If anything, the DTV entry-- which I'll call TEEN/TEEN for short-- is even more referential. Here, most of the inside jokes deal with the popular 2003 TEEN TITANS series, which was dominantly serious in tone and which was responsible for establishing the comic-book characters as popular subjects for animation. Indeed, the producers of GO! included a "teaser" at the end of MOVIES, suggesting that the "Serious Titans" would appear in this sequel.
If the main subject of the first movie was American society's enthusiasm for all manner of superheroes, TEEN/TEEN spoofs what I'll call the "multiple earths adventure" In comic books, this trope depended on the encounter of at least two groups of heroes from parallel versions of Earth, wherein the two groups had to resolve some cosmic threat to the respective domains of each group. In Silver Age DC Comics, these were usually variant versions of popular heroes like the Flash and Green Lantern, and thus for the most part the trope was confined to the comic-book medium. The TEEN/TEEN take on this concept is certainly one of the first, if not the first, non-comics adaptations of the trope, debuting even before the CW network produced its very loose adaptation of a crossover-series from the eighties DC-series CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. In TEEN/TEEN, not only must the "funny Titans" deal with the serious versions of themselves, and with an assortment of other variant heroes as well, the teams' antagonists are a funny and a serious version of the demon-lord Trigon.
Though the 2003 Titans are played straight, their gravitas is largely flouted by the levity of the 2013 group. The level of humor is about the same level as MOVIES, decent but not spectacular, and the "serious TItans" don't really have a chance to shine in this format-- which will probably aggravate the many fans who preferred their adventures to those of their goofball variations.
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