One episode of The Facts of Life saw the girls neglect the store's upcoming health inspection because they were so involved with a chain letter.Only one character refuses to take it seriously. A The Kids in the Hall sketch had a company's CEO presenting a chain letter to his board and asking them what to do.Eventually, Dick ends up taking superstitions seriously to such an outrageous degree that they totally run his life. Dick ambivalently holds on to his and leans more and more toward sending it out when Mary is repeatedly hit by bad luck. Mary throws hers out right away and tells Dick to do the same. In a 3rd Rock from the Sun episode, both Dick and Mary receive chain letters.In an episode of Home Improvement, Unlucky Tim eventually realizes that his ill fortune isn't caused by the letter but rather that, owing to his incompetence, bad stuff always happens to him.It also provides a rare case of the sender getting the bad luck, not just from the bill, but from the others dipping into his cash box to pay for all the letters. By the final act, chain letters are going out like crazy until Harold reveals he didn't get a $100 bill - it was a bill for $100 from the library. A rare common sense moment had Red of The Red Green Show ignoring a recent chain letter craze over the Lodge until Dalton pointed out that Harold, who started it, got a $100 bill from it.This is a staple of Sit Coms and has been for decades, as such, nearly every sitcom that ran long enough has had at least one episode about a chain letter.This was in turn followed by another still ongoing decline from 2016 to 2020, when social media outlets started applying spam filters to their user-posted content and began promoting the anti-fake-news movement in an attempt to stamp out social media-powered superstition. Big Tech eventually caught note of this phenomenon and started mobilizing their large resources to develop AI-powered spam filters that started blocking chain letters, thus pushing them back into obscurity for the remainder of the decade but then they returned to popularity around 2012, when people discovered that cell phone text messages and social media outlets like Facebook didn't have any spam police and could be freely tapped for chain letters. The advent of e-mail made chain letters explode in popularity as all these superstitious and technologically illiterate people were exposed to chain letters that could be widely recirculated by just clicking a button up until 2005 they were so widespread they were considered part and parcel of having an e-mail account, to the point that people just started mentally filtering them out and entire major websites like Snopes gained their early popularity specifically thanks to debunking chain mails. Their popularity has varied throughout the years - back in the days of snail mail they weren't unheard of, as information availability was much more limited and therefore ignorance and superstition were much more widespread, but the cost and difficulty of having to physically mail that letter again prevented them from circulating too much. Disaster proceeds to befall him on a scale which would make Job from The Bible look like a paragon of good fortune.Ĭhain letters in real life have nowhere near the credibility that they do in media, and are annoyingly common in e-mail spam and on comment pages and message boards. Though warned by his credulous friends, the skeptical character mocks the very concept of luck and vows to ignore it. Character receives a letter, one which informs the recipient that he must mail it to a certain number of people or suffer bad luck.
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