Did “the dark side” come from Star Wars? Such as “he went to the dark side”.
The term was used for basically the same meaning prior to Star Wars, but was like 1000 times amplified by the movie.
It’s not a phrase but I bet a million (billion?) people have done the ‘der-dum…der-dum…derdumderdumderdum’ from Jaws when they’ve seen a fin in the water, or just been messing about swimming at the beach.
Also, the six repeating notes of the wicked witch theme from The Wizard of Oz.
(Just testing if you can quote from a different thread in a different topic, and yes, you can).
“Stop trying make fetch happen” might be more popular.
It’s certainly relevant to this thread; I expect quite a few people have quoted that line over the years (in voices as close to that of Slim Pickens as they can manage).
You realize, of course, that was not the original line?
Trivia challenge: What was the original line, and why was it changed?
Dallas, JFK
Correct! 
“Too soon.”
It’s certainly not the most commonly used phrase in English, but tonight I learned that the line “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” came from The Fly (1986) and was in fact suggested by Mel Brooks (the producer of the film).
Brooks also coined the term “High Anxiety” for his 1977 film of the same name.
Yeah, I remember the bargain basement “movie” Blythe Danner’s child attempted to perform. Never heard anyone say that seriously, though.
That might be a winner.
My own contribution ? “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
Doesn’t come up that often in conversation, but when it does, it’s a goodie.
EDIT “Fuck Heineken! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
Trust me, I hear it a few times a month. I’m as big a David Lynch fan as there ever was, but to me that phrase is Lumberton sawing logs…big dumb catchphrase which I hate. Don’t personally care about either beer, but it’s always some dumb oaf shrieking it out at some bar.
Not really, no. It’s an obvious combination that describes a mental state.
What Mel Brooks did was take the phrase and give it a different meaning: fear of heights. It’s a pun that only works because “high anxiety” was already in common use. And have you ever actually heard someone outside the movie use it in that sense?
I knew that Heinlein had used it, so I checked Wikipedia:
“Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying the kindness to others rather than paying it back to the original benefactor. It is also called serial reciprocity.
The concept is old, but the particular phrase may have been coined by Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book In the Garden of Delight. Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel Between Planets helped popularize the phrase.”
The first time I heard the phrase “shits and giggles” was in Austin Powers.
It’s entered the vernacular now, basically meaning a frivolous reason to do something.
Did the expression predate the movie?
Definitely.
Yes. I can recall hearing it for the first time in the late 70s. It seemed to be commonly known to everybody but me at the time.
I mentioned this upthread but it might’ve got lost in the shuffle so I’ll ask again - was the term “perfect storm” used much before the book/movie?
That’s a weird one because the book/film’s use of the phrase is meteorological and was used in that sense for more than a hundred years previous. It’s use to describe situations other than weather seems to postdate the film, but I’m not sure who was the first to do so.
In the first place, the book/ movie was based on a historical event in 1991 that was known as the perfect storm before the book came out.
Secondly, that name was an existing phrase. Here is an example of it being used by Ulysses S. Grant in 1865.