In Media and Popular Culture
Caltech has appeared in several works of popular culture, both as itself and in disguised form. As with MIT, a Caltech reference is often used to establish a character's high level of intelligence or a technical background. For example, on television, the four male lead characters of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory are all employed at the Institute. Additionally, Hugh Jackmans' character from the movie Swordfish is a Caltech alum. Caltech is also the inspiration, and frequent film location, for the California Institute of Science of Numb3rs. On film, the Pacific Tech of The War of the Worlds and Real Genius is based on Caltech. In Blast From the Past the father (played by Christopher Walken) is a former Caltech professor. In Head of the Class, Arvid Engen follows in his father's footsteps and attends Caltech after graduating with honors from high school. In nonfiction, two 2007 documentaries examine aspects of Caltech; Curious, its researchers, and Quantum Hoops, its men's basketball team.
Given its Los Angeles-area location, the grounds of the Institute are often host to short scenes in movies and television. The Athenaeum dining club appears in the Beverly Hills Cop series, The X-Files, True Romance, and The West Wing. Other examples include Legally Blonde, The Wedding Planner, Greek, The O.C., Entourage and Mission Impossible. Caltech also appears in the motion picture Tron: Legacy, where the main character's father is an alumnus.
Read more about this topic: California Institute Of Technology
Famous quotes containing the words media, popular and/or culture:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Just try to prove you’re not a camel!”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)