Seinfeld
But Seinfeld's videos weren't ABOUT anything! They weren't funny, either. So yeah, good point. Now, I sddenly understand why someone would go to the trouble of making "I Love Lucy" all over again, when THAT show was never funny, either. Thanks!

Ridley 666: HUH?
I hope being patronizing makes you FEEL better, because it sure doesn't make you look better. Your response to my post was intentionally offensive, and/or it revealed your own ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

lastie, you're the one I don't understand
Yes, I understood the point of the list. There are people who would contend "Sideways" is a great movie. I can understand why — but I didn't enjoy that movie the one time I watched it.

Sideways
Just a matter of personal taste. "Sideways" apparently appealed to a lot of smart people, but I could never watch it again. The movie is about two shallow, selfish, pretentious idiots, and I found only one or two brief moments entertaining. The rest of the movie was like scrubbing my skin with a cheese…

if i heard a few bars
Not "it" I heard them.

soulja boy = beastie boys?
Took me a long time to realize the Beastie Boys were not shallow idiots who really believed we should fight for our right to party. I finally listened to the lyrics all the way through, and realized they were spoofing the shallow idiots, instead — and doing it quite cleverly.

of course rape is hard to watch
Persia is right. The list would have been much shorter (and much, much harder to assemble) if it only included one example of a great movie made hard to watch by scenes of rape and/or physical abuse.

Catching the Allusions
When I first saw "Shakespeare in Love" in a theater, my wife commented that I seemed to be laughing more often than anyone else in the room. As an English Literature major, I studied Shakespeare extensively, and as a result I did catch more allusions than most.

Fantasy Book Covers
Bloomsbury, the British publisher for Harry Potter, came out with two covers for each book. You could buy your copy with a kid's cover or an adult cover, for that very reason: adults were just too self-conscious about being seen in public with the regular "kids" fantasy covers.

I never saw delta farce
Judging from the cover photo, there had to be at least one "joke" about Larry exercising his 2d amendment right to "bare arms." ba-da-bing!

Pratchett's nightwatch
I agree that Vimes is Pratchett's best character, and Pratchett himself once said that Vimes is Pratchett's favorite. Likewise, I also consider Nightwatch to be the best I've read (I'm currently reading "Making Money," so I cannot yet say "best overall"). It is darker, but it still has a great…

for a science fiction article
Mass media and other ignorant types like to treat science fiction as a crystal ball for predicting the future, rather than as a source of literature or even escapist entertainment. For some serious meta-irony, I'd love to see an informed analysis predicting the future OF science fiction.…

Echoes are Recurring Problem
Science-fiction writer CJ Cherryh has explained the tendency, found in both fantasy and science fiction, to write longer stories that have to be broken into bits. It results from a combination of publishing economics (there are valid business reasons why nobody will publish 2000 pages of…

Neal Stephenson's Baroque Series
Not as satisfying as Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash, but much longer and still quite fun to read. Not a true fantasy (though there are some very brief fantastic elements); rather, it is a swashbuckler, with pirates, slaves, treasure, sex, romance, politics, economics, renaissance…

Terry Pratchett? Yes, Terry Pratchett!
Amazing to me that any celebration of Fantasy stories can overlook Terry Pratchett. His Discworld series is comprised of relatively brief, intelligent, stand-alone novels all set in the Discworld, a fantasy milieu.

derivations
Just from your desciption, I'm getting strong echoes from Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land."

Lemmings
I recently read that we should blame a Disney film for the myth that lemmings will periodically engage in mass-suicide. Apparently, the film crew herded a bunch of lemmings into the water, and then made up stuff about that. Not one of their better moments.

Bad opener is better than no opener
Years ago, I took my not-yet wife to a Todd Rundgren concert in a small venue. We got there 45 minutes before showtime, so we could find a good place to stand. Then the show started 2 HOURS after the scheduled showtime. No opening act. Nothing to do — the canned music was too…

Now we're communicating
Yes, the only objective measures for comparison are really irrelevant. I never played a guitar, but I know that much.

In the alternative
Whenever possible, we can also strive to construe comments from others as NOT intending a silly comparison of things that can't be compared. Won't always be possible, but the effort could help keep comment strings more pleasant.