YMMV / Easy Rider

• And You Thought It Would Fail: As Dennis Hopper's wife was driving him to the airport, where he would fly to Louisiana and shoot the film, she said it would bomb and he'd become a mockery. He replied by asking for divorce... and when settling the terms, she only didn't ask half his winnings from the film because Hopper was so drugged and paranoid those days that she thought he'd kill her.
• Award Snub: It received two Academy Award nominations - Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay (Which they lost to Gig Young for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, respectively.) - but it wasn't up for Best Picture or Director.
• Awesome Music: "Born to be Wild" is just one tip of the iceberg.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The scene where our two heroes and two prostitutes drop acid in a New Orleans graveyard. It features a young girl reciting a Catholic prayer, Peter Fonda babbling to a statue of Virgin Mary as if it was his own mother (who committed suicide when he was 10), and lots and lots of rapid cuts of faded film. It's...very strange. Justified, as it's supposed to represent the effects of being on acid.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: George Hanson. He's only in the movie for 17 minutes and doesn't show up until 43 minutes in, but he made Jack Nicholson a star.
• Funny Moments: Jack Nicholson, stoned out of his mind, explaining his theory on aliens visiting earth.
• Genre Turning Point: The film codified the counterculture of The '60s, exploring the cultural changes and social tensions in a way that no Hollywood production before had dared to do.
• Song Association: "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf will forever be associated with this movie.
• Tough Act to Follow: After the film's success, the studio gave Dennis Hopper carte blanche. The result: The Last Movie, which was once considered to be one of the 50 worst movies of all time. Hopper's later films were mostly duds, although Colors became both a critical and financial success and The Hot Spot has been Vindicated by History.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The main characters receive (murderous) persecution for being counterculture bikers in the Deep South. In more modern times, "outlaw" culture has become embraced in the South, and bikers dressed like them wouldn't be seen as anything particularly noteworthy.
• Values Dissonance: Our two heroes are cocaine traffickers. Given the mayhem that the cocaine trade is causing in Mexico, it is not likely that we would see this in a modern film.

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