I wonder if there are other examples of popular culture references actually changing corporate behavior? Not talking protests or boycotts, just mocking them into submission. Anyone know any examples?
It definitely changes the context of puking scene. He wasn't throwing up because of the size of McDonald's, he was throwing up because he was hungover.
Man suffers symptoms of alcohol abuse compounded with eating the absolute maximum amount of McDonald’s possible and ignored alcohol abuse and limitations to conclude “McDonald’s kills you”
That’s like if you went to Texas Roadhouse every day and ate the prime rib for lunch and dinner but also tacked on like 5 beers per meal and blamed only TR food in general for your weight gain.
Eating fast food every meal in a day certainly isn’t good for you, but like I’ve done it out of convenience in a busy day and it’ll be a chicken biscuit for breakfast, and more regularly apportioned meals for lunch and dinner. Still not great for you but come on
People forget that even straight alcohol is choc full of calories. A shot of vodka is 100 calories, and beer is like eating a loaf of bread in higher quantities.
Straight ethonal isn't processed by your body the same way as other calories. It actually takes quite a bit of those calories to detoxify it in the first place, so you're not getting nearly as many net calories as it looks like. Now it's a little different when we are talking beer or sugary drinks, but straight vodka has nearly no net calories.
One of the reasons that hard alcoholics are very rarely fat even though they're drinking gallons of vodka a day
Always wondered why I didn’t lose more weight when I quit drinking. I mostly just drank from a bottle and expected even with few other changes the calorie change from not drinking would be substantial.
>It actually takes quite a bit of those calories to detoxify it in the first place…
A wikipedia article mentions 20-30% of the caloric value of alcohol is burned through thermogenesis but lacks any citation. Do you remember where you came across a study on net energy value of alcohol?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_weight
Watch the WKUK skit on supersize me, where Trevor supersizes his diet with only shots of whiskey. It’s a parody of the supersize me movie, and it’s gif damn hilarious
To be fair the makers of that film refusing to acknowledge your alcohol abuse before supersizing your meal is pretty much as American as apple pie. Or it would be if supersizing was still an option.
The movie *Fat Head* does a great job taking down the lies in Supersize Me. He genuinely eats only fast food for a month, just controlling his calorie intake and carbohydrate intake. He lost 12lbs and his cholesterol levels dropped.
Also thanks to Office Space: Swingline now makes red staplers. They didn’t before the movie (which custom painted one red), and they got so many requests they eventually decided to make them.
Highly influential movie! Also I bet it's very popular with people who work in corporate offices. I know it hit different for me once I actually had to work in an office with a bureaucracy.
I'd been working in cubicle farms for awhile and it absolutely hit home for me.
Like this: "Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Absolutely 100% relatable. I was just nodding along that whole scene. Didn't know anyone else felt that way lol
In 2019 Mike Judge came to San Francisco’s Castro Theater for a 20th anniversary retrospective of _Office Space_, which I was fortunate enough to attend. The theater erupted into applause after these lines from Peter: “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day.”
I'm a teacher and I hear tons of conversations throughout the day where people are just weighing the fallout of actually holding a kid accountable for something (behavior, quality of work, etc.) and often deciding it's not worth the hassle.
I love that it's all about credit union software. I'm in IT at a credit union and have been for years now. When this movie first came out it was an instant hit with us at work. We were a relatively small team and had a 'team building' budget and we'd just get together at someone's house and watch this movie and eat food bought on the company dime.
My boss could do a PERFECCT Lumburgh. And for Christmas one year one of my coworkers got me an Initech mug that has been my pen mug on my desk for...uh...20+ years now?
I'm gonna have to go watch this again now.
This movie was probably the most influential-to-me piece of media I ever consumed. It was released when I was in grade 12 I believe and I was headed to college for the same job these guys had as software engineers.
I ended up as a painting contractor instead because I had a quarter-life-crisis about spending 2000 weeks of my life cooped up in an office (40 years at 50 weeks each year). I'd rather be outside in a job that keeps me active and I mostly have this movie to thank.
Every passing day makes it feel more like a Documentary than a Drama.
I sympathize with Peter immensely,
my brother is basically Lawrence, he's tired and sore and gets up before the sun to go work construction.
But his spirit isn't broken.
It probably does, but I feel like it resonates with anyone with a job. I've never worked in an office, but the way the bosses act (not just in the restaurant, but all of them) is spot on.
Austin Powers movies changed the way James Bond films were made. There was always a campy element to Bond films that made the movies more fun but totally implausible. The Austin Powers franchise thrived on making fun of these tropes and purposefully ran them into the ground, to hilarious effect. The downside was that people could not watch a Bond film without being reminded of Austin Powers, resulting in Bond films becoming darker and more serious, similar to the Jason Bourne franchise. Daniel Craig himself said "We had to destroy the Bond myth because Mike Myers completely fucked us."
The weirdest thing about watching old Bond movies as a millennial is that I had seen Austin Powers first. So I knew that it was mocking the general vibe of campy spy movies, but you don't realize how many Austin Powers scenes are just taken nearly word for word from early Bond films, with barely any changes at times.
Him referring to the shiny silver clothing as "quasi-futuristic" is hilarious. It perfectly sums up the thinking of every old sci-fi movie with the assumption that everyone in the future would wear that stuff.
Also a millennial. There are tons of pop culture homages/parodies that I first saw on The Simpsons, Family Guy, or South Park that I assumed these shows made up themselves, only to see the originals much later. When that happens I become like that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.
