"Mrs. Robinson" was one of several songs by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel that came outta nowhere and was suddenly being played 24/7 on every local radio station with a format that could accommodate it. I do not recall knowing at first that it was from a movie that had been released a few months before. I didn't get around to seeing The Graduate until it was playing as the bottom half of double features at local movie houses.
It was catchy the first dozen-or-so times we heard it. But since you heard it so relentlessly coming out of radios — yours and those of folks around you — we all got sick of it in a week to ten days. I remember not understanding some of the lyrics and discussing them with friends who didn't understand them either. Neither, I guess, did a man mentioned in the song. I stole this off Wikipedia…
References in the last verse to Joe DiMaggio are perhaps the most discussed. Simon, a fan of Mickey Mantle, was asked during an intermission on The Dick Cavett Show why Mantle was not mentioned in the song instead of DiMaggio. Simon replied, "It's about syllables, Dick. It's about how many beats there are." Simon happened to meet DiMaggio at a New York City restaurant in the 1970s, and the two immediately discussed the song. DiMaggio said "What I don't understand, is why you ask where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven't gone anywhere!"
It seemed to me that the success of the song encouraged a lot of filmmakers to incorporate new, contemporary potential song hits into their movies…and encouraged recording artists to enter into such arrangements. The movie plugged the record and the record plugged the movie…and Joe DiMaggio.