A brief history of table tennis in film – from Forrest Gump to Marty Supreme

A brief history of table tennis in film – from Forrest Gump to Marty Supreme

Table tennis and film have a surprisingly entangled history. Both depended on the invention of celluloid – which not only became the substrate of film, but is also used to make ping pong balls. Following a brief ping pong craze in 1902, the game largely disappeared and was widely assumed to have been a passing fad. More than 20 years later, however, the British socialite, communist spy and filmmaker Ivor Montagu went to great lengths to establis…