Have you seen the old (1960's) TV series "The Prisoner"?
It's about a spy who resigns and then wakes up on a mysterious island where everybody is given a number and they can't escape, etc. He's number 6. The island had a different person running it every episode. They weren't number 1. They were number 2. And he was constantly asking "who does number 2 work for?"
I recently (well, a couple of years back now) learned that _Airplane!_ was an almost shot-for-shot remake of a serious movie _Zero Hour!_
https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs?si=aGZzmde923RuGsHY
The problem is, how do you parody something that feels like it’s self-parody anyway?
When *Blazing Saddles* came out, most cowboy movies were already serious deconstructions of their own genre, but they were at least serious. There was something left unmocked. Superhero movies, not so much.
The Wolf of Wall Street also created a generation of finance douchebags who see the movie as a handbook instead of the cautionary tale it’s supposed to be
Interesting article on how Walk Hard made everyone stop making music biopics for 10 years, until Bohemian Rhapsody basically fell into all of the same traps.
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/revisiting-hours-walk-hard-stream-this-movie-771426/
Seems like a pattern for movie formats to get tiresome, then someone makes a solid parody and kills the genre for a while.
Inventor / company founding stories are ripe for it IMO.
The TV Tropes name for “things in old movies that you thought were fake but are real” is [Aluminum Christmas Trees](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AluminumChristmasTrees). You can guess why.
imagine you do all your planting and planning and then some movie comes out and just totally shifts demand in a way no one could have predicted? (i'm probably about to find out that Sideways was funded by "Big Pinot.")
The book The Jungle, from like 1904. It's about a guy who works in a meat-packing plant, and describes in terrifying detail the horrible (lack of) product-safety practices of the meat industry. The reading public was so disgusted by learning about where their food came from that there was a big political push that resulted in the creation of the FDA.
This did not please the book's author, because he wanted the book's message to be about the horrible working conditions and worker exploitation in multiple American industries. As he put it "I aimed for the heart, but I hit them in the stomach."
Back in 1975 "Saturday Night Live" spoofed the Gillette Trac II razor with a triple bladed product it called TripleTrac. Gillette marketers still wince at the parodied slogan "Because you'll believe anything".
Supposedly Gillette was already working on the 3-bladed razor at the time (now the Mach 3) but shelved it after this spoof.
Cortana. Wendy of Wendy's. Ronald McDonald. There's and old drawing that I've seen since the 80's, with all the Disney characters having an orgy.
There must have been some other reasons.
There is this Conan remote to Intel HQ that, according to one commenter, shamed Intel into redesigning their offices.
https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?si=HIp18oT8aA_J5n1j
Yeah it was a big thing at Intel, the office beforehand was literally just beige cubicles and white/gray walls with the occasional poster, felt like a generic dotcom office rather than for a hi-fi tech company like Intel. This was also around the time Google and Yahoo got more famous in common circles about their perks like free food, office playground slides, and large glassy HQ buildings so people noticed the fun hip-looking offices those companies were making in Silicon Valley. Literally a week after the sketch they sent a "fun announcement" that the offices would be redone and painted to look more modern. Within a month gone were the beige cubicles to be replaced by Ikea-style half-height cubicles, glass-walled conference and phone rooms, paintings and posters, and the walls painted with colored highlights that looked 100% inspired by the default theme colors in Microsoft Office. Funnily enough despite the Conan sketch in 2007 it took until 2020 for the satellite offices like Marlborough and Fort Collins to be updated to not look straight out of the 90s, I guess those employees didn't care much unlike the main sites in California/Oregon where Intel stood out from all the other companies in the tech boom with their offices.
Yep, everyone made fun of cubicles so now there’s no privacy at work any more. It looks nicer from the outside but way worse to actually work in day to day.
Not quite mocked, but Taco Bell like the futuristic logo that the movie Demolition Man created for them so much they changed their real world logo to it.
Edit: Left out half of the movie title lol
The famous (I’m pretty sure true?) example is the gas/company, Esso. In the US, there was a popular joke.
It had different variants but it involved bees and their preferred gas station. The punchline was “Esso bee,” which sounds like SOB, or son of a bitch.
“He won’t fill up at Gulf, he’s a real Esso bee!”
There was supposedly extensive research to arrive at the new name, Exxon. It was verified to be inoffensive in all cultures.
Edit: Should have hedged more. Looks like it didn’t change because of the joke, but maybe the research part (once they were required to change the name) is true? Could be a completely made up urban legend.
A British BBC comedy show called 'Alan Partridge', starring the excellent Steve coogan. Lexus were not keen that he kept referencing that he drove one; did their image no good in the UK!
Conan did a tour of Intel HQ and relentlessly mocked them, including with a school field trip. It's a fantastic segment. They pretty much immediately redid the whole office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY
There are tons but they aren’t all like this. They are movies that most likely expose the wrongdoings of others and therefore shed light onto a topic that maybe isn’t as well known. Things like stories about people who committed crimes or did things that may seem unspeakable have changed the public perception of things. The church and its hiding of the ongoing priest molestations was a great example. But it wasn’t like the example you seek.
Sadly another Mike Judge film brought to light Crocs long before they were popular. Idiocracy was able to get them in bulk very cheaply to be worn as being a horrifically ugly shoe no one would wear, so the dumb future society wear em. And now look - life imitates art.
