Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
"Welcome to the American Museum of Pop Culture, with artifacts dating as far, far, back... as six months ago."
Even my crappy onomonopeotics can evoke one of the most recognizable pieces of music ever used in a movie, Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarustrutha". Hum just those five notes on a crowded bus and everyone around you will get a glint of recognition in their eyes. And even the middleschooler who has, with a straight face, said the words, "Justin Timberlake is, like, a musical genius," will know exactly from whence they came. He'll turn to you and say, "Isn't that from the one where Homer goes to space?"...Damn kids ruin everything.
Classics, almost by definition, are works that are considered to be of high quality, are influential on later works, and are widely known. However, one will often find that only scholars and enthusiasts have first-hand knowledge of the material in question, and that the masses know it either only by title or by homages, parodies, direct references and allusions found in more populist works. Essentially, various bits and pieces of high culture are most widely known through their use in pop culture. Ill-informed people might even think these bits and pieces are original to the popular work.
Pieta Plagiarism exists because of this phenomenon. Most artists would be copying some other usage than the sculpture.
Frequently results in Beam Me Up Scotty, It Was His Sled., and Covered Up.
Compare Memetic Mutation, Older Than They Think, Weird Al Effect, Seinfeld Is Unfunny, Small Reference Pools, The Theme Park Version.
Examples:
- From film: The 1925 Russian film Bronenosets Potyomkin, usually called Battleship Potemkin in English-language sources, is generally considered hugely influential on later cinema. There is a particular scene set on some stairs leading down to the harbour in Odessa which has been imitated several times, including in The Untouchables and one of the Naked Gun films. It is reasonable to assume that, in modern times at least, more people who are not cineasts will have seen these homages/parodies than have seen the original film.
- From literature: Various bits from the works of William Shakespeare have been quoted, parodied, imitated and plagiarised too many times to count. Particularly notable are cases in which Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is confused with the "Alas, poor Yorick" one, leading to an actor reciting the former while holding the prop skull that belongs in the latter. There's a fair amount of Beam Me Up Scotty at work, too: "Alas poor Yorick, I knew him" often has a "well" added to the end in pop culture.
- By now, a notable percentage of the people who reference Citizen Kane as a cinema classic and could recognize the opening scene from any one second of footage have actually never seen the film and wouldn't be able to identify any other line, shot or sequence from the whole movie. (Okay, maybe one.)
- Considering The Simpsons Did It several times over, most people are bound to recognise the majority of the movie, they just won't realise it's Citizen Kane.
- Many famous pieces of classical music have been hijacked by Looney Tunes and other (usually older) animated sequences, and are many people's only exposure to such works. This troper still has the urge to sing "Kill the Wa-bbit" along to Wagner's Ride of the Valkryies, thanks to Elmer Fudd's memorable version in the classic Bugs Bunny short What's Opera, Doc?
- "Sing, Sing, Sing", originally by Louis Prima, played most famously by Benny Goodman, is known to a whole generation of twenty-somethings as "the Chips Ahoy song".
- It's worth noting that "Sing, Sing, Sing" seems to be the stock music used to evoke '30s swing jazz.
- The Bible is the grand-daddy of this trope, with sayings like "there's nothing new under the sun" and references to Pillars of Salt and the like existing in almost every medium, though very few people have actually read the Book in question (people who go to Church
will may have heard excerpts).
- This Australian editor is only aware of various items of American culture (ranging from the Trix rabbit to The A Team) only through references on the internet and through references in shows like Family Guy.
- As with this British editor.
- Similarly, this troper did not recognise the man in historical footage but had seen so many caricatures of Richard Nixon elsewhere.
- Gilligan's Island was never shown in Ireland (and is equally unknown in Britain), yet is referenced so often in American shows and films that this Irish troper can now recognize parodies of the show.
- The same with this Spanish troper.
- An example so classic, jokes about it pre-date the concept of this trope: a wit from the 1960s noted this definition of a "longhair" (a person of culture): "he can hear the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger." The piece of music referred to is from the Rossini Opera William Tell. The dramatic fanfare and thundering string section from the overture was used as the theme music for The Lone Ranger radio drama and then in movies and on television.
