endless.
Still, they did possess individual quirks, which are listed here. I have to say it was not enough, however. They could have disagreements among themselves, usually unrealistic ones about whether vengeance, research, bathing, or apples was more important, but by the end of the day, the five of them might as well have been the same person.
So called for the way the LEGO game exaggerated his odd locomotion. I gave him quirks of my own, giving him an affinity for trying to disguise his presence from the enemy, either with a fake mustache and glasses or a palm tree costume, but being a LEGO character, he was no good at original thought and used those same two disguises again and again and again and again. (He also rendered the original version of The Things Worsen Days
unpublishable with a verse about the palm tree disguise.)
Of the Five, all were obsessive mutant killers (which appeared to be what they thought the word pirate meant), but that was all this supposed Will Turner did. It was, as he claimed, revenge for his barnacled father, but, strangely, he never tried to rescue Bootstrap Bill. Turned out he only claimed to be the son of a barnacled man so he had an excuse for killing Davy to be all he ever did or talked about. He thus had to go. His insensitivity and fabrications would not be tolerated.
Having no personality to speak of in the LEGO game, I gave her my own, making her scientifically minded. I consider her to be the least worst of the Five, but still, a lot of research she did was on how to better kill.
His only personality in the LEGO game was that he smelled so bad that a pig sprayed him with perfume. That was all he had as a Comic Five member, too.
Similar to Mr. Gibbs, except that his sole personality trait was liking apples rather than being stinky.
Lacking any sense of humor of their own, the Five knew my readers and I had an affinity for song parodies and just did whatever seemed to qualify as one, assuming it would go over well - and in doing so, violated a basic rule of trying to be amusing in that whatever you use in your attempt must be something you yourself are amused by. Same goes for trying to be dramatic, tragic, or anything else. Your work will not do for everyone what it does for you, but if it does not at least make you feel it, what is to say it will anybody else?
Their problems can be traced to two main causes. First, being based on video game characters that just did whatever the CPU or the player told them to, they were almost machines I had to program. They could only go off of my evaluations of what was good or bad, not come up with their own. They operated without understanding anything and took everything I told them for granted, unless it indicated things had changed, as they, like some machines, were unable to adapt and effectively became obsolete - but they would have none of any indication that they were no longer what I wanted, because that would mean things had changed.
The second root problem was that they also had a tendency towards dangerous levels of overestimation. They decided that LEGO (or, more specifically, what it did with Pirates of the Caribbean was the best thing since sliced bread and disregarded all non-LEGO Pirates material based on what happened to be the source of my ideas at the time I created them, making it impossible for me to move on until I got the sack.
I hired them to break the bricks of any Flying Dutchman crewman who came to bother me, and they assumed that if the mutants could not be allowed to live in my presence, they could not be allowed to live anywhere. This drove them to endless, obsessive, actively seeking to kill, even though breaking such characters never lasted or changed anything, which caused my plan to completely backfire as the Five constantly dragged me to the things they were supposed to protect me from. Imagine how nice I found out it was in the years since I dismissed them, not spending my every waking moment thinking about things I disliked anymore, and how much I ended up wanting to complain that while the Five technically did as I said, they did it to the complete opposite of the intended effect. Unable to distinguish between literally not existing and subjectively not existing, they, if anything, made that enemy more existent, not less so.
Adding to their unpleasant attitude was that they took my initial approval of their act to mean anything they did was the arbitrary definition of good, no matter what it was, and in turn regarded anything to do with them as superior. Their collective ego knew no limits, and this infinite selfishness only magnified their other problems.
This complacency explains why almost none of their parodies were pleasant, as they believed any lyrics they wrote were better than any lyrics anyone else had ever written and that any kind of nice content would be surplus to requirements. Of course, as the Black Pearl Crew will tell you in all kinds of ways, the Five were quite wrong about that.
All in all this is a cast of characters - or, rather, caricatures - I shall not wish to employ again. And what a job undoing their teachings turned out to be. Basically, it took me two years to figure out what I wanted my parodies to be, and, as you can see on my advice to audiences, another two years for my readers to realize what I had decided on, with some mildly laughable events along the way. I found the perfect song to describe Bootstrap Bill, introduced him into my strip, and my readers did not suspect a thing. My only truly anticipated album was the one I did not do. (To find out what I mean, read my advice on why your readers should not try to predict you.)