Which movie did FUBAR come from?

[Connoisseur]

a co-worker of mine says the term FUBAR first made in appearance in the movie "Tango & Cash". Can someone verify this or was it in an earlier movie?

 

[DeadByDawn]

Full metal jacket?

I heard it first in the late 80's in the military.

 

[Night201]

I can tell you that it was in that movie - the scene when Kurt Russell takes the grenade and throws the guy down the stairs with it.

Not sure if it was used before that. I would think not, because then Sylvester Stalone asks what FUBAR is and Kurt tells him - or something like that - it's been awhile.

 

[fs5]

Tango and Cash as far as I know.

edit: guess I know nothing!

FUBAR likely had its origins in the German word Furchtbar, meaning frightful, or terrible. It is pronounced with a soft cht, and probably made the transition during World War II because foo had been popularized in American culture, appearing in a 1938 Warner Brothers Daffy Duck cartoon and the comic strip Smokey Stover.

Electronics engineers say that snafu and fubar were used before the war by repairmen sent out to repair phone booths. They had to report the situation at arrival to the scene, often on a very bad line, so they developed these acronyms to make themselves understood.

There is some folk etymology that links fubar to the metasyntactic variable, foobar. Snafu is also used in the Illuminatus trilogy and in the Private Snafu series of World War II cartoons.

Except in military and computer sciences/hacker communities, the word fubar had fallen out of use since the 1960s but has enjoyed another resurgence since it was used in the movies Tango and Cash (1989) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). FUBAR is also the title of a 2002 Canadian mockumentary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fubar

 

[Jhill]

It was in Tango and Cash i think. I don't think that was the first one though.

 

[xSkyDrAx]

First time I heard it was in Saving Private Ryan.

 

[moshquerade]

it was also said in Saving Private Ryan

 

[MikeyIs4Dcats]

its been around a long time, just like SNAFU

 

[Mrvile]

SPR is pretty new...

 

[Linflas]

I don't know about movies but it was commonly used when I was in the Navy in the mid 1970's and I am pretty sure it probably dates back a lot further than that.

 

[Connoisseur]

yeah i thought it first appeared in a war movie. I know it's in Tango and Cash. Just verifying whether it was the first instance it appeared in a movie

 

[meltdown75]

Barney & friends

 

[preslove]

Your coworker is a moron.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Tango & Cash.

 

[OREOSpeedwagon]

I first heard it in SPR.. it was about the only war movie I had seen then though (I was about 11 or so)

 

[mcvickj]

Originally posted by: preslove
Your coworker is a moron.

So your answer is?


Tango and Cash and Saving Private Ryan are the only two I can think of.

 

[jjones]

Fubar most likely came out of the military. Like snafu, clusterfvck, frag, etc.

 

[Appledrop]

😱 i always thought it meant ******* ubar! (as in uber, but intentionally misspelt)

 

[captains]

thought it was rambo when they shot a rocket into the cave he was in

 

[JulesMaximus]

Pretty sure it was in the movie 'Blue Thunder' as well.

 

[Dittybob]

I first heard this term around 1972/73, at Misawa Air Force Base, Japan.
It was used extensively by a Security Service code guy named Doc in block 9 Able Flight.
Did he originate the term? Hard to say.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I thought it was a WW2 term?

 

[Homerboy]

"FUBAR" doesn't come from a movie... it was used in movies from the use in the military.
It's been used in pretty much any military movie from SPR, to Platoon to FMJ... I think even Predator?

 

[JulesMaximus]

I first heard this term around 1972/73, at Misawa Air Force Base, Japan.
It was used extensively by a Security Service code guy named Doc in block 9 Able Flight.
Did he originate the term? Hard to say.

You bumped a 10 year old thread to post that? :hmm::\

 

[WHAMPOM]

Frankenpost, the internet never dies just gets resurrected by search addicts.