Dan

First off, apologies for the weak title. I didn't spend too much time thinking of how to frame it in an easily-digestible topic title.

What I'm getting at is:
What are some films that you remember seeing referenced in pop culture before you ever saw the actual film? Were there spoilers? And how do you remember reacting to it?

I can think of a few, and mostly because of The Simpsons:
Planet of the Apes - the musical version in The Simpsons, plus countless references to the last scene in pop culture... I knew exactly what I was in for. Still enjoyed it a lot, though.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Lots of 'em, but particularly the mashed potato sculpture.

Jesus Christ Superstar - I saw Mr. Show's "Jeepers Creepers Semi-Star" long before I saw JCS. I knew the bit was a parody of the play/movie, but didn't have that as a frame of reference, so when my wife finally made me watch JCS a few years back, I couldn't help but laugh for the first 30 minutes or so.

There's more, to be sure. How about you?

Quatermass

Citizen Kane - Rosebud

Casablanca - pretty much every quotable line from the movie. I didn't see it until the mid 1990s

Mabuse

Psycho shower scene has to be #1. Everyone knows that scene even if they haven't seen the film.

Crocker Jarmen

I remember that being spoiled for me as in a Peanuts comic.

Inhumans99

Too many to count, including tons of classics like Gone With The Wind, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Psycho, Casablanca, heck I think I even saw the Attica scene from Dog Day Afternoon referenced in pop culture many years ago before I gave it a shot (great movie, but not a feelgood film that I ever wanted to see again).

To this day my mind thinks I have seen Gone With The Wind all the way through because I have seen the film partway through, and seen enough scenes from the film over the years but no...still need to see it from start to finish (I bet I have seen only maybe 25-30% of the movie). I have seen the shower scene or parodies/homages of the scene too many time to count but no desire to see the film.

Cardsfan111

I saw the Star Wars films much later than everyone else. It wasn't a surprise to learn about Luke's family.

Bluelitespecial

Pulp Fiction was the first Quentin Tarantino move I ever saw, I was in 8th grade at the time. I didn't see Reservoir Dogs until a few years later, but first saw the references from The Simpsons.

jjcool

Yeah. Lots of classics were "spoiled" for me before I was able to see them. Simply because they came out before I was born or before I started watching movies.

Two more recent that I remember being in theaters and being spoiled before I could see them were The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game. Both were "twist" type endings, and both were seemingly being talked about everywhere when they were in theaters. In fact, didn't Ebert spoil The Crying Game on his show? Anyway, I still saw Sixth Sense in theaters, and still haven't seen The Crying Game.

DWilson

I haven't seen "The Crying Game" in ten or fifteen years since I saw it in the theater. It's actually not a twist ending, -the twist is revealed about half-way into the film as I recall and guides the rest of the story.

When I was a child in the mid-60's I had heard of "Psycho" (always spoken of with shudders) and I really wanted to see it because I was a kid who liked scary movies. It was going to be on the CBS 8pm Movie one Friday (I think) but it was blocked locally because that week a local Senator's daughter had been murdered and the local station chose to be sensitive. It finally showed up on a non-network station a year or two later and they ran it five nights in a row at 10:30 (this was unusual around here). I had to wait for Friday night so I could stay up to watch it. My father watched it Monday night and explained the whole movie to me on Tuesday morning. He didn't do that out of sensitivity, -he was just like that.

Mondo Kane

I really wished all of the blood-filled imagery (That I had seen in various movie magazines) concerning Taxi Driver's shoot-out wasn't spoiled. To top it off,I thought De Niro was going to have the Mohawk for the entire movie.

I also wish I could have avoided seeing Major Kong riding the bomb in you know what. I'm sure that sequence was first spoiled to me in a montage sequence for one of The Oscars ceremonies.

Quatermass

I'm pretty sure it was a 1978 Columbo episode that first spoiled it for me, S07 Ep04 "How to Dial A Murder." IIRC, the sled was featured but they didn't really explain how it figured into the movie, so I asked my parents about it and they spoiled it. The bastards.

rw2516

I remember this. It was around 1968. I was 10. It's always been my impression the network cancelled it because that guy had just murdered several nurses(Chicago I think) in a dorm or something. It was national news. Famous case. I lived in Iowa and it was cancelled.
I finally caught it in the 70s on a local channel after it entered syndication.

Looked it up. Psycho was scheduled to air on CBS Friday Sept. 23, 1966. Right after Wild Wild West and Hogan's Heroes. A few days before, Valerie Jeanne Percy was murdered in Chicago. She was daughter of guy running for the senate. Some Midwest affiliates expressed concern about showing it. CBS planned to air a different movie in the Midwest but ended up cancelling it altogether and never did show it.

Cardiac161

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West:

Never was a fan of the western genre but I loved Leone's Once Upon a Time in America and was also very familiar with Morricone's film music.

I approached both GBU & OUATIW from a curious standpoint given Morricone's music are so iconic..ended up loving both movies and finally understand why people see Sergio Leone as a auteur.

Just this scene alone gives me the goosebumps:

Shannon Nutt

The Sound of Music

STILL haven't seen it.

Hazel Motes

The list of movies would for me would be a long one, but I think 99.9 % of the ones spoiled for me were spoiled by The Simpsons.

rennervision

Hearing the line "We don't need no stinking badges." a few times made me want to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Ash Ketchum

I saw pretty much every film listed here--in theaters--before I was exposed to references from them, most of them when they came out, but the older ones at repertory theaters. My mother took me to see CASABLANCA and THE MALTESE FALCON when I was 14 and I saw CITIZEN KANE at a Columbia University summer screening when I was in high school. Nobody I knew talked about these films until I was in college.

Mabuse

I always point out that "Be afraid, be very afraid" gets laughs when you watch The Fly with new people because everyone knows that line and no one realizes it's from that movie.

Defiant1

Casablanca by far. Not just all the famous quotable lines, but the overall structure and plot of the movie so heavily influenced countless movies in the decades that followed.