What Movies or TV Series do you use to show people to teach them what is Shadowrun?
1] Johny Mnemonic
2] Ghost in the Shell
3] Tank Police
4] Burn Notice
5] Ronin [Robert D.]
6] The Profesinal
7] Metropolis
8] Black Magic M66/AppleSeed
9] Akria
10] Bubblegun Crissis

Neuromancer + D&D

(if books dont count, so its Blade Runner + D&D )

Freejack. (Good showing of just how bad things can get.).

Johnny 2.0 (Hard to find).

Snow Crash (To show just how hard things get with Extraterrioriality.).

watch "The Matrix" and yell,"but theres magic too!"

Sin City got me in the mood for SR.

oo, what about Big trouble in Little China and yell,"but its in the future!"

5th element maybe??

5th Element is good Post-Cyberpunk!

Korben Dallas' apartment block is a perfect way to show how the "Middle Class" are living. Complete with idiots that try to jack him!

"Now, you're not only Lower Class, you're non-existant. No power, no water, nothing."

Big Trouble in Little China... heehheh ah great movie.

Yeah mix between Matrix 1, BTiLC, Terminator, and ... wait for it... Firefly/Serenity!

Anyone that hasn't seen Strange Days is really depriving themselves of some great SR material, particularly in a quasi-historical perspective, since the tech is antiquated by the current SR canon. Still though, for background and feel, it's perfect.

Strange days is always the first movie I toss to an interested new player.

Sneakers (Robert Redford, Dan Akroyd, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix) for how a team works together, and how to plan a run.

Lars

A few days ago I've suggested the following movies to a Shadowrun newb for inspiration:

Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. 2nd GIG, Strange Days, Matrix (NOT the Sequels), Domino, Sin City and Babylon A.D.

Another fan of Domino as SR! Excellent.

Actually it was a post here on dumpshock stating domino as an inspiration for SR which made me watch this flick again. And I have to agree. It's effing SR!

Wow, you guys got all of my usuals.

Any movie with assassinations, theft and gunplay works for me. Mr. & Mrs Smith has some run and gun craziness plus fun assassinations. Even a backstab by Mr Johnson.
This one is way out there, but check out Grosse Pointe Blank. It's a comedy about an assassin who's looking to quit the business. Some may find it a bit too much a of a romance but I dig it.

The Way of The Gun must see it.

After strange days, I'll also go the Usual Suspects, Snatch,First Season of Alias, Enemy of the state or the transporter as an example of a run. Really though, all Strange Days needed was a Dragon.

I usaly end up stating the Matrix, but to me it makes a better Mage: The Assencion Game than Shadowrun Game.
Currently my number 1 choice is Burn Notice.

For fluff and world setting inspiration, check out The Running Man.

It's pure 6th World in tone, regard for human life, gameshows, etc. Made of win.

Also worth checking out for tone are
Runaway
Robocop (less so 2 and 3, but they're all great for megacorp shenanigan inspiration
Death Race Vehicle combat
Demolition Man Dystopian future, general feel, some tech stuff, some social attitude stuff
Doomsday Barrens tribal setting, madness and mayhem, a bad ass shadowrunner main char
Escape from New York and Escape from LA. characters, general feel, setting
Equilibrium setting, oppressive government, over the top gunslinger adepts of badassery
Gattaca setting, feel, social issues
Judge Dredd setting, police attitude and operation, social issues
A Scanner Darkly social issues, overall plot is pure Shadowrun, great characters, police methodology
Tank Girl setting, megacorp power and corruption
Mad Max and 2 and 3; settings, characters, ideas; the barrens and feral areas, etc.

I would say that The Italian Job is a good example of a run

Original, or the recent remake?

It's not a movie or T.V., but just as cool.... Frank Millers graphic novel Ronin features a future dysopia and a cybernetic samurai. Tres cool.

EDIT:
And on that subject, Frank Millers HardBoiled fits even better and included a T-Bird.

didnt know it was a remake, so the recent one

anyone familiar with this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107668/

hmm also Die Hard, for Hans and team of villians executing their "run".

The Big Hit is representative of how my last Shadowrun group "worked" . Other than that, I'd suggest any heist movie.

Looks like my favorites are in there...

Blade Runner
Johnny Mnemonic
Matrix
Ronin
Ghost in the Shell

Books:
Neuromancer
Mona Lisa Overdrive

I'll second that. Personally, I find the settings of most cyberpunk/near-future SF movies are too distinct to teach people what Shadowrun is beyond visuals and the most general cyberpunk concepts.

I suggest Heat (portrayal of a group of professional criminals) and Rising Sun (Japanacorp intrigues).

Heh, that's kinda funny. I always feel like the nuts and bolts of 'running is the easy bit to convey, and that people lack a good feel for setting, attitude, and surroundings.

I'd also add Banlieue 13 (AKA District 13) to the list. If you took the walls down and kept everything else, you'd get an idea as to what the Barrens would look like...

To me the best tool for me currently is Burn Notice.
Using the lead's rules I walked out of a run with 4 solid contacs and imroved one from the previos one.

or keep the walls and run the game in bug city

oh, and i could have sworn one of the barrens in seattle is at least partially walled of...

Ongoing thumbs up for Johnny Mnemonic if only for the "I want ROOM SERVICE!" flip-out scene. So good.

The campy B-ish rated movie "Death Machine" was perfect. If you can find it I heartly recommend it for a laugh if nothing else. Set primarily in a single office building. There is and evil hacker villian with a crazed robot, megacorp underhandedness and some curveball people who broke into the building to vandalize the place for reasons of social activisim (their guns are only loaded with blanks, they are passivists). It was so Shadowrun it hurt

Something slightly neglected:
For anyone interested in the feel of magic and the spirit world I recommend a small cross section of film.
General film viewing -
Prinsess Monnonoke (SP?), cause its awesome

For anyone wanting to know what a metaplane quest can be like.
Cat Soup - For the upper end of weird
Spirited Away - For the lower end of weird

Spell casting
Willow - specifically because it demonstrates focus bonding, spell casting drain, possible initiation and what happens when two evenly matched high end casters manage to counter each other at every step. Bloody noses, thats what.

Split Second

Has to be a must for any London-based job. Devil Rats, eternal pollution murk, seedy bars, crap coppers, ritual blood magic and big fragging guns!

the Crow

The SciFi Channel has been doing a bunch [It looks like there are just going through the MM], most of them are set in now, but...
-Baslasik
-Chimeria
-Maticore
-AI Apocolips

Currently I am waiting for
-Rusty: Rust Monster Rampage
-Gelatious: The Cube
-StirgeL The Sucking

Kill Bill
Dusk till Dawn
Tremmors
The A-Team
Transformers
Batman Beyond


-And for a military bent
G.I. Joe

thanks, i think i ones watched part of it on some late night german sat channel

thanks to me having a limited grasp of the language, and it being dubbed to hell and back, the storyline passed me by...

maybe ill dig that and willow out from under a rock somewhere...

Ha! Someone got to Batman Beyond already. I will add that if you don't want to watch an entire series, just rent Return of the Joker. That will not only give you a performance equally on the level of The Dark Knight, but has some of the best lines written for a Batman movie ever:

"Bonk? Oh that's right - dead. Deedee, be a dear and take out the trash."

"So let me get this straight. You fell into a pit of acid, got your skin bleached white, and decided to become a criminal. What, couldn't get work as a rodeo clown?"

On that note, The Dark Knight. It's a great way to show the higher up spectrum of running, the people that faces dream of interacting with, and it's got great cityscape shots and a whole lot of tech. If you're planning on running with boys like Ryan Mercury, this is your movie to watch. Batman Begins is overshadowed by this great sequel.

If you're going to talk heist movies, you have to mention the best of the best: Ocean's 11. This is a run, complete with a pulled together team of professionals and a whole lot of wacky hijinks to try to get towards that final goal. You've got a couple faces, professional thieves, bank robbers, your heavies...plus, it's funny. Too many series try to go for the hardened criminal element; Eleven does a great job of making it a fun watch too.

And while people will probably groan at this, Gone In Sixty Seconds, the remake with Nick Cage. For pretty much the same reason as Ocean's Eleven but with Angelina Jolie doing her best crazy since Girl Interrupted and lots of fun cars. Plus, that chase scene at the end!

Honorable mention goes to Burn Notice because everyone is going to mention Burn Notice. It's the best show ever - and it has Bruce Campbell as a drunk, washed up spy! Best role since Brisco County.

Nothing seriously comes closer visually tech wise than Ghost in the Shell, movie or the show. Shadowrun basically stole AR from GitS (well, you could say part of it comes from Edward in Bebop) and you've got cybertech, body replacement, brain-in-jars, and giant sized drones with rogue free sprites in them (or AIs, I'm willing to play nice). Their rigging is even spot on (slightly NSFW).

Cowboy Bebop has a lot of Shadowrun in it. Your main characters are an ex-cop, an ex-Mafioso, a woman with no past, a kid, and a gene enhanced dog traveling space in search of money - and their pasts won't stop catching up to them. Great and tragic, with an end that will get you right in the gut. Holy shit.

No one ever mentions this (because I don't know how many people have seen them) but Read or Die and its follow up, Read or Die(tv). Strange title, great series. Yes, it's about books. It involves secret British conspiracies, books and main characters that can manipulate paper. The movie (Read or Die) is about genetic clones of famous people escaping from captivity and trying to piece together a collection of books that contain a song that, when played, will cause all of humanity to commit suicide. The trio trying to stop them is The Paper (the aforementioned paper manipulator), Miss Deep (think Kitty Pryde of the X-men) and Draco, a military man that just wants to quit already.

Oh, and the President of the United States pees himself in the first five minutes. Seriously.

Read or Die(tv) is so called because, well, it's a tv show. It's weird, don't question me. Featuring three sisters with the ability to manipulate paper (one creates bows and arrows, another puppets, a third uses them basically as daggers) they're charged with protecting a famous author from her fans but slowly stumble into this British conspiracy. Cute at the beginning, goes completely psycho and gut wrenching at the end, but ultimately, kicks a whole lot of ass. If anything, watch the first episode for the amazing plane rescue at the end.

There's two manga series. Read the first one, with Yomiko on it that takes place before the movie (and adds lots of backstory). Stay away from Read or Dream unless you liked the first half of tv (because it basically has nothing to do with any other series, other than the main characters being from tv).

I should also mention Tenjou Tenge again, because if you're looking for adepts of all shapes, colors, and sizes and the amount of damage that they can do, this is the manga for you. Very highly sexualized (we've mentioned it before, but the artist / writers is a porn writer as his main job) but highly violent. If you liked old school anime deaths, this is the manga for you.

heh, batman beyond is close to a dark spider-man in the verbal department.

oh, and i so love the new spectacular spider-man cartoon, especially green goblin

btw, its kinda funny who voices joker in all of warner brothers DC comics related cartoons

Seriously.. Black Lagoon.. watch the whole anime series.. SOOOO perfect setting and story for a hongkong/thailand based story.. =)

indeed, i would say they are operating out of whats basically a free city in SR terms...

btw, i swear, revi(y?) must be some kind of gun adept...

Renaissance

Terry's great. He was a great change from Bruce's dour attitude about everything.

"...suspended in a block of ice?"
"Shut up and drive."

Nirvana with Christopher Lambert. Nice IC, nice VR, nice synthetic intelligence, nice house AI. And the Sonys in blue.

The comic book series Wildcats 3.0 hits on a lot of shadowrun style elements. Corporate Culture, Black Ops, and the machinations of the National Park Service.

There is an awful lot out there that is applicable, from the classic SR texts to bizarre niche pieces that illuminate just a small corner. That being said, a lot of the works listed below don't immediately translate but in all cases at least one aspect would either A) make a great character concept, B) make a great campaign or run concept C) add a great bit of background detail.
In no particular order:

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons. The main character is (for me at least) The Sammi With Issues.
Iain M. Banks, 'Gift from the Culture' in The State of the Art. Low cunning beats high tech.
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Wizards: Magical Tales from the master of modern fantasy. Light reading, but there is a few good takes on people (usu. children) coming to grips with their magical talent.
In a similar vein, Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book. Transposing Nobody Owens into the SR universe would make a great character.
Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. Less dark and foreboding than how I tend to imagine SR, but still a perfect example of somebody falling through the cracks into the shadows.
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind. Kvothe's explanation of magic and especially drain easierly serves as the basis of an entire hermetic tradition.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Because Big Brother is watching and given the right pressure he can make a believer out of anybody.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia and Anthony Beever The Spanish Civil War. A must for anybody wanting to launch the Revolution.
Anna Funder, Stasiland, or anything about living in East Germany really. Because the man is watching.
Evan Wright, Generation Kill and Sir Rupert Smith's work on 'War amongst the people' (don't have my copy on me). For takes on how we fight wars now, Generation Kill gives you the pop culture 'Get Some!' view, and serves as a reference for building ex-Military soldiers in an ultraviolent world and Smith's work gives you a more intellectual view of how warfare is changing laying the foundation for the hyperbolic 'universal' warfare of SR.
And on Ultraviolence, Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. First, if you can't read the book (I couldn't), just for its view of a society gone to hell but if you can read the book for an excellent introduction to writing in a made up English dialect.
George R. R. Martin, 'The Way of the Cross and the Dragon', Sandkings. For reminding us that one person's Blasphemy is another person's Truth and the consequent tendency of the powerful to manipulate people using this understanding.
Orson Scott Card, Maps in A Mirror. Especially his Introduction, 'Fat Farm', and 'Dogwalker'. Fat Farm is within the realms of SOTA SR technology and would provide an ideal campaign hook and Dogwalker is just classic cyberpunk.
Greg Bear, 'Blood Music' in Brian Aldiss ed A Science Fiction Omnibus. Because Robot's and AI's arn't the only technological threat.
Ric Alexander ed. Cyber-killers. Honestly if you can find a copy get this. A collection of some of the best short stories about technological terrors by some of the best authors of the genre.
Philip K. Dick, Human Is? A collection of Dick's short stories, of which 'Paycheck' and 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' are ideal for adding stories for adding to the SR 'verse.
Also, Phillip K. Dick Do androids dream of electric sheep? and A Scanner Darkly. I actually prefer A Scanner Darkly just for how trippy it is; also, the concept is perfect for screwing with a guy who has is Deep Cover as a quality.
Pretty much anything by William Gibson. Not all of it is a good as everything else, but hey.
And Bruce Sterling. Not just his Cyberpunk though. His stuff on the Shaper's and Mechanists is really good as a basis for hyper-augmented characters.
Sergei Lukyanenko, 'Destiny Inc.' and 'Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay noo.' in James and Kathryn Morrow eds The SFWA European Hall of Fame. The first, because well - pimping your soul is an option. The second, because organlegging is a slippery slope.

Those are just the books I'd recommend to anybody interested in SR. The multitude of other works which can give you inspiration are innumerable. But of the top I'd keep an eye for stories in today's newspaper, Shakespear and definately any good history (hell, play a campaign where your runners are employed by a Talleyrandesque Mr Johnson who is trying to ameliorate Britain's internal policy, balance the competing Dragon agendas and normalise Britain's relationships to the rest of Europe all whilst living large and trying not to get his head cut off).

Oh, and whoever already said it ,I couldn't agree more: Strange Days is a must to watch, absolute must. It IS mundane SR.

Imp

One of my favorites is Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. While it doesn't have the magic/tech feel, in my mind it's a good example of a newbie SR group trying to do something beyond them and (through GM sympathy) surviving it.

/Paul

Strange Days is the first one that comes to mind. Many others mentioned above are good as well, but a couple I haven't seen on the list are:

Harley Davidson and the Malboro Man - cheesy, but fits in a way
Le Femme Nikita - great movie
The Spirit - not as good as Sin City
Leverage TV series - great team series with face, close combat guy, decker, and infiltrator (although not many guns)
Nemesis - future cyborg/bounty hunter
Cyber Wars - not a very good movie, but it fits

Spartan is a solid example of what a veteran shadowrunner (face/sammy in particular) could and would do to retrieve a girl with a little help from his contacts. It's probably my favourite SR-ish movie and it doesn't appear to be terribly well known. Taken plays in a similar fashion but doesn't have as mesmerizing a cadence. Both movies flip between the slick con and ruthless violence in a heartbeat, which appeals to my playing style.

Bravo Wanderlust Bravo! God, but its been some years since I saw this one. Apparently it's not available on DVD which is a damn shame. Gotta love the quotes

Police Inspector "I'm surprised you don't have a grenade launcher"

Rutger "Couldn't get a permit"

And "Big guns. We need big guns..."

As for the other stuff, well I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned Akira - one of the original Cyberpunk genre seeds. Whack in a healthy dose of Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed movies like Hard Boiled and God of Gamblers for the action scenes and a load of those totally eighties cyberpunk (B) movies like Freejack and Cyborg.

However, I always liked Thunderheart and Last of the Dogmen for a take on the native Amerindian side of things.

not exactly on the shelf but still:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation

now turn that up to 11, and one can get a feel for how the SR corps operate...

check the bottom of the page, and there are download versions available, from the creator.