For example: Jaws crashed the shark population and Sideways changed the popularity of 2 different Wines.
Surprised the Crying Indian American TV ad isn’t in here. I have a giggle when I see someone on here outraged that they saw someone toss trash out their car window. That was SOP until the Crying Indian. I can’t think of a PSA in my lifetime that made such a dramatic impact.
While not a piece of media exactly, reporting on the Tylenol Murders changed packaging almost overnight. Used to be you could pull anything off the shelf, open it and close it, no one would be the wiser. I remember as a kid suddenly encountering all the things suddenly having tamper-proof packaging. It was truly wild to my young brain.
It doesn’t get brought up much anymore, but Roots.
Torah, Bible, and Quran, unfortunately.
From Hell (2001) popularized drinking absinthe, and twisted the traditional way of drinking it. (The sugar is not traditionally set alight). Not 100% sure of this, might be that Moulin Rouge which was released around the same time also had an impact.
Janet Jackson’s nipple slip was a major contributor to the creation of YouTube.
I think this is more interesting limiting it to fictional pieces or work, as many of the non-fiction examples were written to have a real world impact.
Also one I didn’t see was The China Syndrome. If you’re unfamiliar it was a drama about a nuclear incident, but happened to release just days before the Three Mile Incident. Meaning it was a one-two punch to the nuclear industry and something people point to about nuclear energy stalling in the US.
Here in Québec, there is a song by Gilles Vigneault that somehow became what we use to sing happy birthday to someone. Beautiful song, great guy who, at around 95 years old , had his music removed from Spotify because they gave millions to Joe Rogan.
Somwhow, no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings, which basically invented modern fantasy.
It’s a foundational work, but I’d argue that modern fantasy is more of a synthesis of LOTR and Conan the Barbarian.
This. You might have never read or seen LotR, but your idea of medieval fantasy is essentially LotR, I love a quote by Terry Pratchett:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
GNU Terry Pratchett
GNU Sir pTerry.
That’s a great quote, thank you!
The 24 hour news cycle. It made the news dependent on ratings and turned into an entertainment medium to fill all of the extra hours. Before that, it was a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news at dinner time and at bedtime with snippets of news in the morning on things like the Today Show. CNN created a format, Fox added imaginary outrage, and things went downhill from there.
The bible and the quran and what for obvious reasons
How about war of the worlds radio broadcast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
Final Destination caused an entire generation of drivers to abjectly refuse to take up any space within a quarter mile behind a log truck.
Refuse to? Buddy, I’m hunting for them. I don’t have to do this anymore and my family gets a big payout. Sign me up.
Might I recommend any given highway in and around Washington State’s Olympics Peninsula.
Bad news, the scene was CGI’d because logs don’t bounce like that.
For anybody wanting to watch the movie so they understand this meme, don’t actually watch Final Destination, because the log scene is not in there. I know this because I watched the whole movie waiting to see it, and never saw it.
The log scene is in Final Destination 2.
Final Destination 2 also had the best final kill of the entire franchise. Most of the movie is not great, but the open and close are two of my favorite moments in a cinema.
I’ve never seen the Final Destination movies, but the one with the tanning bed scene came out when I was in high school.
…Interestingly enough, that was right around when the cliquey “cool” girls stopped going to tanning salons in the winter.
Honestly I got a lot more of that from IdiotsInCars on reddit
That youtube channel is a great way to learn what stupid mistakes drivers commonly make, to know what to look for/avoid.
First thing that came to mind is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which led to, among other things, the creation of the FDA.
That wasn’t his goal though; he’s quoted as saying: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
I know, the whole book is about how America is a giant con to get immigrants to come over so they can be exploited for profit then left to die with they can no longer work 12 hour shifts, meanwhile they get to watch their kids get poisoned by companies, ran over by commercial trucks and robbed of any dignity or chance they deserve.
Instead people read it and were like ‘omg some filthy polacks finger could be in my sausage, that’s disgusting!’
Theres still on average about 2 amputations per week across the US meat packaging industry. People are still getting maimed and killed doing a job that pays shit. You just don’t eat as much of them as you used to…
There was a minor news story about a decade ago about Tyson getting caught employing minors on the meat packing floor.
Theres still on average about 2 amputations per week across the US meat packaging industry. People are still getting maimed and killed doing a job that pays shit. You just don’t eat as much of them as you used to…
Damn, shrinkflation hitting everything
The Hindenburg crash. If it weren’t for the newsreel, it would have been a unique airship crash and the airships would have continued to fly. But because it was shown in every theater as a newsreel for months, the interest in airship travel tanked and fleets were dismantled. It was actually a safe form of travel for the time. While tragic, only 35 people actually died, which is peanuts to a large air liner crash.
I remember reading that most airships at the time used helium, but due to the war Germany had to use hydrogen instead. This is what made the hindenburg explode.
If they had used helium there wouldn’t have been any issue.
And 62 of the 97 survived. It blew my mind to learn that.
It’s actually crazy to me that cruise ships exist but cruise zeppelins don’t. You are telling me me there isn’t a market for a treetop rainforest cruise because of a crash from almost 100 years ago but people will still fly on a 737???
A cruise zeppelin could only work as an extreme luxury thing. A ship can carry tons of stuff, but a zeppelin is pretty limited, especially compared to the size of one.
For sure, it would be stupid expensive, it still surprises me that it nobody has tried it.
I will never forgive them for what they stole from us
A single piece of media, then Neuromancer, but really it’s the entire cyberpunk literary subgenre of the 1980’s and 90’s, including the Cyberpunk TTRPG.
