Popular Culture
The long-running success of the strip made the character a pop culture icon referenced in fiction, pop music, dance and sports:
- An educated Neanderthal known as "Alley Oop" is a character in Clifford D. Simak's science fiction novel The Goblin Reservation (1968).
- "O. Paley" (a quasi-anagram of "Alley Oop") was the central figure in Philip José Farmer's The Alley Man, a 1959 novella about the last Neanderthal who has survived into the 20th century.
- The character was the subject of the 1960 #1 single "Alley Oop," which was the only hit for short-lived studio band The Hollywood Argyles. It was written in 1957 by Dallas Frazier, and musicians on the record included Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. Lead vocalist Norm Davis, who was paid a one-time flat fee of $25, is currently a poet and poetry teacher in Rochester, New York. The song was later covered by Dante & the Evergreens and George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and it was included in choreographer Twyla Tharp's 1970s ballet Deuce Coupe.
Read more about this topic: Alley Oop
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)