When movie audiences see something they’ve never seen onscreen for the first time—a loud, collective gasp goes up. If it’s a stunning enough innovation that produces a small adrenaline rush, screenwriters and directors take note and hurry to incorporate that thing in their next script/project. Ten years later, that thing has become passé, and we want to see a new thing; get a new rush. So what kinds of things? Here are 11 first-time appearances of attention-grabbing things in action movies:
1) The Headbutt
Is anyone shocked nowadays when, in a fight scene, someone decks his opponent by banging that guy’s noggin with his own head? Of course not. We’ve been seeing that in movies since exactly 1975. That’s 46 years’ worth of headbutting.But let me tell you—that first instance of a headbutt in a movie? The degree of shock that rippled through the audience was powerful. Nobody'd seen that before. It was outrageous! Completely devastating, unnerving, shocking, animalistic—who did that? Nobody did that. It was during a bare-knuckle, brawling proto cage-fight in a Charles Bronson film; 1975’s “Hard Times.” Movies haven’t been the same since.