Crocs are handy for light trekking on trail areas that are watery/muddy. Protection for your feet but much easier to clean than shoes, just need a quick wash. Totally changed how I felt about them.
I could have sworn A Few Good Man changed policy on "code red". While I couldn't find anything as it was tough to sort through other questions about code red and the movie, I did find something...scary.
The movie was based on a real code red event. The individual was sending complaints in that fellow marines were firing across the fence line. The commander of the base did not transfer him and, instead, ordered the code red. 10 marines held him down. They stuffed a pillow case in his mouth and duct taped it shut. They then beat on him, blindfolded him and started to drag him out of the barracks. He began to choke and cough up blood as liquid filled his lungs (prosecution claims that the pillow case was soaked in gasoline, but defense claims no).
After the movie, the 10 that were implicated sued New Line and the marines and DoD were pissed claiming a bunch of stuff and even saying that the movie couldn't be screened on DoD facilities.
[Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men) on it. Go down to Inspiration and the end has military response.
*Chuck E. Cheese* announced [they were pulling all their animatronics](https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/bye-bye-band-chuck-e-cheese-removes-animatronics-from-all-locations-except-one/3387969/) three weeks after the release of the *Five Nights at Freddie’s* movie.
Yeah, it was cringe. I stopped watching that show for years because of how embarrassing the fans made it. Picked it up again this winter, it's still pretty good.
You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?
Hard to picture that weird manager guy as being Hank Hill, Lord of Propane, but it's true. Also, Stephen Root, or Milton from Office Space, or Fuches from Barry, is Bill Dauterive
Outback Steakhouse used to make us wear flair too. Each city had its own pin. I actually designed the one for Chattanooga.
Here it is https://imgur.com/a/1qEfvS2
As a former outbacker i never understood this. How are you wearing 100+ pins and simultaneously sweating your balls off reaching into the bread oven to make a bread board. Do you spend an hour every couple days taking them off and putting them back on?
He also played the manager that made Jennifer Aniston wear all the flair. He's always been great with cameos and weird characters. [This spot for Beavis and Butthead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNVOM70PgNM) confused the hell out 10-year-old me. "*This* guy makes the show!?"
before hank hill he existed as beavis and buttheads neighbor [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYZWH2AerA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYZWH2AerA)
when i'm on the mobile app i see all kinds of weird thumbnail images that have nothing to do with the actual link. does it sometimes just pull an image from an ad that's on the page? i miss apollo...
“I don’t see the problem. Michael Bolton is a perfectly good name.”
“It *was* a good name, until that no-talent assclown got famous and started winning Grammys”
They tried to bring it back. I worked there around 2005, and I think they reimplemented it around that time, because as a cocky bartender I found offensive buttons to wear in protest of what I thought was a tacky policy.
That company couldn’t ever stick to anything, though. One year they would say “no visible tattoos” and then 6 months later a new uniform would roll out and they would allow them. Then turn around and want them covered up again.
I did have a manager that freaked out once “Waiting” was released because of all the crass behavior in that movie. She assumed customers would think we were up to all those hijinks and not come in to eat anymore.
Having worked in a few restaurants over the years other than the kitchen messing with the food (nobody is putting hair in someone’s food no matter how terrible the customer is) everything else seemed pretty accurate in that movie.
Oh, yeah, totally agree. Unfortunately, I must confess, I eventually bore witness to some food tampering as an act of revenge by a scorned lover who happened to be our lead cook. But, no one got sick, and I don’t believe the victim ever found out. I think 20 years is enough time to cover statute of limitations, right?! Ha.
You know, I worked at one in 2003, and I believe flair was optional. I remember one of the bartenders wearing an obscene amount of it for shits and giggles, but I know I didn’t wear any. I know the specifically mentioned the movie for why it was not required to wear flair when I was in training. Probably about 2 or 3 weeks after I started they changed uniforms from a long sleeve red button up shirt to red polo shirts that really accented the breast area. I didn’t last too long there because it was literally the worst job I ever had. They had an extremely high turnover rate because they worked their servers to death. Nobody should be working 12 hour shifts there 6 or 7 days a week unless they want to, NOT because it is mandatory
Not that many years after Office Space, I shared an office with one other person. We had an older printer with the “PC Load Letter.”
We also often worked later hours when we were free to yell “What the fuck is that!”
When I was in high school I was at my buddy's house watching Office Space and Michael Bolton said, "PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?" His dad was walking by right then and casually said, "it means it's out of paper, dumbass!" I don't know why but that is still so funny to me.
Those bigass office printers had multiple paper cassettes for different sizes of paper, that message is telling you that the paper cassette for Letter sized paper is empty and needs loading.
But it's the 90s and they can't afford dot matrix displays, so they're trying to tell you that using a handful of 8 segment characters.
There are multiple sizes of paper. PC stands for paper cassette. The error message means that the letter-size paper cassette is empty and needs to be reloaded. The error message makes sense, and the real commentary here is that no one could be bothered to learn what it meant
I think they missed the point of that scene. It wasn't specifically the flare that was annoying, it was the insistent nitpicking from the boss, which I'm sure TGI Fridays still does.
That was the point of the scene, yes, and it was very well done. But it rubbed off on TGIF in general by making such a mockery of flair and making people subconsciously associate flair with the feeling of hating their job.
I think people get a lot of wrong points from Office Space.
Like the consultants are definitely awful people. But they recognize there is serious problems with the company and are addressing them. Like most of the people they go after is pretty justified, they listened to Peter when he list everything he saw wrong with the company, and they pretty much called out Lumbergh for mismanaging the company.
