In Popular Culture
In the Nintendo/GameFreak video game franchise "Pokémon", there are three creatures in the same evolutionary chain named Abra, Kadabra, and Alakazam (the third of which is also an alleged magic word used by stage magicians).
The incantation "Avada Kedavra" is known as the Killing Curse in the "Harry Potter" novel series. During an audience interview at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 15 April 2004, series author J. K. Rowling had this to say about the fictional Killing Curse's etymology: "Does anyone know where avada kedavra came from? It is an ancient spell in Aramaic, and it is the original of abracadabra, which means 'let the thing be destroyed.' Originally, it was used to cure illness and the 'thing' was the illness, but I decided to make it the 'thing' as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine."
Abra Kadabra is the name of a DC Comics villain, who originally uses futuristic technology to create effects that appear magic to present-day people, and later gains actual magic powers.
In Sergio Aragonés' Groo comic series, two witches who are sometimes allies or enemies of Groo are named Arba and Dakarba.
Mr. Kadabra is a member of the 13th floor witches, in Vertigo's Fables series.
Read more about this topic: Abracadabra
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)