I was thinking the other day about how I heard that ‘The Godfather’ inspired real-life mobsters to behave and talk more like the characters in the movie and its sequel; behaviors and phrases that previously had been entirely fictional. Which got me to thinking, there must me more examples of this. I thought that, since as a species we are such copycats, there must be many other examples of this, but I couldn’t think of much, other than the term “Bucket List”, which was made up for the movie “The Bucket List” and now has become an actually used phrase in the popular lexicon.
And looking up examples online, I found surprisingly few, several of which were odd coincidences, like author Morgan Robertson writing the novel “The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility”, an eerily spot-on parallel to the Titanic sinking 14 years later. Or Brad Pitt tearing his Achilles tendon while filming 'Achilles". I’m not interested in coincidences, however eerily spot-on or ironic, I’m interested in times when the fiction was intentionally recreated or copied IRL.
Looks like there was a similar post back in '04: Examples of life imitating art?, but it had only 5 replies, and a couple of those replies were of the coincidence variety. I know we can do better than that!
Much of technology comes from people trying to make real things that they read about in science fiction. The very word “robotics” comes from Isaac Asimov and “cyberspace” from William Gibson. And Elon musk is trying hard to recreate Iain Banks’ Culture books.
If the mobsters are the iconic example, surely any time someone cosplays is also an example? Or maybe the criteria need to be clearer, such as:
A behavior is introduced in a work of fiction.
People who experience the fiction (read, view, etc.) start using this behavior.
They use it in everyday life without referencing the fiction, and without other folks connecting their behavior to the fiction.
Is that what you’re looking for?
I wonder whether parts of goth fashion are influenced by classic black-and-white horror films. William Gibson’s cyberspace culture was imitated in real life by a lot of folks. Is that what you’re looking for?
The “Klingon” language some nutcases trekkers speak at Cons comes immediately to mind. They wrote dictionaries, invented grammars, created fonts, built on-line communities of like-minded souls, etc. Far, far beyond the teeny bits of throwaway yak-yak used in the shows & movies.
AFAIK the world does not yet have a serious religion based on Jedis and The Force. But for quite awhile various buzzwords & touchphrases of the SW canon were in mainstream use. And carried the same sentiment here as they did on-screen.
It may be a bit tautological, but car companies have been producing “concept cars” since forever. Which represent wild stabs at what might be technologies and styles of 10-15 years in the future. These are hand-made one-offs, usually not even functional. They are pure art of a practical engineering nature.
Quite frequently when a totally new model is introduced or an existing one gets a major make-over, various echoes of former concept cars are readily evident. Whether in shape or function, todays life is imitating yesterday’s art at least a little.
No, because the mobsters who adopted 'Godfather" behaviors and phrases were not cosplaying.
I’m thinking more “behaviors and phrases that were adopted from fiction and became a part of real life”.
Yes, that’s more what I’m looking for.
Almost…? But…not quite? When someone says “may the force be with you” its meaning is more cutesy and humorous than serious. But phrases like “Jedi Mind Trick” meaning a method used to fool a gullible person into thinking or doing something desirable is pretty close, I’d say. Its meaning still has an ironic remove to it, but if you say “I performed a Jedi Mind Trick on Frank, getting him to take on that task I hate” everybody will know what you mean.
Well, the biggest example in my life is National Lampoon’s Animal House. That largely defined the “college” experience for Gen X at least: Louie, Louie sung drunkenly, toga parties, that sort of thing. You could have just played the soundtrack to this movie at any of the parties we had, and everyone would have just rolled with it, like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
Someone made these Star Trek Communicators with Blue Tooth capability that can be used with most cell phones, so I had to get one. The Star Trek Tricorder triggered development of several modern medical devices.
This is a great example, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it. Frats at the college I went to in the 80s practically worshiped Animal House, and yes, toga parties, “Louie Louie” and dancing to “Shout” were de rigueur.
With the way smart phones have been evolving, with more and more, and smaller sensors, I could see them essentially becoming tricorders at some point. Cameras, GPS, compasses, NFT, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. Slap in a radiation detector, maybe an automated blood sensor like diabetics are getting these days, a pulse oximeter thingy, an ultrasound emitter/sensor, and you could measure all sorts of things at once just by waving it over something.
Ah, I should have remembered that one! I freaked someone out at an event at our local museum’s dino exhibit by referring to the thagomizer. They didn’t believe me that that was the official term for it until they googled it.
My lunch break is up soon, so I don’t think I’ll have time to read the full site and story. But, the RPG company White Wolf inlcuded statistics for a generic waldo in several of their books- in different games. I always wondered why they did that. ‘The book writers were huge Heinlen fans’ makes more sense than any explanation I’ve been able to come up with.
Another example of this sort of thing – Seinfeld is generally credited for popularizing the word “re-gift”.
The Simpsons created the word “embiggen” in the 1996 episode Lisa the Iconoclast. The whole joke was that it wasn’t a real word. But people actually started using it, and in 2018 Merriam-Webster added it to their dictionary.
