Movies can be pretty influential, in more ways than you realize. Movies got us all to be afraid of quicksand, but that was because it was used in many movies. A lot of ideas that seem universal came from a single movie that proved strangely influential.
Everyone is used to NASA counting down the seconds before a space flight, as is tradition. But there's no real reason to do it like that, outside of the drama. The idea came from a 1926 German silent film. Yeah, they counted down to liftoff with intertitles. German rocket scientists like Werner von Braun were impressed, and did the same with their rockets, and then brought the idea to NASA. Now it's just what we do. We know that rabbits eat carrots because of Bugs Bunny, except rabbits don't normally eat carrots. Bugs only chomped on a carrot as a reference to another film, but since Bugs Bunny cartoons are in color, they ended up as more influential.
You might be surprised at some of the other stories about something small from a movie that became a part of our culture as explained at Cracked. Video clips of each movie are included.
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