Popular Culture
The 1980s–1990s British cartoon series Danger Mouse featured the title character and his assistant living in a red pillar box in London. The sidekick's name was Penfold, supposedly an intentional reference, though the pillar box did not resemble the Penfold hexagonal style.
In 1999, McDonald's Restaurants issued a promotional toy featuring DC Thomson character Roger the Dodger hiding inside a red pillar box.
UK comic strip "Desperate Dan" about fictional characters in the US "wild west" showed Dan posting a letter in a pillar box. These were not used in the US.
In The Beatles' film Help!, a member of the cult tries to obtain the ring while hiding in a pillar box.
Two Walt Disney films set in London feature a very accurate wooden prop pillar box of the Penfold type. It can be seen in several scenes of Mary Poppins (1964) and in the Portobello Road Market scene of Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
A blind ransom drop is made into a London pillar box in the John Wayne crime action film, Brannigan. The extortionists have installed a hatch at the bottom of the pillar box, to permit them to access the pillar box from the sewer and switch the ransom with worthless newspaper for the police to follow.
British songwriting duo Flanders and Swann included a song Pillar to Post on their album, ''And Then We Wrote''.
Read more about this topic: Pillar Box
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)
“What’s wrong, a little pavement sickness?”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)