Parodies and Imitations
As the campaign progressed, many parodies and imitations of Fairey's design appeared. For example, one anti-Obama version replaced the word "hope" with "hype", while parody posters featuring opponents Sarah Palin and John McCain had the word "nope". In January 2009 Paste magazine launched a site allowing users to create their own versions of the poster. More than 70,000 images were uploaded to the site in its first two weeks.
Mad magazine parodied the "hope" poster with an "Alfred E. Neuman for President!" poster. Alfred was on the poster, and the word "hope" was replaced with "hopeless". Anti-Gaddafi protesters in Chicago, in solidarity with the 2011 Libyan civil war, have co-opted the image.
Fairey himself was commissioned to create a number of works in the same style. He produced two other versions, based on different photographs, officially on behalf of the Obama campaign, and another to serve as the cover of the Person of the Year issue of Time. He also created a portrait of comedian Stephen Colbert in the same style, which appeared in an issue of Entertainment Weekly honoring Colbert's television show The Colbert Report.
Firas Alkhateeb, the student who designed the controversial Obama "Joker" image, cited Fairey as being his greatest influence. Alkhateeb described the "Joker" image as a corrective to Fairey's glowing portrayal of Obama. Fairey has both criticized and praised the "Joker" poster, stating "The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly", but that "I don't agree with the political content of the poster".
Conservative satire site The People's Cube did designs using words like "Chaos" with an image of Rush Limbaugh ("Operation Chaos"), "Shrugged" with an image of Ayn Rand (as in "Atlas Shrugged") and "Marxism" with an image of Groucho Marx.
The September 2009 issue of The Advocate, America's oldest-continuing LGBT publication, featured a cover image that was similar to Fairey's design. The blue and red coloring was replaced with pink and purple, but instead of "hope", the caption was "nope?". Jon Barrett, the magazine's editor-in-chief, said the cover symbolized frustration among some Democratic members of the LGBT community.
The poster has also been parodied in popular culture. In the Futurama episode "Proposition Infinity," a similar poster of President Richard Nixon can be seen, with the slogan "DESPAIR". In the 2010 movie Megamind, a version of the poster can be seen with Megamind's visage and the caption "NO YOU CAN'T", parodying Obama's campaign slogan "Yes we can". Disney's animated series "Phineas and Ferb" has two episodes, "Nerds of a Feather" and "She's the Mayor", both with Obama's poster parodied with Candace's face. American heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch has released a version with their mascot and the words "WAR", referring to their then-new album War Is The Answer. In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark receives a similar poster of the Iron Man armor and hangs it in his Malibu garage, much to the displeasure of his assistant and love interest Pepper Potts.
Read more about this topic: Barack Obama "Hope" Poster
Famous quotes containing the words parodies and/or imitations:
“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)