"I didn't intend it to be a genre parody," Mr. Busch said, "just a mysterious story line with very un-mysterious characters."

Rather than broad caricature and sharp genre parody, their humor relies heavily on pun-filled wordplay and on stretching stock situations into the realm of the ridiculous.

Halfway between sneaky genre parody and whited-out film noir, it was thawed by Frances McDormand's wonderful Marge, with her imperturbability around dead bodies or live bait.

The most prominent example is Beck, whose last album, the kitsch-funk "Midnight Vultures," was an accomplished but excruciating exercise in Gainsbourg-inspired genre parody and gaudy excess.

The tone of "Out of the Dark" lurches from mundane whodunit to inept genre parody without rhyme or reason.

It dissolved genre parody into a post-modern whirlpool of information.

Darkwing Duck was also the first Disney Afternoon property that was produced completely as a genre parody.

Heavy on action-movie hyperbole, Roger Donaldson's film "is written as something of a genre parody" (Maslin).

A ND yet . . . and yet . . . is there something larger than genre parody going on here?

Peter Ekstrom and David DeBoy's generally uninspired music works best in the genre parodies, but most of the lyrics lead nowhere.