- On the subject of the Lone Ranger and William Tell, this commercial
 , which references not only The Lone Ranger but another TV ad of the day for Lark Cigarettes.
- The animated saturday morning show The Smurfs used nothing but clips of classical music for mood and theme setting.
- Futurama has an example in the boy from the pair of Victorian dressed Street Urchin children who are recurring characters. They are clearly meant to evoke Dickens, as his crutch is identical to that famously used by Tiny Tim, although what the writers seem to have missed was that Tiny Tim was not one of Dickens' urchin characters. Then again, it's Futurama; it was probably on purpose.
- Lampshaded again in Futurama, as the Fungineers who designed the Moon Landing 'historical' recreation with singing whale hunters as astronauts have certainly gotten their historical facts through popcultural osmosis. This troper would love to live in the year 3000 as a Fungineer of Marvel Comic History with a Ph.D in Spiderman Studies.
- Another one from Futurama is simply the theme song. Most people associate it with the series, but it's actually just a slightly tweaked version of part of the Maurice Béjart ballet Mass for our time. The original was written back in 1967 by a man named Pierre Henry and is entitled "Psyché Rock".
- Homage? Almost definitely. Cover or rework? No. There isn't a single shared melodic phrase between the two of them.
- The chord progression is the same, and the chime riff in Futurama is the Psyché Rock riff with extra flourishes.
- This editor owns several anthologies of Mad Magazine stories from various decades, and has managed to pick up a good bit of knowledge about the pop culture and history of those time periods just from that. See, Mad does teach you things!
- People these days seem to think that "Klaatu barada nikto" is that funny nonsense line from Sam Raimi's horror comedy Army Of Darkness (1992) (aka The Evil Dead 3). Actually, it's from the black-and white Sci-Fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), where the sentence is used to stop Gort, the powerful invincible robot of the alien Klaatu, from destroying the Earth as punishment for the humans killing his peaceful master.
- The fact that the people behind the remake just didn't care and actively tried to render that line incomprehensible when Keanu Reeves insisted it had to be included, naturally, does not help the collective memory.
- It's impossible to list all the comic books, novels, fantasy horror movies, roleplaying games, video games, fantasy/Sci-fi art and music videos that feature blatant rip-offs, allusions, homages, parodies or additions to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos tales.
- How many people quote lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Faust and especially the prequel Faust II. (Faust, der Tragödie Zweiter Teil) without knowing where it's originally from?
- The 1981 German film adaption of Faust, titled Mephisto, transports the story into WWII, as a stageplay performed for a Nazi audience. Klaus Maria Brandauer's performance as a stage actor playing the devil, with sinister stark white make-up, black eye shadow and sharply upturned eyebrows, has definitely influenced later despictions of the devil in visual media.
- From this description, the design apparently owes a lot to Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. On that note, if you showed most people today stills from this movie, they'd think it was some sort of Tim Burton thing.
- In addition to Geothe's Faust, there's also Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which many people only remember for the line, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships." Many people today only know it from the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos."
- "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."
- One can argue that Ridley Scott's horror-sci-fi movie Alien (1979) with its dark grimy spaceships and iconic alien menace designed by H.R. Giger singlehandedly kick-started and defined a whole genre.
- The sequel, Aliens, as well.
- Same goes for Ridley Scott's dystopian cyberpunk movie Blade Runner (1982), tangentially based on Philip K. Dick's bizarre novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968). Forget William Gibson's famous cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984). Forget The Matrix (1999) with its Hong-Kong martial art style. Forget Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun RPG. Forget all the movies about clones and androids on the run. They wouldn't have been there without Blade Runner. And Japanese anime cyberpunk series like Ghost In The Shell SAC might never have penetrated into the Western geek consciousness without the blending of Western and Asian culture in Blade Runner.