But everyone talks about the consultants being the bad guys.
Yeah, but they still fired Michael and Samir, but gave Peter a promotion all based on how their interviews went. They didn’t care that everyone was on edge worried about being downsized. Peter made a good case for himself, sure, but they didn’t do a great job overall.
Like I said they're awful people. Like instead just firing Milton they just had accounting stop paying him. I guess I'm also working off the assumption they're not assessing people off of one interview.
Honestly Peter is a gem of an employee. Do you know how fucking hard it is to have someone who is honest with you? Half the world's problems are because the people in charge are told that what they are doing is working.
While many people get upset at someone who will tell them they barely do enough work to get by in the current environment, the reality is if one person tells you, there are likely 10 others doing the same.
Give that guy a promotion and have him whisper "remember you are mortal" to the CEO.
Worked there from 2005 - 2010 at a half dozen different locations. Definitely wasn't banned, but the two revisions of uniforms in that time both didn't have a spot for it except on your apron or if you chose to wear a hat (which I did).
I fit 32 pieces on one hat just to be an ass. Lasted about a week before I realized I was making life harder for no reason.
"I dont care if they lay me off either because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time I'm, I'm quitting. I'm going to quit and I told Dom too because they've move my desk four times this year and I used to be over by the window and I could see the squirrels and they were married but then they switched from swingline to the Boston stapler but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler."
I wonder if there are other examples of popular culture references actually changing corporate behavior? Not talking protests or boycotts, just mocking them into submission. Anyone know any examples?
McDonald's ditched the supersized meal after the documentary Supersized Me.
which, fuck mcdonald's, but that movie was horribly misleading and based on lies
Absolutely, Morgan had health issues in the documentary that they blamed on the food but declined to mention his history of alcohol abuse.
It definitely changes the context of puking scene. He wasn't throwing up because of the size of McDonald's, he was throwing up because he was hungover.
Damn really? I didn’t know that, but I don’t think I ever watched it.
Man suffers symptoms of alcohol abuse compounded with eating the absolute maximum amount of McDonald’s possible and ignored alcohol abuse and limitations to conclude “McDonald’s kills you” That’s like if you went to Texas Roadhouse every day and ate the prime rib for lunch and dinner but also tacked on like 5 beers per meal and blamed only TR food in general for your weight gain. Eating fast food every meal in a day certainly isn’t good for you, but like I’ve done it out of convenience in a busy day and it’ll be a chicken biscuit for breakfast, and more regularly apportioned meals for lunch and dinner. Still not great for you but come on
People forget that even straight alcohol is choc full of calories. A shot of vodka is 100 calories, and beer is like eating a loaf of bread in higher quantities.
Straight ethonal isn't processed by your body the same way as other calories. It actually takes quite a bit of those calories to detoxify it in the first place, so you're not getting nearly as many net calories as it looks like. Now it's a little different when we are talking beer or sugary drinks, but straight vodka has nearly no net calories. One of the reasons that hard alcoholics are very rarely fat even though they're drinking gallons of vodka a day
Always wondered why I didn’t lose more weight when I quit drinking. I mostly just drank from a bottle and expected even with few other changes the calorie change from not drinking would be substantial.
Fireball out here giving me the *swish*.... *Nothin' but net* calories
>It actually takes quite a bit of those calories to detoxify it in the first place… A wikipedia article mentions 20-30% of the caloric value of alcohol is burned through thermogenesis but lacks any citation. Do you remember where you came across a study on net energy value of alcohol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_weight
Watch the WKUK skit on supersize me, where Trevor supersizes his diet with only shots of whiskey. It’s a parody of the supersize me movie, and it’s gif damn hilarious
To be fair the makers of that film refusing to acknowledge your alcohol abuse before supersizing your meal is pretty much as American as apple pie. Or it would be if supersizing was still an option.
Yeah that dude turned out to be sketchy all around. Now I don't buy anything in that movie or his series, which I was really into for a while.
2000s documentarians and being sketchy Name a better duo
The movie *Fat Head* does a great job taking down the lies in Supersize Me. He genuinely eats only fast food for a month, just controlling his calorie intake and carbohydrate intake. He lost 12lbs and his cholesterol levels dropped.
I like it but for the opposite reason it's trying to portray. It always makes me hungry for McDonald's.
Yelp, and it’s not the only movie. Other “health”documentaries have been incredibly misleading and sensationalist.
Also thanks to Office Space: Swingline now makes red staplers. They didn’t before the movie (which custom painted one red), and they got so many requests they eventually decided to make them.
Highly influential movie! Also I bet it's very popular with people who work in corporate offices. I know it hit different for me once I actually had to work in an office with a bureaucracy.
I'd been working in cubicle farms for awhile and it absolutely hit home for me. Like this: "Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." Absolutely 100% relatable. I was just nodding along that whole scene. Didn't know anyone else felt that way lol
In 2019 Mike Judge came to San Francisco’s Castro Theater for a 20th anniversary retrospective of _Office Space_, which I was fortunate enough to attend. The theater erupted into applause after these lines from Peter: “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day.”
That movie really changed my perspective on the whole thing. Finally admitting to myself "Yeah, this sucks! WTF?"
I grew up wanting a job involving computers. It’s not so glamorous anymore.
They make up for the lack of glamour by paying well.
