O Captain! My Captain! - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The 1989 film Dead Poets Society also makes repeated references to the poem, especially when English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students that they may call him "O Captain! My Captain!" if they feel daring. At the end of the film, the students show their support to the recently-dismissed Keating in defiance against the school's headmaster, by calling the phrase in the classroom.

In the 1996 science fiction novel The Truth Machine, the protagonist places a back door in the book's otherwise infallible lie detector that allows him to avoid detection when he repeats fragments of the poem in his mind.

In referencing a scene from Dead Poets Society, the phrase was used in A Nutcracker in Paradise episode of television comedy-drama Bunheads. It has also been used in such shows as Archer, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, Family Guy, South Park, the BBC show Bad Education, and the video game Mass Effect.

Read more about this topic:  O Captain! My Captain!

Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:

    It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.
    Marie Winn (20th century)

    To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind’s wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.
    Judith Malina (b. 1926)