- Gibson, at least, is up front about this—he has said that he walked out of Blade Runner in tears, because there was his world, already on screen, when the novel was still in the writing phase. He was almost overjoyed when it tanked.
- Both Gibson and Scott were heavily inspired by the work of French Cartoonist Moebius, specifically The Long Tommorow and L'Incal, with their noirish plots and dense, impossibly high metropolis criss-crossed with flying cars and bridges. His depiction of a future that was as dirty and lived in as the real world was also a huge influence on Star Wars. His scenes are often directly homaged as well, particularly L'Incal's famous opening shot. Of course, Moebius contributed directly to the design of Alien and Dune so even people who don't know his name recognise his influence.
- Flying cars zooming through the sky-scraper canyon streets of megacities. The idea was first put on screen with Blade Runner, was visually quoted in The Fifth Element by Luc Besson and the Star Wars prequels by George Lucas, and recently turned up in an episode of the new BBC Doctor Who series.
- There have been flying cars in movies at least from 1950s, if not earlier. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is probably the first to show similar scenery on the silver screen, though it still used planes with wings, but the massive megacity with flying vehicles was made the setting for a science fiction film in that moment.
- And the flying cars in Fifth Element were a homage to French Valerian comics, with Corben's taxi's design almost entirely lifted from a similar vehicle flown by a flamboyant cabbie S'traks in the crowded skies of industrial planet Rubanis.
- This troper has some trouble in not thinking about either Fantasia or Princess Tutu when listening to Tchaikovski's The Nutcracker. And first got acquainted with the Carmina Burana through "One-Winged Angel" in Final Fantasy VII. And learnt about LOTS of mythological figures and archetypes through anime back when she was an innocent teenager. Seriously.
- Similarly, this troper is still reminded of Tetris upon hearing the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.
- Speaking of Fantasia, there's likely not a soul on Earth who dosen't associate "L'apprenti sorcier" by Paul Dukas with Mickey Mouse.
- This Troper doesn't know a single soul who has seen Fantasia... So yeah.
- This troper has never seen Fantasia, so I associate that music with a commercial with flying yoghurt that was definitely riffing on Fantasia. I was also familiar with the song "Mysteries Of Love by Julee Cruise due to its use in a commercial for Cadbury's chocolate. It was many years before I realised it came from Blue Velvet.
- Or 2001 A Space Odyssey when they hear the fanfare from Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra".
- Although some people just go "Whoooooooooooo" in response to that one.
- Monty Pythons Flying Circus has done a similar takeover of John Phillip Sousa's march The Liberty Bell.
- Even though this editor is British he's only heard of 1960's British public figures like Reginald Bosanquet, Arthur Negus, Norman St. John Stevas and Richard Baker through Python, and certainly wouldn't have heard of the movies 'If' and 'Finian's Rainbow' without seeing Mr. LF Dibley's versions first. And since British colonialism is barely taught in schools any more, the pith helmet and long shorts are more associated in this contributors mind with the Fish Slapping Dance than the British Empire.
- This troper had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney until Michael Palin's police officer turned into him after raiding the Tudor Job Agency.
- But here's the question: when Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (fourth movement) plays, do you think of A Clockwork Orange or Neon Genesis Evangelion?
- "A Clockwork Orange", duh. But there are certainly people out there who recognise the one-eyelashed aristopunk look and what it's trying to invoke, let alone the Ludovico Technique itself, who have never read the book or seen the film. Thanks a lot, Panic! At the Disco...
- Evangelion was This Troper's introduction to classical and baroque music, So Yeah. Poor Shinji and his Bach. Unfortunately, I also still hear screaming in the background of the Hallelujah Chorus.
- Speaking of Evangelion, how about Fly Me To The Moon?
- I'll Take A Third Option and answer Civilization.
- Er...Die Hard?
- I thought that was the Starz theme song?
- As famous as the 1932 classic Freaks is, many more people are familiar with the parodies and allusions to its "One of us! One of us!" scene out of context.
- A large proportion of British people hearing In The Hall Of The Mountain King would be surprised to find out that it wasn't, in fact, written as the Alton Towers theme song.
