Popular Culture
The Avro Lancaster featured prominently in the 1955 film The Dam Busters, and a number of B VII Lancasters in storage were modified to the original configuration of the B III (Special) for use on screen. The Lancaster also plays a central role in Bomber, the 1970 novel by Len Deighton about a night raid on a fictional German town by a formation of RAF bombers. It also featured in a 1989 British commercial for Carling Black Label lager which reused footage in a Dam Busters parody sequence in which a German soldier on top of a dam was catching the bombs in the manner of a football goalkeeper. The pilot of the attacking Lancaster then delivers the brand slogan: "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label!" The commercial ran for many years, frequently appearing in commercial breaks during broadcasts of both the The Dam Busters and of documentaries about Operation Chastise. The Avro Lancaster was also featured in the UK TV series Pathfinders, airing in 1972 and released on DVD in 2006, concentrating on the lives of the aircrew of a fictional Pathfinder squadron during the Second World War. Other films in which the Lancaster appeared include Appointment in London (1952) and The Guns of Navarone (1961).
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Just try to prove you’re not a camel!”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)