Parody and Homage as Influence: The Pop Culture Legacy of 12 Angry Men Timothy Sexton College

How does one go about determining the influence of a motion picture on society? The number of times in any given day that someone quotes a line of dialogue? How about how many lines of dialogue are quotable enough to be recognized? Maybe the number of hits that come up with a film’s precise title is typed into a search engine? One thing seems to be certain: we know which movies are the most influential simply by name, right? Star Wars. The Godfather. Psycho. And then there are those movies that don’t even the entire title to be recognized as influential: Raiders. Strangelove. 2001. One could go on, but let’s move to the point. What if someone were to propose that 12 Angry Men is at the very least just as influential (and likely more so) than any of the most listed above and unquestionably more influential than 99% of all the movies ever made? And that the argument favoring this assertion has absolutely nothing to do with that film’s rank on the IMDB list of the 250 highest rated movies (which was a surprisingly impressive #5 as of April 2021)?

There is, after all, another high effective way of determining the influence of a movie on society. A method that, unlike most others, takes into account the penetration of a movie’s...