Soylent Green/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: Nobody has heard of the book (Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison), but most people have heard about the movie, or at least "It's people! Soylent Green is people!". Which, incidentally, isn't in the book -- it's just a straight-up Crapsack World.
• Anvilicious: If we don't do something about the overpopulation we're all going sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the streets and stairwells, until we're turned into green biscuits!
  • Keep in mind that the movie was made in the 70's. Birth control had only been legal for a few years and nobody took environmental protection seriously. You could argue that this movie was a well-needed slap in the face. A self-defeating prophecy, perhaps?
• Cult Classic
• Fridge Logic: Lots of it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Roth's suicide. The actor playing him, Edward G. Robinson, was dying of cancer. Only Heston knew. And because of this, Heston's tears were real.
  • It may have come true.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: "Soylent green is made from people!"
• It Was His Sled: Soylent Green is people. Like "it was Earth All Along", It's now possibly the world's most poorly guarded secret, and has been parodied almost universally in Sci-Fi comedies and plenty of other places too
  • The Simpsons worked it into an episode about Homer and Marge's sexual relations. "It's people! People have soiled our greens!" A look into the future also had Homer saying "Mmm...Soylent Green."
  • Futurama has Soylent Cola. The taste "varies from person to person."
  • In Paranoia, low clearance citizens have to make do with Soylent Red. They only get the Green stuff when they advance up the ranks.
• Memetic Mutation: "It's people! Soylent Green is people!"
• Squick
• Straw Man Has a Point: Considering the state of the world, it makes perfect sense to recycle human matter into food. Many critics have noted that Thorn's rant was silly.
• Tear Jerker: Sol Roth's suicide.

The book contains the following examples:

• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The Aesop of the novel is that birth control should be legalized. It's easy to forget how controversial a statement this once was.
  • In the US, it had only been legalized nationally by the 1964 Supreme Court decision of Griswold vs. Connecticut, or only two years before the book was released. Even then, it was illegal for unmarried couples to use birth control until 1972 (Eisenstadt v. Baird). Since then, along with abortion, better agricultural techniques, medicine, etc. global population rates have dropped increasingly, especially in the most developed countries. YMMV on whether this is a good thing or not, of course.