Pop Cultural References
Immediately following the Exxon Valdez incident, Hazelwood was ridiculed by talk shows and late night television. For example, according to one of David Letterman's Top Ten lists one of his excuses was, "I was just trying to scrape some ice off the reef for my margarita." He was featured in syndicated comic strips like The Far Side strip, which showed him as a clumsy person who spilled in various stages of his life; as a baby (his cup), teenager (pen ink in his shirt pocket), and others. The six-picture single-panel strip ends with Hazelwood driving into a water tower.
The 1995 film Waterworld anointed Hazelwood the patron saint of the movie's villain "The Deacon", leader of the "Smokers", a band of scavenging raiders. They displayed his portrait prominently aboard their flagship, the Exxon Valdez. In 2001, the animated series Futurama satirized Hazelwood in the episode, "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz." The episode had Bender as the captain of an intergalactic oil tanker who was, in an absurd parallel, not drunk enough (because robots in Futurama require alcohol to function properly) and crashed the ship into a penguin sanctuary on Pluto, spilling the whole load of Dark-matter-oil.
The American Dad episode "You Debt Your Life" revealed that Roger the alien got Joseph Hazelwood drunk, which led to the oil spill happening.
In the Australian comedy television series Newstopia, Captain Hazelwood maintains that his BAC was not a big deal, and that at the time he was "sober enough to drive a car, in Mexico."
Read more about this topic: Joseph Hazelwood
Famous quotes containing the words pop and/or cultural:
“Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don’t pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that “nice girls don’t.” He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue—but only in a certain section of society.”
—Barbara Cartland (b. 1901)
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)