- Or the theme to the syndicated Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog cartoon.
- Or scene music from a certain Astroboy ep
- Worse yet, one dance remix of "In The Hall of the Mountain King" has been mis-credited on file-sharing services as a remix of the Inspector Gadget theme, despite there being only a very vague similarity between the two songs.
- Due to his habit of pastiching rather obscure movies, Quentin Tarantino is perhaps responsible for more Popcultural Osmosis than any other mainstream filmmaker.
- This troper gives Tarantino his due for keeping the legacy of Sonny Chiba's insane bad-assery alive into the modern era.
- Speaking of Chiba, anyone who's seen the 1976 classic Karate Wariors knows that people had been merging slow motion captures seamlessly into jump cuts decades before 300 came around.
- This troper remembers reading an article in Time Magazine about how the "Shrek" film franchise is full of old-culture references (Puss in Boots, for example) that many children today (and, indeed, many to come) don't know where they originated from.
- Averted (or maybe subverted) by Star Wars, since it is still widely known and widely seen (although perhaps this isn't surprising, since some have said that the history of the movies can essentially be split into two groups: "Before Star Wars" and "After Star Wars").
- Although Star Wars itself was openly based on many influences (Joseph Campbell, The Hidden Fortress, et al.), most people today don't recognize said influences.
- This troper was once listening to a Mozart CD. His three-year-old nephew recognized the music ... from Little Einsteins.
- Exposure to classical music and other culture is basically the franchise's point...So Yeah.
- Play the Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" to just about anyone in the world, including Russians, and they are almost certain to identify it as video game music. Specifically, the Tetris theme.
- Of course, Tetris is Russian, so that might be understandable.
- "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" Despite being quoted (albeit, incorrectly) and parodied in pop culture for decades, most people have no idea this line is a reference to the Humphrey Bogart film "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", often attributing its origins to "Blazing Saddles" instead. However, without the understanding that the line in the latter film is intended to be a parody of the former, the joke itself does not make sense. (The actual, original quote from the film goes, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!")
- The song "Anything Goes" actually does not come from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's an authentic show tune of the period (from a Cole Porter musical of the same name) and, by the way, normally sung in English.
- This troper is gobsmacked at how few people knew that song before Temple of Doom. (because he grew up with the music of the thirties through to the seventies. In the nineties.)
- Fallout 3 uses "Anything Goes" (and many others) to establish it's alternate history post apocalyptic setting.
- Likewise, "Puttin' on the Ritz" did not originate from Young Frankenstein. Similarly, its close musical cousin, concerning the naming history of Istanbul, was not originally by They Might Be Giants.
- For that matter, "Puttin' on the Ritz" was not originally performed by Taco.
- Recently, this troper's supposedly learned friend referred to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" as "that song from Iron Man" despite knowing who Black Sabbath is.
- Perhaps she thought you didn't know who Black Sabbath were.
- Whereas this troper first heard it from marching bands at (American) football games.
- Many people know the "Love Theme" from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture only from its use in innumerable TV shows (South Park, The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air) and movies (Wayne's World, Clueless) to show that someone has fallen in Love At First Sight.
- Thanks to The Ladykillers, this troper cannot hear Boccherini's minuet without laughing.
- ''A Night at the Opera'' has ruined Il trovatore for many people. Just try to hear the Anvil Chorus without thinking of Chico and Harpo after you've seen it...
- Just try listening to "Hoedown" from Aaron Copland's Rodeo without thinking "Beef: It's What's For Dinner."
- How about Emerson, Lake and Palmer's version?
- It was also used over the credits on a Simpsons episode. Not that this troper had never heard it before, he just had a minor realisation that "hey that's a really good tune!"
- This Gilbertand Sullivan aficionado has sworn on sacred relics that he will gleefully torture and brutally decapitate the next person who attends a performance of The Pirates of Penzance and shouts "Hey! It's Tom Lehrer's Element Song!".
