5. Spinal Tap
The first most anyone heard of Spinal Tap was when they watched Rob Reiner's 1984 documentary 'This is Spinal Tap'. Most of that day's audience left theaters confused as to what they had just witnessed, like the Canadian women's soccer team after the Summer Olympics. Reiner, for those non-film geeks, is often credited with creating the first 'mockumentary'. It filmed the attempted resurgence of the naive and ignorant UK heavy metal trio of David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls as the three rockers strive to reclaim their past glory by embarking on a tour of America to accompany their latest album "Smell The Glove" and instead find themselves having to accept they are on the downward side of their career. The blurring between reality and fiction really expanded after the movie's release, when curious new fans of the band would go into record shops (ask your parents what they are) and try to find Spinal Tap's back albums or previously-released singles such as Hell Hole, Big Bottom, and Silent But Deadly. Many probably also attempted to find a bootleg copy of Nigel Tufnel's Trilogy in D-minor, including the song with the greatest working title in history "Lick My Love Pump". The album from the movie, This is Spinal Tap went to #121 in the US. Their follow-up albums, Break Like the Wind in 1992 went to #61 in the US, #51 in the UK and to make things stranger, their third album (again, from a fictional band) released 25 year later named Back From the Dead reached #52 in the US. There are just too many jokes from this movie that have made it into our pop culture over the decades to get into, from Spinal Tap's problematic drummer deaths to turning it up to 11, if you haven't seen This is Spinal Tap, it's a must. For the record, Spinal Tap's true identities are Baron Haden-Guest, aka Christopher Guest on IMDB, Harry Shearer, aka as all the other Simpson's voices and Michael McKean, who rose to prominence as Lenny on Laverne and Shirley and done lots of other stuff since then with Guest in the 'mockumentary' fashion.