Somwhow, no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings, which basically invented modern fantasy.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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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
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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.
You have a cause and effect backwards here.
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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.
Final Destination caused an entire generation of drivers to abjectly refuse to take up any space within a quarter mile behind a log truck.
Refuse to? Buddy, I'm hunting for them. I don't have to do this anymore and my family gets a big payout. Sign me up.
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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.
Final Destination 2 also had the best final kill of the entire franchise. Most of the movie is not great, but the open and close are two of my favorite moments in a cinema.
I swear this is just an online meme and people are larping about it being a genuine fear.
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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...
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...
Damn, shrinkflation hitting everything
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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.
And 62 of the 97 survived. It blew my mind to learn that.
I remember reading that most airships at the time used helium, but due to the war Germany had to use hydrogen instead. This is what made the hindenburg explode.
If they had used helium there wouldn’t have been any issue.
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???
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I will never forgive them for what they stole from us
The bible and the quran and what for obvious reasons
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.
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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.
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
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.
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The Matrix; check out "the internet" for some examples of its influence.
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(Personal case, but i think i am not alone) I have been interested in science since Carl Sagan's Cosmos, i was a kid when it aired.
Dracula and Frankenstein both came out during the same year, 1931. Dracula was so popular in early 1931 that they were able to do all of Frankenstein by the end of the year. Can you imagine?
Those two began the modern era of horror. Modern being not silent.
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The first Federal laws against hacking and computer crimes was a direct reaction to the movie War Games (1983).
From Wikipedia:
President Ronald Reagan, a family friend of Lasker's, watched the film and discussed the plot with members of Congress, his advisers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reagan ordered a full national security review. Within a week, the Joint Chiefs of Staff returned an answer: "Yes, the premise was technically possible". Reagan's interest in the film is credited with leading to the enactment 18 months later of NSDD-145, the first Presidential directive on computer security.