- Playing NASCAR and Indycar videogames meant that when this British troper first went to the US-of-A he recognised many of the brands that don't exist much in Europe. (Things like Lowe's, Allstate, Target stores etc.) He'd like to think there's Americans out there who know Halfords or Vodafone for a similar reason.
- This troper has learned a significant amount about DnD simply from reading Webcomics, especially The Order Of The Stick. World Of Warcraft, too.
- That's funny; I learned some of the subtleties of the Unix shell by reading through the jokes directories of some Gopher servers.
- This might be happening to Batman, if You Tube comments are to be believed.
- For a long time, this troper was unaware that "A Beautiful Morning", which was used for years on daytime TV as a jingle for some paper towel or fabric softener or tampon company, was a Young Rascals single in 1966. And The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" still, to an extent, reminds me of Sunkist orange soda.
- Many people are unaware that the "Game over man!" line referenced in Left 4 Dead was actually originally from Aliens.
- The lines from the hooker in Full Metal Jacket have been incorrectly credited to both Family Guy and South Park.
- Not to mention 2 Live Crew.
- The term graphic novel, which originated as a way to get compiled comic books onto the bookshelves of big-name bookstores, has grown into being separate from "mere" comic books. This troper was once "corrected" after referring to Watchmen as a comic book. The self-important eavesdropper took it upon herself to tell me that Watchmen is not a comic book, it's a graphic novel. Despite the fact that Watchmen was published as a 12-issue series in 1986/87.
- The Ma Na Mana song, does not originate from The Muppet Show, or even Sesame Street, but rather a Swedish softcore porn film.
- That just makes it even MORE awesome
- I think it's actually an Italian soft core porn film set in Sweden. The concept is that it's a Swedish sex education film, but it's really just Italian porn.
- Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain has unfortunately become known as either the theme music for a comic nemesis, or that scene in Fantasia that scarred generations of children
- Countin' the Beat by the Swingers is known to a generation of Australians as the Kmart theme song.
- This troper cannot listen to Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin without immediately thinking of United Airlines.
- Is that the song that makes it sound like the plane just ran out of fuel and is slowly losing altitude? Strange choice, that.
- Many talk shows cause this, from Rush Limbaugh with "My City Was Gone" by The Pretenders, to Rachel Maddow with "Stealing the Stock" from the Ocean's Twelve soundtrack.
- The song called "The Merry Go Round Broke Down" created by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin is better remembered as the music for the Looney Tunes theme song, Daffy Duck sings a more complete version of the song with different lyrics in "Daffy and Egghead".
- The new Star Trek movie has instantly recognizable characters, themes and objects - even for those who have never seen a Star Trek episode in their life.
- Despite having watched next to zero 60s Star Trek, this troper was able to recognise Hodges' fantasy sequences from the CSI episode "A Space Oddity" and indeed the Astro Quest Show Within A Show, as parodies of it.
- Astro Quest also references Battlestar Galactica (especially with regard to the Darker And Edgier update). Several Battlestar cast members appear either as guest stars or cameos, as does producer Ron Moore.
- The title "A Space Oddity" has nothing whatsoever to do with Star Trek. It's a reference to the famous song Space Oddity (alternatively known as Major Tom) by David Bowie, which was first released as a single on July 11th, 1969 to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing (on July 20th) and became Bowie's break-through hit. The song's title itself is Bowie's homage to Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey which came out in 1968 (The movie being an adaption of Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel, published in 1948.) So, the CSI scriptwriters were either a) trying to cram as many Science Fiction references into the episode as possible, or b) morons whose vague knowledge of Science Fiction was derived solely from Popcultural Osmosis.
- Donald Duck (& Co.). The Disneyverse is simply filled with retold classics, movie and music references and the like, providing lots of kids their first contact with greek myths, Shakespeare's plays, classical history, etc.
- Everyones heard of "Smoke on the Water", but a lot fewer people know Deep Purple. Similarly, find anyone who would recognise any part of the song other than the famous intro. It'll be a lot harder.
|
|