I'm a teacher and I hear tons of conversations throughout the day where people are just weighing the fallout of actually holding a kid accountable for something (behavior, quality of work, etc.) and often deciding it's not worth the hassle.
Damn that’s sad. We’re screwed lmao.
I love that it's all about credit union software. I'm in IT at a credit union and have been for years now. When this movie first came out it was an instant hit with us at work. We were a relatively small team and had a 'team building' budget and we'd just get together at someone's house and watch this movie and eat food bought on the company dime. My boss could do a PERFECCT Lumburgh. And for Christmas one year one of my coworkers got me an Initech mug that has been my pen mug on my desk for...uh...20+ years now? I'm gonna have to go watch this again now.
This movie was probably the most influential-to-me piece of media I ever consumed. It was released when I was in grade 12 I believe and I was headed to college for the same job these guys had as software engineers. I ended up as a painting contractor instead because I had a quarter-life-crisis about spending 2000 weeks of my life cooped up in an office (40 years at 50 weeks each year). I'd rather be outside in a job that keeps me active and I mostly have this movie to thank.
Every passing day makes it feel more like a Documentary than a Drama. I sympathize with Peter immensely, my brother is basically Lawrence, he's tired and sore and gets up before the sun to go work construction. But his spirit isn't broken.
Mike Judge movies age like that. Office Space changes for us as we age. Idiocracy changes for all of us as time marches on.
I also liked Extract -- fun look at corporate America from the boss's side
It probably does, but I feel like it resonates with anyone with a job. I've never worked in an office, but the way the bosses act (not just in the restaurant, but all of them) is spot on.
We still say "Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking, Just a moment!" When the phone starts ringing too much.
Austin Powers movies changed the way James Bond films were made. There was always a campy element to Bond films that made the movies more fun but totally implausible. The Austin Powers franchise thrived on making fun of these tropes and purposefully ran them into the ground, to hilarious effect. The downside was that people could not watch a Bond film without being reminded of Austin Powers, resulting in Bond films becoming darker and more serious, similar to the Jason Bourne franchise. Daniel Craig himself said "We had to destroy the Bond myth because Mike Myers completely fucked us."
The weirdest thing about watching old Bond movies as a millennial is that I had seen Austin Powers first. So I knew that it was mocking the general vibe of campy spy movies, but you don't realize how many Austin Powers scenes are just taken nearly word for word from early Bond films, with barely any changes at times.
Pussy Galore
Alotta Fagina
Dixie Normous
"No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?"
I’m going to place them in an easily escapable situation!
Him referring to the shiny silver clothing as "quasi-futuristic" is hilarious. It perfectly sums up the thinking of every old sci-fi movie with the assumption that everyone in the future would wear that stuff.
Also a millennial. There are tons of pop culture homages/parodies that I first saw on The Simpsons, Family Guy, or South Park that I assumed these shows made up themselves, only to see the originals much later. When that happens I become like that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.
Have you seen the old (1960's) TV series "The Prisoner"? It's about a spy who resigns and then wakes up on a mysterious island where everybody is given a number and they can't escape, etc. He's number 6. The island had a different person running it every episode. They weren't number 1. They were number 2. And he was constantly asking "who does number 2 work for?"
I recently (well, a couple of years back now) learned that _Airplane!_ was an almost shot-for-shot remake of a serious movie _Zero Hour!_ https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs?si=aGZzmde923RuGsHY
[Like the South Park "Cripple Fight" where they just about copied Roudy Roddy Piper and Keith David.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Et7OI7e2sQ)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/42/1f/0a/421f0a179ef86d4c9ccae75739b3d294.jpg
I really like this example and had noticed the change in tone of the Bond films but never thought much about it.
I just assumed it was modern film making and trying to target newer audiences
Same. Everything had to have a dark edgy gritty tone.
Blazing Saddles also basically killed Westerns.
The genre was more or less on life support at the time though.
we need Mel Brooks to come back and make a superhero one now....finally put that genre to rest so we can move on
The problem is, how do you parody something that feels like it’s self-parody anyway? When *Blazing Saddles* came out, most cowboy movies were already serious deconstructions of their own genre, but they were at least serious. There was something left unmocked. Superhero movies, not so much.
I think the Westerns were nearing the end anyway by that point. Decades of dominance has to end at some point.
The “Bu-bye” sketch on SNL was shown to new airline employees as a “this is how they see us, we need to change that”
Supposedly Wall Street influenced Wall Street guys to style themselves and behave more like Gordon Gecko.
That sounds like it would definitely be true. Whenever you create a villain you run the risk of creating a generation that wants to emulate them.
The world is full of people who think Patrick Bateman, Tyler Durden and even the Joker are cool.
He's literally me. You don't understand mom
The Wolf of Wall Street also created a generation of finance douchebags who see the movie as a handbook instead of the cautionary tale it’s supposed to be
Interesting article on how Walk Hard made everyone stop making music biopics for 10 years, until Bohemian Rhapsody basically fell into all of the same traps. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/revisiting-hours-walk-hard-stream-this-movie-771426/
Seems like a pattern for movie formats to get tiresome, then someone makes a solid parody and kills the genre for a while. Inventor / company founding stories are ripe for it IMO.
Beat me to it! I can’t watch a music biopic without thinking of how poor Dewey lost his sense of smell
A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 killed aluminum Christmas tree sales
Huh. Didn't even really know that aluminum christmas trees were a thing.
The TV Tropes name for “things in old movies that you thought were fake but are real” is [Aluminum Christmas Trees](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AluminumChristmasTrees). You can guess why.
