Popular Culture
In the 1980s, the US Department of Transportation launched a series of public service announcements in magazines and on television featuring the antics of two talking crash dummies named Vince and Larry who modeled seat belt safety practices through their slapstick antics. The campaign, with its slogan "You can Learn a Lot from a Dummy," was very popular, and since then crash dummy characters remain a common sight in seat belt safety campaigns, especially those aimed at children.
In the early 1990s, Tyco Toys created a line of action figures called The Incredible Crash Dummies based on the characters from the ads. The colorful toys were intended to fall apart at the touch of a button on their stomachs and could easily be re-assembled. Vehicles could also be bought, which could similarly be crashed into walls and broken, and easily put back together. The popularity of the toys prompted a one-hour television special, The Adventures of the Incredible Crash Dummies. Unique for its time, the cartoon was produced entirely using 3D computer animation techniques. A comic book series was also produced as well as a video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.
In 2004, a series of "Crash Dummies" animated shorts were commissioned for the FOX network, thus spawning another series of toys from Mattel through the Hot Wheels brand.
The television series MythBusters employs a crash test dummy, "Buster", for experiments that are too risky for the human hosts to try. In Discovery kids' children's educational series Crash Test Danny the title character is a living breathing crash test dummy played by Ben Langley who gets crushed, exploded and pulled apart all in the name of science.
Read more about this topic: Crash Test Dummy
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)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.”
—Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)