For example: Jaws crashed the shark population and Sideways changed the popularity of 2 different Wines.
The Exorcist bears some (much?) responsibility for kicking off the Satanic panic.
Many war photos could work for this question, too. The first one that comes to mind for me is “The Terror of War,” often called “Napalm Girl,” from the Vietnam War.
Somwhow, no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings, which basically invented modern fantasy.
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
The bible and the quran and what for obvious reasons
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.
How about war of the worlds radio broadcast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
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.
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???
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.
Final Destination caused an entire generation of drivers to abjectly refuse to take up any space within a quarter mile behind a log truck.
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.
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.
I still do this for this exact reason.
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…
Star Trek introduced a lot of the first concepts of what we currently use as every day technology, it had a first hand tangible impact on the lives of pretty much every human alive today.
The book Unsafe at Any Speed was partly responsible for the formation of both the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Jurassic Park caused a lot more kids to be interested in growing up to be paleantologists. Ironically, they went on to prove some of the science in the movie wrong
Patterson-Gimlin-Film maybe. I see this image everywhere!
I’m not claiming to fully understand the cultural impact, but I’ve heard from native Irish folks that Zombie had a material impact on The Troubles.
It’s also a banger.
The Matrix; check out “the internet” for some examples of its influence.
Do you mean The Matrix the movie, or The Matrix the thing William Gibson created in 1983?
Fun fact, the Internet was around long before The Matrix. We even had fledgling VR before then. Google VRML and The Lawnmwer Man.
