Fiction than inspired real life bands/movies/shows/products etc?

Cafe Society
1

I’m working on a story in which one of the characters spent his whole “life” in the afterlife, but is eventually brought back to life. This causes him to do a lot of adjusting because he doesn’t have the background for pop culture references. In a scene I’m still plotting out he’s completely baffled by a webcomic called “The Prince and Cyndi Lauper” and spends a while trying to get the main character to explain why anyone would think Prince and Cyndi Lauper switching places is funny and why anyone would have confused the two (he hasn’t read The Prince and The Pauper either, of course)… Obviously this webcomic doesn’t exist, but it could.

So, now that I’ve digressed, I’ll get to my point. Fiction is full of pretend things like my fictional webcomic. But has anything that was born in fiction ever been realized in reality? Not just as a promotional tie-in to the book/movie/tv show in question, though, so examples like True Blood beverages or the novels from Castle being real now don’t really count.

Has a band adopted the same name as one in a book?
Has a fake product in a story ever been manufactured in the real world?
Have fake movies (sometimes in movies, even) ever been made into real movies?
Have fictional books ever become real books by the same or a different author?

There have to be some examples of things from fiction becoming real, right?

2

Do the Willy Wonka line of candies count as a promotional tie-in?

3

Here’s a better one: The film Sullivan’s Travels, by Preston Sturges, is about a man trying to write a movie called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which the Coen brothers later took to make a movie that, in part, is a tribute to the films of Preston Sturges.

4

does Spinal Tap count

5

How about opening a can of Whoop-Ass?

6

Bands

As I Lay Dying - Inspired by a William Faulkner novel of the same name

Atreyu - Named after a character in 1984 movie, The Never Ending Story.

Bad Company — from the 1972 film Bad Company.

Belle & Sebastian — from Belle et Sébastien, a children’s book by French writer Cécile Aubry

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club — The film The Wild One featured two motorcycle gangs - The Beetles, led by Lee Marvin’s character, and Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, led by Marlon Brando’s characater. In a reference to the story that The Beatles took their name from one motorcycle gang, Peter Hayes, guitarist, and bassist Robert Levon Been, originally named their band “The Other Gang”, but switched to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club when The Other Gang didn’t catch on

Klaxons - Originally known as “Klaxons (Not Centaurs)”, a quote from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism text The Futurist Manifesto . Also in an interview a band member stated Klaxons “is to toot to be a loud intrusive noise to disrupt”

Modest Mouse — Their name derives from a passage from the Virginia Woolf story “The Mark on the Wall,” which reads, “…and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people…”

Opeth - The band name was derived from the word “Opet”, taken from the Wilbur Smith novel Sunbird. In this novel, Opet is the name of a (fictional) Phoenician city in South Africa whose name is translated as “City of the Moon” in the book.

Steely Dan — Named after a dildo in the novel Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

Thompson Twins – From Thomson and Thompson, the bumbling detectives in Hergé’s comic strip series The Adventures of Tintin.

The Velvet Underground - Were named after a book about sadomasochism by Michael Leigh.

7

Duran Duran were named after a character in the movie Barbarella. Heaven 17 were named after a fictional band (never seen or heard) in A Clockwork Orange. I’m on my Touch so I can’t do links, but that movie inspired a whole ton of things.

8

TV Tropes link

The one I was going to mention is the in-universe anime on Genshiken, which apparently was turned into its own show. And of course The Tales of Beedle the Bard, from Harry Potter.

9

Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

10

The band ‘Toad the Wet Sprocket’ named themselves after a fictional band of the same name in a Monty Python skit.

11

Otis Day and the Knights

Kickapoo Joy Juice

12

You can buy BRAWNDO: the thirst mutilator energy drinks. It’s from Idiocracy. It’s what plants crave!

13

It’s got electrolytes.

14

*The Killers *got their name from the fictional band in the New Order video for “Crystal”. Like Toad The Wet Sprocket, it’s one of the few examples of a real band directly taking their name from a fictional band. A lot of the other examples in this thread are just names taken from fiction.

Also, the movie Machete was based on a fake trailer that ran during Grindhouse.

I’m still waiting for Catholic High School Girls In Trouble - very NSFW) to be released! (To fix link, take extra X’s out of school)

15

American Express Black started out as an Urban Legend, but is now very much a real card with some amazing perks.

16

Venus on the Half-Shell was a nonexistant novel written by Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Philip Jose Famer later wrote a novel by that name and bylined it as by Kilgore Trout. That’s since been changed back at Vonnegut’s request.

Once, Locus Magazine reported that the final volume of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun would be titled The Castle of the Otter. The actual title was The Citadel of the Autarch. Wolfe liked the error and published a book of essays named The Castle of the Otter.

Similarly, Wolfe wrote a short story, “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories.” When it didn’t win a Nebula,* another author consoled him by saying that all he had to do was write a story called “The Death of Doctor Island” and he’d be a shoo-in. Wolfe wrote the story, and won. He later wrote “The Doctor of Death Island” and “The Death of the Island Doctor.”

I can’t recall the title, but there was a film title that was used by Warner Bros throughout the 30s as a placeholder on movie marquees as part of the set design. Eventually, they made a film with that name.

Several candies were produced to tie in with the original Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. At least one, Everlasting Gobstoppers, were mentioned in both the book and movie.

*In a very embarrassing circumstance for Isaac Asimov – he announced it as the winner, but was quickly told (as Wolfe was walking toward the podium to accept the award) that there would be no winner that year.

17

I’ve seen cans of Slurm, Duff, Romulan Ale, and some other stuff.

18

The very first episode of NBC’S Saturday Night (before the name changed to Saturday Night Live) had a fake commercial for the Triple Track razor with the tagline “Because you’ll believe anything.”

19

The fake trailer “Machete” being turned into an actual movie.

20

[geek cred]How about the game Hackmaster(haing started out as a fictoinal parody of D&D in KODT?)[/geek cred]