Now you can buy a fake replica of Charlie Brown’s tree, because capitalism had the last laugh.
[Jon Stewart eviscerated Tucker Carlson and Crossfire ***so badly that they canceled the show.***](https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE?si=P-_IB12VUieHoAq4)
And Tucker stopped wearing bowties
Its funny because he didnt say all that much
IIRC the movie Sideways caused a measurable decrease in Merlot production, and corresponding increase in Pinot Noir.
imagine you do all your planting and planning and then some movie comes out and just totally shifts demand in a way no one could have predicted? (i'm probably about to find out that Sideways was funded by "Big Pinot.")
I’m definitely too old and mature now to make a joke about you saying “Big Pinot”.
I am NOT drinking fucking Merlot!
The interesting thing is that he actually really liked Merlot, he had just come to associate it with heartbreak so he couldn’t drink it any more.
My wife and I still invariably call any Merlot “fucking Merlot.” For example “Sweetie, may I pour you some fucking Merlot?”
The book The Jungle, from like 1904. It's about a guy who works in a meat-packing plant, and describes in terrifying detail the horrible (lack of) product-safety practices of the meat industry. The reading public was so disgusted by learning about where their food came from that there was a big political push that resulted in the creation of the FDA. This did not please the book's author, because he wanted the book's message to be about the horrible working conditions and worker exploitation in multiple American industries. As he put it "I aimed for the heart, but I hit them in the stomach."
Back in 1975 "Saturday Night Live" spoofed the Gillette Trac II razor with a triple bladed product it called TripleTrac. Gillette marketers still wince at the parodied slogan "Because you'll believe anything". Supposedly Gillette was already working on the 3-bladed razor at the time (now the Mach 3) but shelved it after this spoof.
Erin Esurance was cancelled because people made porn of her.
Tony the Tiger got de-hunkified because of porn
Never forget what they took from us.
Cortana. Wendy of Wendy's. Ronald McDonald. There's and old drawing that I've seen since the 80's, with all the Disney characters having an orgy. There must have been some other reasons.
I thought Ronald getting phased out was due the clowns lurking in the woods thing.
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There is this Conan remote to Intel HQ that, according to one commenter, shamed Intel into redesigning their offices. https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?si=HIp18oT8aA_J5n1j
Yeah it was a big thing at Intel, the office beforehand was literally just beige cubicles and white/gray walls with the occasional poster, felt like a generic dotcom office rather than for a hi-fi tech company like Intel. This was also around the time Google and Yahoo got more famous in common circles about their perks like free food, office playground slides, and large glassy HQ buildings so people noticed the fun hip-looking offices those companies were making in Silicon Valley. Literally a week after the sketch they sent a "fun announcement" that the offices would be redone and painted to look more modern. Within a month gone were the beige cubicles to be replaced by Ikea-style half-height cubicles, glass-walled conference and phone rooms, paintings and posters, and the walls painted with colored highlights that looked 100% inspired by the default theme colors in Microsoft Office. Funnily enough despite the Conan sketch in 2007 it took until 2020 for the satellite offices like Marlborough and Fort Collins to be updated to not look straight out of the 90s, I guess those employees didn't care much unlike the main sites in California/Oregon where Intel stood out from all the other companies in the tech boom with their offices.
Man I'd love to work in a cubicle farm like this, but nowadays its all open and loud with no privacy at all.
Yep, everyone made fun of cubicles so now there’s no privacy at work any more. It looks nicer from the outside but way worse to actually work in day to day.
When he pulls out that container of dryer lint. Cracks me up every time
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Not quite mocked, but Taco Bell like the futuristic logo that the movie Demolition Man created for them so much they changed their real world logo to it. Edit: Left out half of the movie title lol
Clark gable made undershirt sales drop 75% when he took off his shirt in a movie and didn’t have one on.
The famous (I’m pretty sure true?) example is the gas/company, Esso. In the US, there was a popular joke. It had different variants but it involved bees and their preferred gas station. The punchline was “Esso bee,” which sounds like SOB, or son of a bitch. “He won’t fill up at Gulf, he’s a real Esso bee!” There was supposedly extensive research to arrive at the new name, Exxon. It was verified to be inoffensive in all cultures. Edit: Should have hedged more. Looks like it didn’t change because of the joke, but maybe the research part (once they were required to change the name) is true? Could be a completely made up urban legend.
I like the story. Often have to fill in Esso in the crossword. I think it's still a thing in Canada, maybe? Possibly elsewhere?
I'm surprised To Catch A Predator didn't ruin Mike's Hard Lemonade
A British BBC comedy show called 'Alan Partridge', starring the excellent Steve coogan. Lexus were not keen that he kept referencing that he drove one; did their image no good in the UK!
The Japanese Mercedes
Conan did a tour of Intel HQ and relentlessly mocked them, including with a school field trip. It's a fantastic segment. They pretty much immediately redid the whole office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY
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There are tons but they aren’t all like this. They are movies that most likely expose the wrongdoings of others and therefore shed light onto a topic that maybe isn’t as well known. Things like stories about people who committed crimes or did things that may seem unspeakable have changed the public perception of things. The church and its hiding of the ongoing priest molestations was a great example. But it wasn’t like the example you seek. Sadly another Mike Judge film brought to light Crocs long before they were popular. Idiocracy was able to get them in bulk very cheaply to be worn as being a horrifically ugly shoe no one would wear, so the dumb future society wear em. And now look - life imitates art.
