As I lay in bed last night waiting for sleep, I remembered an article in Time around the time Shrek the Third was released in theaters. In Is Shrek Bad for Kids?, the author (I can’t find a byline anywhere) expresses both love and concern over today’s “postmodern” fairytales.

As a member of generation X, the author loves ironic postmodern takes on the Disney-style pablum we grew up on, where handsome princes save the day and beautiful princesses swoon. But, they also wonder about the next generation, who has only known stories where Snow White karate-chops the bad guys, and where the Three Little Pigs fold the next page into a paper airplane and fly out of the storybook:

“But those parodies had a dominant fairy-tale tradition to rebel against. The strange side effect of today’s meta-stories is that kids get exposed to the parodies before, or instead of, the originals. My two sons (ages 2 and 5) love The Three Pigs, a storybook by David Wiesner in which the pigs escape the big bad wolf by physically fleeing their story (they fold a page into a paper airplane to fly off in). It’s a gorgeous, fanciful book. It’s also a kind of recursive meta-fiction that I didn’t encounter before reading John Barth in college. Someday the kids will read the original tale and wonder why the stupid straw-house pig doesn’t just hop onto the next bookshelf. Likewise, Shrek reimagines Puss in Boots as a Latin tomcat–but what kid today even reads Puss in Boots in the original?”

If you don’t understand what’s being parodied, can you really understand a parody? I’ve been watching Airplane! for almost 30 years now. I know many of the jokes by heart. But, I hadn’t seen Zero Hour until last night, and I still haven’t seen any of the airplane disaster films that were so popular in the late 1970s. So, Airplane! was just a funny movie for me, because I lacked a conceptual framework for airplane disaster movies.

And, in a lot of ways, Airplane ruined Zero Hour for me. There wasn’t any suspense, because I’ve seen the parody so many times and I know how it ends. There certainly wasn’t any drama, because the moment a character uttered a line used in both movies, I was cracking up over the joke that inevitably followed the straight line in Airplane!.

Or am I just reading waaaay too much profundity in all of this?