Popular Culture
- President John F. Kennedy, from Massachusetts, bought a pony for his little daughter Caroline while he was in the White House. The family named the pony "Macaroni", after the pony in Yankee Doodle.
- The Voice of America begins and ends all broadcasts with the interval signal of "Yankee Doodle."
- The song featured in a famous sequence in the 1942 James Cagney film, Yankee Doodle Dandy.
- The title of the song has also been parodied in the Looney Tunes Cartoon Yankee Doodle Daffy.
- At the conclusion of the 1981 Wimbledon Championships, in which American tennis star John McEnroe had defeated his long-time rival Björn Borg, TV commentator Bud Collins took note of the July 4th holiday and also McEnroe's red-white-and-blue attire, and quipped "Stick a feather in his cap and call him 'McEnroe-ni'!"
- The song featured in the 1963 film, The Great Escape. The scene also references the painting Spirit of '76 (Yankee Doodle) by Archibald Willard.
- The 1965 children's cartoon Roger Ramjet adopts Yankee Doodle as its theme song: "Roger Ramjet and his Eagles/Fighting for our freedom/Fly through in and outer space/Not to join 'em, but to beat 'em/Roger Ramjet, he's our man/Hero of our nation/For his adventures, just be sure/and stay tuned to this station". Ramjet's four child sidekicks, the "American Eagle Squadron", are named Yank, Doodle, Dan and Dee.
Read more about this topic: Yankee Doodle
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)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)