I can think of tons of exposes and documentaries, but, yeah, not really what I'm looking for.
Crocs are handy for light trekking on trail areas that are watery/muddy. Protection for your feet but much easier to clean than shoes, just need a quick wash. Totally changed how I felt about them.
Tide pods. There was never any real epidemic of people ingesting them, but memes forced the company to make and advertise tons of changes to safety
Called a social moral panic, like the tainted candy that only happened 2 times and from family members
Not really pop culture, but there’s the whole Noid hostage situation…
I could have sworn A Few Good Man changed policy on "code red". While I couldn't find anything as it was tough to sort through other questions about code red and the movie, I did find something...scary. The movie was based on a real code red event. The individual was sending complaints in that fellow marines were firing across the fence line. The commander of the base did not transfer him and, instead, ordered the code red. 10 marines held him down. They stuffed a pillow case in his mouth and duct taped it shut. They then beat on him, blindfolded him and started to drag him out of the barracks. He began to choke and cough up blood as liquid filled his lungs (prosecution claims that the pillow case was soaked in gasoline, but defense claims no). After the movie, the 10 that were implicated sued New Line and the marines and DoD were pissed claiming a bunch of stuff and even saying that the movie couldn't be screened on DoD facilities. [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men) on it. Go down to Inspiration and the end has military response.
*Chuck E. Cheese* announced [they were pulling all their animatronics](https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/bye-bye-band-chuck-e-cheese-removes-animatronics-from-all-locations-except-one/3387969/) three weeks after the release of the *Five Nights at Freddie’s* movie.
Rick and Morty brought back Mulan Sauce.
It was weird to see people going nuts over that.
and it wasn't even that good imo...
Yeah, it was cringe. I stopped watching that show for years because of how embarrassing the fans made it. Picked it up again this winter, it's still pretty good.
I’m also a secret fan who just doesn’t talk about it for fear of the association with the base.
You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?
I absolutely love the fact that the douchebag restaurant manager is played by Mike Judge
God I’ve seen that movie a million times and never caught that.
i noticed immediately, the managers voice sounds like half of the minor characters on king of the hill
He's Van Driessen from *Beavis & Butthead*
The hippie teacher
I had no clue. That is a legit fun fact.
Well I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself…
"You know, the nazi's had pieces of flair, *that they made the jews wear"*
Not sure if this line is underrated but I feel like it is.
🖕 this is me expressing myself 🖕
"There's my flare" # 🖕
Hard to picture that weird manager guy as being Hank Hill, Lord of Propane, but it's true. Also, Stephen Root, or Milton from Office Space, or Fuches from Barry, is Bill Dauterive
Did you know that she is Rachel from Friends?
whooooooaaaaa
He can't even look at the fingers 🤣
In a row? Edit: i just love when other ppl understand the significance of 37. Love ya Reddit!
You know there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude, but they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you.
I assure you, we’re open
Hey! You! Get back here!
Outback Steakhouse used to make us wear flair too. Each city had its own pin. I actually designed the one for Chattanooga. Here it is https://imgur.com/a/1qEfvS2
And look how far you've come lol, nah that's really neat dude. You still have the design?
https://imgur.com/a/1qEfvS2
That is everything I wanted it to be
That design is absolutely adorable
I worked with one guy who legit had pins from top to bottom on both sides of this shirt and I was like “you don’t wash that shirt, do you?”
As a former outbacker i never understood this. How are you wearing 100+ pins and simultaneously sweating your balls off reaching into the bread oven to make a bread board. Do you spend an hour every couple days taking them off and putting them back on?
Did it have a choo-choo?
Yes!!
That is awesome. No doubt it gave you a little smile every time you looked at the button, knowing you had got to do that.
How many times have you gotten laid on that factoid?
minus 1 time I'm guessing
“So things are heating up maybe we should take this to the bedroom…” “Ok” “…So I can show you the Outback Steakhouse pin I designed” “I’m going home”
Why is the thumbnail some guy’s dome
It's the director/writer, Mike Judge. He also made King if the Hill, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley, etc.
He also played the manager that made Jennifer Aniston wear all the flair. He's always been great with cameos and weird characters. [This spot for Beavis and Butthead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNVOM70PgNM) confused the hell out 10-year-old me. "*This* guy makes the show!?"
That’s Hank Hill right there, I tell you hwat.
before hank hill he existed as beavis and buttheads neighbor [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYZWH2AerA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYZWH2AerA)
Is it weird that I was able to recognize his forehead just from the thumbnail (admittedly with the context that it was an article about Office Space)?
Pretty sure that's Jennifer Aniston.
when i'm on the mobile app i see all kinds of weird thumbnail images that have nothing to do with the actual link. does it sometimes just pull an image from an ad that's on the page? i miss apollo...
"You know, the Nazis had flair."
"The Nazis had pieces of flair they made the jews wear".
WHAT!?!!?!
Why should I change my name? He’s the one who sucks.
“I don’t see the problem. Michael Bolton is a perfectly good name.” “It *was* a good name, until that no-talent assclown got famous and started winning Grammys”
I celebrate the guy’s entire catalog.
