5 Extremely Specific Movie Trends That Nobody Remembers

And this hypothetical so-and-so has a point. It is usually just trucks -- which, if you haven't noticed, don't exactly have the adventurous dexterity of a car or motorcycle. Trucks are great for having loud horns and for making 30-point turns in the middle of intersections while you're on your way to work, but as a figure in movies that are meant to pump the blood? Maybe I'm just spoiled by the fact that I've gotten more Fast & Furious movies than calls from my best friend in the past decade. But even before Smokey And The Bandit, trucker movies were abundant, as American audiences were delighted by things like White Line Fever, B.J. And The Bear, Movin' On, Hijack!, and a movie that was named specifically after my middle school fan fiction pseudonym, Moonfire.

But one thing that set Smokey And The Bandit apart from earlier trucker films was the copious use of CB radio, which truckers could use to talk to each other and service stations in intricate code that sounds like a parody of what it actually is. And maybe it's because mid '70s Burt Reynolds could look cool if he was snacking on a dog turd, but Burt made talking on a CB radio look soooooo fun. Who could he contact on that thing? The president? An animal sidekick? Luke Skywalker? It was such an integral part of the movie that they slapped a CB radio microphone in the title on the poster, as if to include a third character in it: Smokey And The Bandit And The Bandit's Radio, Chuck, Who Has Feelings.

Hollywood was so enamored of driving big vehicles and talking on little hunks of metal that they pumped out movies like Handle With Care, Convoy, and Breaker! Breaker!. Convoy was inspired by a song called "Convoy," which was a hit in its own right. That's right, CB radios were so oddly huge that they were basing whole movies off of novelty songs about them. Think about that the next time you complain about some new comic or book adaptation. People heard this song and thought "This. This is where we shall build our empire." And for a stretch of time, they were right.

But the inability to make even a mediocre Bigfoot flick did not stop filmmakers in the '70s, as they produced films like Bigfoot, the Boggy Creek series, The Capture Of Bigfoot, Creature From Black Lake, The Legend Of Bigfoot, Snowbeast, Shriek Of The Mutilated, and Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot. All of these films either portrayed Bigfoot as a beast that might eat you if you got close to it or, oh no, is probably eating you right now because you got too close to it. It's kind of hard to make a movie with any kind of positive tone, as seeing a title like Shriek Of The Mutilated means that you're just a step away from That Yeti Caused My Divorce and Help! Bigfoot Is Eating My Dick.

But a few years passed, and Hollywood decided that we were being too harsh to Sasquatch. "Maybe he is a friendly friend?" they thought. "Maybe he's so friendly that he just adores being around kids and families." And so we entered Stage 2 of Bigfoot's cinematic existence: Bigfoot as Mr. Mom. Harry And The Hendersons is the most famous of these, but we were also treated to Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter, Cry Wilderness, and Little Bigfoot AND Little Bigfoot 2. If you're still having trouble guessing, the Little Bigfoot saga asks the age-old question "What if Bigfoot was something I could punt?"

This all concluded with Big And Hairy, in which not only does Bigfoot learn to play basketball, but a whole population of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) is introduced to thousands of people. This shock is quickly forgotten by these masses, and they go on to celebrate some boring blond kid who makes a few baskets. We got to a point where we were so bored of nice Bigfoot movies that we had one in which Bigfoot playing basketball was the B plot.

Hollywood sensed this and did an about-face, and since the early 2000s, Bigfoot has gone back to being a wonder-less slaughterer of camping residents in various coniferous forests. Exists, Rage Of The Yeti, Abominable, and Willow Creek are but a few of these. However, the most notable are the two that Lance Henriksen, star of Aliens, has been in: The Untold and Sasquatch Mountain. No, they're not notable because they're good. They're notable because somewhere, Lance Henriksen is relaxing in a cabin that he partially purchased with that sweet, sweet yeti money.

As a former cross country runner, I'm not going to diss running for being "boring." Yes, you run over hills and through forests without talking to anyone or doing anything else but running. It'd be nice if, halfway through, you got to box a man in one of those T-Rex costumes for a minute, but nope, running is all you get. That said, six running movies in a year seems like it's edging juuuuuuust on the side of overkill. Luckily, Chariots Of Fire would be released in 1981, and running movies were cut back to a much more manageable schedule of one nearly every fucking year.

But the comical misadventures of what happens when you put a man in a room with an infant and tell him to care for it (gasp) wasn't the only baby-centric plot that Hollywood had up its sleeve. "What if your dead cousin left you their baby as your inheritance?" asked Baby Boom. "What if Nicholas Cage AND BABIES?" asked Raising Arizona. "What if she's having a baby?" asked She's Having A Baby.

In these films, babies were still relatively normal presences, but that couldn't last for long. Hollywood blasted forward into the realm of the fantastic with Look Who's Talking, in which Bruce Willis voiced a smarmy baby who provides commentary on the world around him. The movie in which Bruce Willis voices a goddamn baby made $300 million worldwide, and it spawned a sequel, Look Who's Talking Too, wherein Willis is accompanied by Roseanne Barr voicing another baby. For all of our readers who were born after the year 2000, just know that the sentence "There was a comedy in which the star of Roseanne pretended to play a talking baby in a sequel that made far less money than its '80s predecessor" kind of sums up the early '90s for you.

What bad could happen if you started a relationship with a ghost? A lot, probably. As the DVD cover of Somewhere Tomorrow, a 1983 film starring Sarah Jessica Parker, says: "Life is confusing when you fall in love with a ghost." Which is probably putting it very lightly. A more accurate title would be "Ah, Fuck, What's Wrong With Me?" but that wouldn't sell many tickets.

Instead, Hollywood has made falling head over heels for a poltergeist seem like the best thing ever. Just ask the movie Ghost, wherein Patrick Swayze provides more awesome lovin' in death than I could ever hope to in life. Or Somewhere In Time, where Christopher Reeve gets so fucking bored of human interaction in 1980 that he falls in love with a dead person he's seen in a portrait, and he then wills himself into being able to travel through time. He time travels simply because he believes that he can time travel hard enough. On the other hand, I wanted leftover hot dogs for lunch today, but I didn't want to use the effort to microwave them, so I just didn't have lunch today.

The ghost love genre spans fairly innocuous things like Deja Vu, Kiss Me Goodbye, Always, and Truly Madly Deeply, as well as some batshit insane things like Chances Are, where a reincarnated Robert Downey Jr falls in love with his daughter from his past life and then has to psychologically deal with that. How do you psychologically deal with that? A lot of crying, probably.

As it turns out, despite many, many attempts, Hollywood never did find a way to release a string of ghost love movies that weren't the weirdest things ever. This is no truer than with the tagline for Made In Heaven, in which a guy dies, meets his love in heaven, and then has to go find her on Earth: "12,000 babies will be born in the United States today. Two will already have fallen in love."

Hey, movie. How 'bout fucking not?

Daniel and the ghost just aren't working out. Console him on Twitter.

Whether or not Bigfoot wants to eat you, one thing is certain: his nudity is offensive. Fix his disturbing nakedness by giving him some dope threads.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more check out 6 Weirdly Specific Tropes Movies Got Briefly Obsessed With and 5 Huge Hit Movies That No One Ever Talks About Anymore.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out 5 Dumb Movie Tropes They Need To Bring Back and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow our new Pictofacts Facebook page, pal.