Taxi Driver/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Award Snub: Lost Best Actor (Peter Fincher) and Best Supporting Actress (Beatrice Straight) to Network, Best Original Score to The Omen, and Best Picture to Rocky. Martin Scorsese wasn't even nominated as Best Director.
  • Complete Monster: The vile bearded passenger who tells Travis how he is going to murder his wife. Possibly averted with Sport in the scene with Iris which implies that he actually does care about her.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Easy Andy tells Travis a great deal about the guns he's buying, but it's all very inaccurate and leaves one wondering why an arms dealer wouldn't know his own merchandise. Then one realizes Travis probably doesn't know anything about the history of the merchandise he's buying and Andy is just telling him this stuff to convince him to buy it.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Watching this movie knowing about John Hinckley Jr. makes several scenes, including where Bickle appears to be about to shoot Senator Palantine, a different experience to watch. It also paints Bugsy Malone in a whole new light.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Travis is extremely violent, racist, and an overall sociopath. But he's so full of despair and beaten up by his problems its difficult not to feel for him. This is a guy whose life is so sad he has to send his parents letters documenting elaborate fantasies about working for the Government and having a girlfriend.
  • Misaimed Fandom: The film has badly suffered from being idolized by gun-toting sociopaths who believed They'd found Their representative in Travis (Most infamously John Hinckley Jr). The other side of the fandom is nutjobs who take Travis' racism and vigilante ways as something to be admired. Like A Clockwork Orange five years earlier, a brilliant work of art that suffered because it was viewed by dangerous idiots.
  • Never Live It Down: John Hinckley trying to emulate Travis by shooting Ronald Reagan. Not that any sane person would ever see that link otherwise, though.
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: An unreleased video game was in the works. According to to one of the staff, it was going to be a GTA Clone, written by Hollywood Writers who had never played a video game or seen the movie (beyond the mirror scene) before. Featured stupid dialog with awful voice acting and made Travis a mass-murdering psychopath instead of a deranged loner posing in the mirror. It even went through a period where the license was removed from the game before getting it applied again.
  • The Woobie: Travis is quite possibly some category of this: