Pedestrian ping pong

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Pedestrian ping pong is a clip taken from the 1998 film Meet Joe Black, in which the character played by Brad Pitt is hit by two passing cars, thus establishing the film's premise of Pitt's character being possessed by an inquisitive and romantic Grim Reaper.

The crash scene, staged with an almost comedic surprise element, became something of a word-of-mouth phenomenon, eventually appearing on the Internet. People who had not seen "Meet Joe Black" were fooled into believing this to be genuine amateur footage of a man being bounced back and forth between two oncoming cars, largely due to the camera keeping its relative distance from the stunt double performing the scene. Upon frame-by-frame viewing of the crash, it becomes apparent that a forced-perspective technique was used, and that the first car actually passes behind the stuntman rather than hitting him, indicating that he was in fact pulled by an off-screen wire rig into the windshield of the second car.

See also internet phenomenon.