1984 Summer Olympics Boycott - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

In the season 4 episode, "Lisa's First Word", of the U.S. television show The Simpsons, Krusty Burger is featured in a promotion where the characters get free food if they receive a slip that features an event that was "won" by the United States. The promotion was rigged, as was said in the episode, where every game card was to be in an event that "Communists never lose." However, almost immediately after that is said, word of the boycott is spread and the rigging backfires. Krusty Burger loses so much money on the promotion that Krusty states publicly he will "personally spit in every 50th burger".

The Krusty Burger promotion paralleled a real-life McDonald's scratch-card promotion from the 1984 Olympics that also lost that company money. The promotion was called "If the US Wins, You Win!" and gave away Big Mac hamburger sandwiches for every gold medal, fries for every silver medal, and Coca-Cola beverages for every bronze.

Read more about this topic:  1984 Summer Olympics Boycott

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
    Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)

    There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.
    Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)

    As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)