Popular Culture
The B-47 is featured prominently in the 1955 film Strategic Air Command starring James Stewart. The film features good aerial footage of both the B-47 and the Convair B-36. The majority of B-47 scenes were filmed at MacDill AFB, Florida utilizing aircraft from the 306th Bombardment Wing.
The movie On the Threshold of Space (1956) has footage of a B-47E being used as a test ship in the development of a downward-firing ejection seat, with Eglin Air Force Base identified as Sovran Air Force Base.
The 1957 film, Bombers B-52 features B-47s at Castle Air Force Base, that sported the proud legend, "Home of the B-47" and a fly-over in formation, before moving to focus on the new B-52.
In the 1957 science fiction film Kronos, a B-47 is dispatched to attack the monster Kronos with a hydrogen bomb.
There is a fact based movie starring John Payne in the development of the downward firing ejection seat. It is called, "Bailout at 43,000 feet" and is of some interest.
The 1 July 1960 shoot down of an RB-47H (AF Ser. No. 53-4281) by a MiG-19 over the Barents Sea was retold by the two surviving crewmembers: Captain John R. McKone (navigator) and Capt Freeman B. Olmstead (co-pilot), in the biographical book, The Little Toy Dog by William L. White. The title refers to a small plastic toy "Snoopy" that Capt McKone carried with him, and kept during their seven months in Lubyanka prison in the Soviet Union.
A one-hour episode of the TV series Kraft Suspense Theatre, "Streetcar, Do You Read Me?" (1965), starring Martin Milner, features extensive real footage, interior and exterior scenes, of the B-47E. The fictional story depicts a mission of the 307th Bomb Wing of the Strategic Air Command.
Read more about this topic: Boeing B-47 Stratojet
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—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)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)