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
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