Austin Powers/YMMV

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• Acceptable Targets: Austin's father hates Dutch people for no good reason. Austin himself hates carnies (carnival workers) because they have "small hands."
  • ... and smell like cabbage.
  • His hate for the Dutch might be justified. See Freudian Excuse a bit further down the line.
  • He's also not fond of Belgians because "they share a border with the Dutch" (Michael Caine makes this line awesome).
• Angst? What Angst?: Austin doesn't even particularly seem to care that Vanessa was a Fembot and is now dead. He's a swinger!
  • Also, he doesn't seem to care all that much when Basil admits that they suspected it all along, and then quickly changes the subject and never mentions it again.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is a loving homage of the John Barry Bond scores, including a fantastic villainous theme for Dr Evil.
  • Three words: Soul Bossa Nova.
  • There's also rapper Ludacris's 2004 song Number One Spot, which not only samples the series' intro theme, but also includes several references to the series.

"In court I never show up like Austin Powers's fah-za."

• Discredited Meme: There has been a rather huge Internet Backlash against the meme from Memetic Mutation. Using any one of them today immediately brands you a loser, even if jesting.
• Evil Is Sexy: Alotta Fagina and Ivana Humpalot, full stop.
• Expy: The Original Mrs. Kensington is an Expy of Emma Peel from The Avengers.
• Fountain of Memes: And how.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Man Of Mystery ended on a perfunctory Patrick Stewart Speech about how the spirit of The Sixties was living more responsibly in The Nineties. Highly cynical Turn of the Millennium ideas about sex, war and egotism make even a Chivalrous Pervert like Austin look like a Wide-Eyed Idealist.
  • You may never look at Random Task from Man of Mystery the same way again.
    • And now It Got Worse.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the songs in the first movie's credits rolls off a list of BBC channels which didn't exist at the time, such as BBC Three and BBC Four.
  • Dr Evil originally wants one million dollars in exchange for not trying to take over the world. Number Two tells him that one million dollars is a relatively modest hostage demand in the 1990's. He then ups the bid to "one hundred... 'billion... dollars!" His demand seems telling in light of Ireland's 90 billion euro EU bailout.
  • While snooping around Alotta Fagina's penthouse in the first movie, Austin discovers a folder with some of Virtucon's evil plots listed inside. In between "Human Organ Trafficing" and "Project Vulcan" is... "Carrot Top Movie". In the following year, they made Chairman Of The Board.
  • In the movie-in-the-movie in Goldmember, Kevin Spacey plays Dr. Evil, a bald, evil super genius. He'd later go on to play a second bald, evil super genius a few years later in another film.
  • "Who throws a shoe? Honestly!" Cue the Bush "Shoe Incident".
  • Machine-gun breasts? Who would ever do that again?
  • In the second movie when Dr. Evil tells Austin "I am your father", Austin says "Really?" in a rather hopeful tone of voice. Come the third movie, and you find that his relationship with his father is traumatic enough that he might have actually wanted Dr. Evil to be his dad.
• Memetic Mutation: "Yeah baby!", "Shagadelic" and "Oh, behave!"
  • "Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed. "
  • "Judo Chop!"
  • "One MILLION dollars!" *Puts little finger to mouth*
  • Sharks with Frickin' Laser Beams!
    • "One MILLION dollars" was so overplayed, even King Hussein of Jordan was doing it before he died.
  • Also "The sheer mechanics are mind-boggling!" and "You look like a baby. I eat babies. Get in my belly."
    • Though mostly just "GET IN MAH BELLEH!"
  • And "When Dr. Evil gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset... people DIE!"
• MST3K Mantra: Most explicitly, when Austin has some issues with temporal causality in The Spy Who Shagged Me, Basil Exposition tells him to just relax and try to enjoy it, then looks directly at the camera and tells the audience to do the same.
• Retroactive Recognition: in the Rent-A-Zilla scene from the third movie, there's a cameo by Masi Oka - now with all the time-travel involved, where was Hiro Nakamura when you needed him?
• Signature Style: If you've seen the Wayne's World movies, the way Austin Powers gleefully plays with every trope possible and half the time ignores the fourth wall won't be new to you.
• Values Dissonance: The first movie gets a number of jokes about The Sixties and The Nineties being different decades with different social mores.
• Vindicated by Cable: The first movie was only a modest hit at the box office, but actually wound up making significantly more money through rentals. It's one of the only movies to do so.