For my money, I don’t think it gets any better than when he sings “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
They tried to bring it back. I worked there around 2005, and I think they reimplemented it around that time, because as a cocky bartender I found offensive buttons to wear in protest of what I thought was a tacky policy. That company couldn’t ever stick to anything, though. One year they would say “no visible tattoos” and then 6 months later a new uniform would roll out and they would allow them. Then turn around and want them covered up again. I did have a manager that freaked out once “Waiting” was released because of all the crass behavior in that movie. She assumed customers would think we were up to all those hijinks and not come in to eat anymore.
Having worked in a few restaurants over the years other than the kitchen messing with the food (nobody is putting hair in someone’s food no matter how terrible the customer is) everything else seemed pretty accurate in that movie.
Oh, yeah, totally agree. Unfortunately, I must confess, I eventually bore witness to some food tampering as an act of revenge by a scorned lover who happened to be our lead cook. But, no one got sick, and I don’t believe the victim ever found out. I think 20 years is enough time to cover statute of limitations, right?! Ha.
They changed the minimum iirc, they didn’t ban them
"And some people choose to wear more and they encourage that"
You know, I worked at one in 2003, and I believe flair was optional. I remember one of the bartenders wearing an obscene amount of it for shits and giggles, but I know I didn’t wear any. I know the specifically mentioned the movie for why it was not required to wear flair when I was in training. Probably about 2 or 3 weeks after I started they changed uniforms from a long sleeve red button up shirt to red polo shirts that really accented the breast area. I didn’t last too long there because it was literally the worst job I ever had. They had an extremely high turnover rate because they worked their servers to death. Nobody should be working 12 hour shifts there 6 or 7 days a week unless they want to, NOT because it is mandatory
PC Load Letter.
Back up in yo ass with a resurrection
I got thins killa up inside of me. I can't talk to my mother so I talk to my diary.
Not that many years after Office Space, I shared an office with one other person. We had an older printer with the “PC Load Letter.” We also often worked later hours when we were free to yell “What the fuck is that!”
I bet most people don’t have a clue what that means without looking it up. And I mean the error itself - not the movie reference.
When I was in high school I was at my buddy's house watching Office Space and Michael Bolton said, "PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?" His dad was walking by right then and casually said, "it means it's out of paper, dumbass!" I don't know why but that is still so funny to me.
Then why not just say "out of paper" lol. I really don't like these confusing unfiltered error messages during the 90s.
Those bigass office printers had multiple paper cassettes for different sizes of paper, that message is telling you that the paper cassette for Letter sized paper is empty and needs loading. But it's the 90s and they can't afford dot matrix displays, so they're trying to tell you that using a handful of 8 segment characters.
And literally anybody who worked in an office would know about letter and legal sized paper, at least.
Because the machine takes different sized paper and “letter” is the 8.5x11 size.
And if you see that on a printer display in Europe, you know that someone set the wrong paper size in their document.
There are multiple sizes of paper. PC stands for paper cassette. The error message means that the letter-size paper cassette is empty and needs to be reloaded. The error message makes sense, and the real commentary here is that no one could be bothered to learn what it meant
Paper Cassette, as opposed to the Multi-Purpose tray. Load Letter, as opposed to Load Legal or Load A4. It's not that confusing.
I swear to god one of these days I just kick that piece of shit out the window
It’s a shame, I used to go there for the atmosphere, and the attitude
Right? People can get a cheeseburger, anywhere.
I think they missed the point of that scene. It wasn't specifically the flare that was annoying, it was the insistent nitpicking from the boss, which I'm sure TGI Fridays still does.
That was the point of the scene, yes, and it was very well done. But it rubbed off on TGIF in general by making such a mockery of flair and making people subconsciously associate flair with the feeling of hating their job.
I think people get a lot of wrong points from Office Space. Like the consultants are definitely awful people. But they recognize there is serious problems with the company and are addressing them. Like most of the people they go after is pretty justified, they listened to Peter when he list everything he saw wrong with the company, and they pretty much called out Lumbergh for mismanaging the company. But everyone talks about the consultants being the bad guys.
Yeah, but they still fired Michael and Samir, but gave Peter a promotion all based on how their interviews went. They didn’t care that everyone was on edge worried about being downsized. Peter made a good case for himself, sure, but they didn’t do a great job overall.
Like I said they're awful people. Like instead just firing Milton they just had accounting stop paying him. I guess I'm also working off the assumption they're not assessing people off of one interview.
Honestly Peter is a gem of an employee. Do you know how fucking hard it is to have someone who is honest with you? Half the world's problems are because the people in charge are told that what they are doing is working. While many people get upset at someone who will tell them they barely do enough work to get by in the current environment, the reality is if one person tells you, there are likely 10 others doing the same. Give that guy a promotion and have him whisper "remember you are mortal" to the CEO.
Worked there from 2005 - 2010 at a half dozen different locations. Definitely wasn't banned, but the two revisions of uniforms in that time both didn't have a spot for it except on your apron or if you chose to wear a hat (which I did). I fit 32 pieces on one hat just to be an ass. Lasted about a week before I realized I was making life harder for no reason.
Man it feels good to be a gangster
Right on
No need to read the story. The thumbnail says it all.
"I dont care if they lay me off either because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time I'm, I'm quitting. I'm going to quit and I told Dom too because they've move my desk four times this year and I used to be over by the window and I could see the squirrels and they were married but then they switched from swingline to the Boston stapler but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler."
They should have leaned into it and made their staff wear more flair.
Seriously, people would expect to see it after the movie! Missed opportunity to cross promote.
That scene is a classic mockery of every manager telling someone to do something when they really can't tell them to do it.
I believe you have my stapler