Got around to reviewing the four omnibus case file editions of Judge Dredd I've read earlier this week. I remembered how the series basically started out as a parody of American cop movies and aspects of them that come across as ridiculous to British audiences, though the series moved beyond that pretty quickly.
"In the comics it's clearer than the films, both the Sylvester Stallone version from the mid 90's and the recent Karl Urban version, that the central concept of Dredd is a British parody of 1960s/1970s American cop-on-the-edge movies like "Bullitt" or "Dirty Harry". That genre comes across as faintly ridiculous to UK audiences, who prefer their action heroes closer to James Bond or Sherlock Holmes. A good deal of the humour at first comes from putting a straight-laced hard-boiled supercop into the type of patently ridiculous futuristic society typical of the more satirical strain of UK science-fiction, and having him act like the "straight man" to everything around him. Imagine Steve McQueen's Bullitt dumped into "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and you have a good idea."
Which I touch upon in my review of the first omnibus:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"In the comics it's clearer than the films, both the Sylvester Stallone version from the mid 90's and the recent Karl Urban version, that the central concept of Dredd is a British parody of 1960s/1970s American cop-on-the-edge movies like "Bullitt" or "Dirty Harry". That genre comes across as faintly ridiculous to UK audiences, who prefer their action heroes closer to James Bond or Sherlock Holmes. A good deal of the humour at first comes from putting a straight-laced hard-boiled supercop into the type of patently ridiculous futuristic society typical of the more satirical strain of UK science-fiction, and having him act like the "straight man" to everything around him. Imagine Steve McQueen's Bullitt dumped into "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and you have a good idea."