It only went as far as you could spit.
I don’t think that Capricorn One increased the percentage of people who believed that the moon landings were faked. There has always been a certain amount who have believed that ever since the first landing. Can anyone find anything that gives the percentage of people in polls over the past 47 years who said that the landings were fake?
One film you wouldn’t think would have such a big impact is Animal House. At the time it was made, frats were dying off. The writers wanted to put another stake thru the Greek system.
But people took the film as glorifying the frat lifestyle and enrollment in frats shot up. In turn, this promoted the big drinking and partying lifestyle that dominates too many campuses today.
The effects of partying for 4 years instead of studying reduces the effectiveness of the knowledge the students are paying for and has long term effects in the workplace for decades afterwards.
Ask [del]for[/del] Babs.
It made a difference, but not all by itself. MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco ran in the summer of '94, about six months later, and HIV-positive house member Pedro Zamora died in November. That really humanized the disease to MTV viewers.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner made a big impact in the acceptance of interracial marriage.
The scriptwriters apparently invented Toga Parties.
No, they were real and Chris Miller went to them at Dartmouth.
There’s also no evidence whatsoever that Clark Gable killed the undershirt, and the story of that urban myth is given at length in this fantastic article. It’s like saying that the plastics industry was affected by The Graduate.
Dude, Where’s My Car forever impacted the way we…uh…park…cars?
Didn’t Free Willy lead to better whale treatment?
The failure of The Three Amigos sidelined Lorne Michaels’ film ambitions and forced him to return to SNL, which was nearing cancellation. Some of the people who joined the show after 1985 would undoubtedly have been big stars anyway, but a more typical outcome without the continued show would have been, in Chris Rock’s words, “Tina Fey would’ve been the funniest English professor at Drexel University.”
Singles capitalized on grunge rock more than the other way around, but I doubt Pearl Jam and its imitators (Stone Temple Pilots, et al) would have been as big a deal without that film. Plus, MTV doubled down on the popularity of grunge and gangsta rap so heavily that they stopped showing music videos altogether by the end of the 90s. Singles was the pebble that started an avalanche.
Not sure what the link between The Wizard of Oz and gay cultural identity was, but a lot of gay people have pointed to this film as the thing that spurred them to realize who they were. This was bigger than the Stonewall riots in terms of establishing a publicly-recognizable movement and identity.
Enter the Dragon did for martial arts academies what the Beatles did for guitar stores; both had pretty much always been around in America, but they experienced a quantum leap in popularity afterwards that just hadn’t been there before.
Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania popularized the idea of America entering WWI. It’s hard to state just how resistant most Americans were to the idea of getting involved in a European clusterfuck, and how instrumental one of the first cartoons ever made was in turning public opinion around.
According to accounts at the time the 1983 TV movie The Day After (which my family was about the only family in the nation that didn’t watch) supposedly spiked a huge interest in what we’d now call survivalism. According to accounts at the time, sales of everything from home generators to bunkers to wagons multiplied.
Though I’d go with the already mentioned Birth of a Nation as the number 1 answer.
The Godfather had a big impact on the Mafia. After the movie came out, they changed from what we today would call “street thugs” and began to purposely conduct themselves in what they felt was a more dignified fashion.
About The Day After, the Wikipedia article mentions that it influenced policymakers. Copypasting from there:
President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed,”[16] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war”.[18] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer’s [Meyer was the director of the film], told him “If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone.” Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan’s memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.[16]
(The text with reference [16] is taken from an article in Empire Magazine published in November 2010, and the text with reference [18] is from Reagan’s book An American Life).
My husband told me the because of Psycho, his mother won’t shower if she’s home alone.
The Fast and the Furious popularized the until-then small Japanese import scene.
So no one can think of any impact James Bond movies had?
I agree with WarGames. It literally led to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) being passed in 1984. You could even argue that Reagan thought it was nonfiction based on what he said about it. I’ll post an excerpt from the article linked by Tired and Cranky.
I don’t know if it’s truth or urban legend, but I’ve heard that the deer hunting industry took years to recover from Bambi.
I assume you mean for street racing. There was no lack of Japanese import cars before that movie.
I think it influenced a number of things in the real world. If I remember right, the russian astronaut brought over the fresh bottle of 02, and it had a nonstandard plug in. Which meant A for effort, but did not help.
So it was instrumental in standardizing a bunch of different things, in space craft design on both sides.
Another was a book about the space shuttle having to do an abort, and landing on Easter Island, and having to come up with Passports, which at the time was never needed. So anything manned going up, had some sort of documentation if needed. In the book, they took the refueling probe off an A7 or F-8, as the 747 lifter, had no inflight capability. In the real world, I dont recall if the lifter has inflight capabilty.
Declan