In Media and Popular Culture
Caltech has appeared in several works of popular culture, both as itself and in disguised form. As with MIT, a Caltech reference is often used to establish a character's high level of intelligence or a technical background. For example, on television, the four male lead characters of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory are all employed at the Institute. Additionally, Hugh Jackmans' character from the movie Swordfish is a Caltech alum. Caltech is also the inspiration, and frequent film location, for the California Institute of Science of Numb3rs. On film, the Pacific Tech of The War of the Worlds and Real Genius is based on Caltech. In Blast From the Past the father (played by Christopher Walken) is a former Caltech professor. In Head of the Class, Arvid Engen follows in his father's footsteps and attends Caltech after graduating with honors from high school. In nonfiction, two 2007 documentaries examine aspects of Caltech; Curious, its researchers, and Quantum Hoops, its men's basketball team.
Given its Los Angeles-area location, the grounds of the Institute are often host to short scenes in movies and television. The Athenaeum dining club appears in the Beverly Hills Cop series, The X-Files, True Romance, and The West Wing. Other examples include Legally Blonde, The Wedding Planner, Greek, The O.C., Entourage and Mission Impossible. Caltech also appears in the motion picture Tron: Legacy, where the main character's father is an alumnus.
Read more about this topic: California Institute Of Technology
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, media, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
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“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)