Sometimes people do stuff that is so stupid that you're like, "This is just like a movie!" and sometimes what they did is stupid was actually in a movie.
Back To The Future
Lets get started with a classic, Back to the Future! You remember that, Doc Brown figured out how to make a time machine out of a Delorean and you would go eighty eight miles per hour and then you would travel in time. Well a 40 year old dude in Florida with no background in science engineering or time travel was like, "I can do that. I dont have a DeLorean but i have a Dodge Challenger. I'm sure it can get eighty eight."
So this man did that. He got up to eighty eight miles per hour. He was trying to create a time portal and the weird thing is, it actually kinda worked because he created a portal into Advanced Tax Services in Pensacola, Florida. He actually created two portals, one in the front and one in the back when he went directly through the tax service.
Disney Pixar, Up
Elsewhere in Florida, a high school science teacher, Laura Bailey Cutkomp, showed the Disney movie , Up, a Pixar film, to her students. I dont know what Up has to do with science, maybe the helium?
So you know the dog, Doug, has to wear the cone of shame, and that gave her an idea. She bought one and she started cone shaming her high school steudents if they acted up, she slapped a cone of shame on them. Guess what? the student post pictures of this cone shaming on Facebook and people are outraged.
She dint get fired, she just got transferred to a middle school, where they dont use Facebook. No biggie, you can do this to middle schoolers, they wont complain. They wont tell their parents about this.
October Sky
Now, how about October Sky? You remember the formative movie in Jake Gyllenhaal's carrer back in 1999. The rockt booys actually had to collect some money to build a rocket and the way that they did that is they stole some old spikes off of abandoned railroad tracks. So in 2006 two teens had an idea, "Lets do what they did in October Sky." Three very different details though.
Number one : its not a movie. It's just actually happened in real life.
Number two : Jake Gyllenhaal was not involved.
Number three : The tracks were not abandoned.
They took 157 spikes from these railroad tracks that were $3 each, do quick math on that, that was $471 split two ways. We're not talking about a big score here. But thankfully they discovered that this was done ahead of time, before disaster struck. Nobody died, they were able to repair the tracks. The teens were arrested and then their defence was like, "We were just doing what we saw on October Sky".
Seinfeld
Next one is a couple in Maine, Thomas and Megan Woodard, who were watching a rerun of Seinfeld. Kremer and Newman hatched a scheme to drive a truckload of cans and bottles out of New York to Michigan so that they could cash in on the redemption fee, which was double. So the Woodards thought, "Hey, we own a recycling redemption center, this is on!". They open and it was in Maine. So they open two out of state redemption centers, one in New Hampshre, one in Massachusetts. They have smaller refunds in those stated to the people who brought the bottles. Trucked the bottles back to Maine and cashed in on the higher returns in Maine.
Except it is illegal. Bottle refund fraud is what its called. Over three years, they moved over a hundred thousand containers, bottle and cans. They made a whopping $10,000. Thats a lot of work for $3,333 year, especially when the fine is $10,000 when you get caught. Guess it worth it.
The Purge
I think you all know this one, The Purge, you know, the 2013 movie. Its this twelve hour period where you can do whatever you want to whiteout legal repercussions. The city becomes a bloodbath of chaos and murder. Well in 2014, a teenage boy in Louisville, Kentucky sees this and he tweets, "Who's trying to get a Louisville Purge started with me?" I love the phrasing of that. Well apparently, a lot of people in Louisville were trying to get a Purge started with him.
So he actually made a poster. You know if you make a poster, something becomes very official. He took the Purge poster from the movie and he just put "Louisville The Purge" on top of it. Well, he forge the apostrophe.
So anyway, this was enough to get people excited about this and the cops were like, "We gotta prepare for this, we're gonna cancel events, we're gonna close down businesses." And that Friday night comes, 8PM strikes on the clock, everybody starts looking out their windows. Guess what happened? Nothing happened!! Absolutely no crimes were committed. However, there was a rumor that someone stole a giraffe from local zoo. But it was just a rumor.
Twilight
If you think you cant take a tween vampire romance movie seriously, think again. In 2009, a thirteen year old boy in Des Moines, Iowa, was obsessed with Twilight. So he started wearing glitter and shimmer makeup to get the ladies~~ No, jk jk.
He went on a biting spree, he bit eleven students over the course of a few days. He bit this one thirteen year old female students on the right hand at a track meet. I dont know how Twilight ended, it might have like a half vampire baby, i dont know. But this dude had a delayed referral to a juvenile court on an assault charge.