La La Land is the frontrunner to walk away from this weekend’s Academy Awards with a boatload of gold statues. But the movie musical already leads the pack of Oscar hopefuls when it comes to online parodies.
A host of online spoofs of the film’s memorable musical score and dance numbers have popped up across the internet in the months leading up to the Oscars. There is an 8-bit version of La La Land‘s opening song-and-dance number resembling a classic Nintendo game, while comedy site Funny or Die made a mashup of Emma Stone’s La La Land character singing and dancing with the Muppets’ Kermit the Frog. Jimmy Fallon also spoofed the movie’s opening sequence at the start of last month’s Golden Globes.
Now, the Internet has graced us with a clever new parody that manages to spoof La La Land while also skewering New York City’s finance and technology industries. Sketch comedy group Cannibal Milkshake’s video, titled “NY NY Land,” appeared on YouTube (GOOGL) earlier this week, and the parody features two actors spoofing La La Land‘s two romantic leads (played in the film by Stone and Ryan Gosling) by imagining they live in New York instead of sunny Los Angeles.
Watch the video spoof here:
In La La Land, the two characters bond over their mutual aspirations in show business. (Stone’s character is an actress and Gosling’s wants to open a jazz club.) But, Cannibal Milkshake decided to give its video’s two lead characters more New York-centric goals, with the money-loving male character dreaming of starting his own hedge fund while his female counterpart longs for funding for an app that’s similar to Instagram—except only for pictures of pizza. (New Yorkers love pizza! Get it?)
While Hollywood is closely associated with Los Angeles, New York is obviously a financial hub, and the city’s tech scene has also been blossoming in recent years. (New York’s “Silicon Alley” is trying to compete with California’s larger Silicon Valley.) Cannibal Milkshake simply transported La La Land‘s general plot and themes from one coast to another—coining catchphrases like “I just heard you finance,” and “What if my app’s too basic?” along the way—and set it all to the tune of the film’s actual Oscar-nominated song, “Another Day of Sun.”
“NY NY Land” is definitely one of the better La La Land parodies thus far. Now we’ll have to wait until after this weekend to see if winning Oscar gold will spur more spoofs.
