In 1992, Shaquille O’Neal signed what he thought was a five million dollar contract to star in the movie Blue Chips. However, the contract actually obligated Shaq to star in a production of Blue Chips with an entirely new cast every year for the rest of his life. The burden of this commitment finally manifested itself in an emotional outburst in the 1999 making of Blue Chips, with Shaq pleading to coach Billy Crystal not to hold the basketball team responsible for the cultural bias of the SATs.

When fifteen high school basketball players signed contracts committing to Western State University in 1992, they thought that they were securing a prosperous and popular basketball future. Unfortunately, WSU was in fact a fictional university created in the movie Blue Chips. In turn, all of the team’s games were also fictional, and the educational opportunities the players had hoped for were limited to a short classroom scene in which an unrefined but obviously intelligent Shaquille O’Neal talked back to his haughty English professor.

When those fifteen high school basketball players finished making Blue Chips, they signed another contract with Paramount Pictures giving them the opportunity to play NCAA basketball. Unfortunately, Paramount reneged on the contract and instead sold the fifteen young men as mail-order husbands to Chechnya. There the fifteen boys were forced to spend their days impregnating impoverished village women eager to give birth to the next Slavic basketball star. Even those who were able to escape back to the US had lost all NCAA eligibility from their previous contract with WSU.

When TNT paid fifty million dollars to acquire its own cable channel in 1994, network officials hoped that the growing number of households with cable would help them to reach an audience of unprecedented magnitude. Unfortunately, the contract stipulated that TNT would be allowed to broadcast nothing but Blue Chips. Much to the chagrin of basketball star Shaquile O’Neal, TNT was able to renegotiate and, for an additional 50 million dollars, show the action thriller Tango and Cash.

In 2003 basketball star Shaquille O’Neal renegotiated a contract requiring him to act in annual productions of the movie Blue Chips. Shaq was able to free himself from this obligation by agreeing to sing a catchy jingle about Blue Chips in all of his TV appearances for the next 50 years.

When Joseph Neddelman signed a contract with Blockbuster Video to open a franchise in Lake Forest Illinois, he thought it was the beginning of a lucrative business venture. What he failed to realize was that the agreement required Neddelman to only stock copies of the 1992 film Blue Chips. The contract did grant him the opportunity to keep boxes of other movies on the shelves, but each tape was required to be secretly replaced with a copy of Blue Chips before leaving the store. Neddelman’s franchise, though certainly not thriving, stays afloat on the business of a few loyal customers.