Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s “California Gurls” video debuted on June 15, and in the past two months it’s racked up more than 33 million YouTube views and spawned roughly as many amateur parodies. Some of these spoofs are great, some of them are weird, and the rest are profoundly, mesmerizingly bad. Fortunately for you (or, more likely, for no one), Vulture spent several hours sifting through them to determine what makes one “California Gurls” parody succeed and another fail. It’s called science!
