Dude - "Dude" in Popular Culture

"Dude" in Popular Culture

• 1883 – Political cartoon of Chester A. Arthur pictures the refined, well-dressed President, with the caption, "According to your cloth you've cut your coat, O Dude of all the White House residents; We trust that will help you with the vote, When next we go nominating Presidents."
• 1889 – Andy a dude and a chorus of dudes in the opera Leo, the Royal Cadet by Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann sing We are the Dudes: "We are the dudes you read about in all the papers Social Etudes, we captivate all hearts by our capers, Bai Gawge! Once every week the Bank pays each and all of us two dollars; But, by cold cheek we sport the latest thing in coats and collars, Bai Gawge! Weep ye, en masse! We're suffering most excruciating pain; For ah! alas! The Prince of Wales has ceased to carry a cane, Bai Gawge! Till we learn whether His Highness orders that the cane shall go; Each with a feather we promenade the city streets just so, Bai Gawge!"
• 1889 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain comments on how commoners in Medieval Britain worshiped nobility and title without question, for the sake only of a meaningless title: "...and the best of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too – I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared – at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system."
• 1959 – Howard Hawks's film Rio Bravo has Dean Martin as "Dude," the drunk deputy to John Wayne.
• 1969 - In the film Easy Rider, Billy (Dennis Hopper) speculates that George (Jack Nicholson) "must be some important dude". When George asks what the word "dude" means, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) tells him "dude means, uh, nice guy, dude means regular sort of person".
• 1972 – Mott the Hoople releases their hit album, All the Young Dudes, named after the title cut, which was written for the band by David Bowie.
• 1973 – The premiere of Dude, a musical by Galt MacDermot.
• 1974 – Steely Dan releases their album Pretzel Logic, which features the song "Any Major Dude Will Tell You"
• 1981 – Quincy Jones releases his album The Dude
• 1985 – Less Than Zero (a novel by Bret Easton Ellis) includes the first published usage of the now-common phrase, "No way, dude!", and the first mainstream display of "dude" having crossed the gender barrier. In a noteworthy scene, a young woman tells her mother, "No way, dude."
• 1987 – Aerosmith release a song called "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)"
• 1989 – Hey Dude premiers on Nickelodeon; it will go on to run for three years. The cast of this teenage sitcom set on a dude ranch included Christine Taylor.
• 1989 – Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, in the future, the world's slogan is "Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!"
• 1990 – In Back to the Future Part III, set in 1885, Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen frequently calls Marty McFly "Dude" as it is apparent from his attire and demeanor he is not a frontiersman.
• 1991 - Scatterbrain release a song called "Don't Call Me Dude", which became a Top 20 pop single in Australia.
• 1996 – Britpop band Kula Shaker title the first track of their album K "Hey, Dude".
• 1997 – Less than Jake's song "We're all Dudes" from the soundtrack to the movie Good Burger.
• 1997 – Blink-182 release an album called Dude Ranch.
• 1998 – BASEketball, featuring Trey Parker and Matt Stone as two young men who, at one point in the film, have an argument composed entirely of the word "dude," with their inflections conveying the meaning of each instance of the word.
• 1998 – The Big Lebowski, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen features Jeff Bridges as "The Dude" ("or His Dudeness, or Duder, or, you know, El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing"), an aging hippie/beach bum, who turns 'dude' into a philosophy. The film's narrator, an old-fashioned cowboy played by Sam Elliott, insinuates that he considers the term 'dude' in its traditional sense, meaning a pretentious city-slicker type, rather than in its more contemporary sense.
• 2000 – Dude, Where's My Car?, a comedy film directed by Danny Leiner, starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott.
• 2001 – "Dude, you're getting a Dell!", an advertising campaign by Dell Computer Corporation, starring Ben Curtis as "Steven the Dell Dude."
• 2003 - Dude, Where's My Country?, a book by Michael Moore dealing with corporate and political events in the United States.
• 2003 - The green sea turtle characters Crush (father) and Squirt (son) in the movie Finding Nemo habitually speak in California English, using the "dude" term repeatedly in their dialog.
• 2008 – Bud Light airs an advertising campaign in which the dialogue consists entirely of different inflections of "Dude!" and does not mention the product by name. It was a followup to their near-identical and more widely noted 1999–2002 "Whassup?" campaign.