The Mayor in Popular Culture
The New York City mayoralty has played a central role in several films and television series. Spin City (1996–2002), set in City Hall, it cast Barry Bostwick as the dim-witted mayor, but starred Michael J. Fox as a deputy mayor, whose primary task was to keep the mayor from embarrassing himself in front of the media and voters. City Hall (1996) starred Al Pacino as an idealistic mayor and John Cusack as his deputy mayor, who leads an investigation with unexpectedly far-reaching consequences into the accidental shooting of a boy in New York. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) features Lee Wallace as an indecisive, flu-struck mayor who is bullied by his deputy and booed by the citizenry. The comic-book series Ex Machina posits an alternate history in which the 2001 election is won by the independent Mitchell Hundred, a former superhero called the Great Machine, who sweeps to victory after saving the second tower of the World Trade Center on September 11. A fictional mayor is also featured in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series.
Local tabloid newspapers often refer to the mayor as "Hizzoner", a corruption of the title "His Honor". Several mayors have appeared in television and movies, as well as on Broadway—most notably in The Will Rogers Follies. In the 1980s and 90s, Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani had appeared on Saturday Night Live on several occasions, sometimes mocking themselves in sketches. Giuliani and Bloomberg have both appeared, as themselves in their mayoral capacities, on episodes of Law & Order. Giuliani has made cameos in films such as The Out-of-Towners and Anger Management. Bloomberg has appeared on 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Read more about this topic: Mayor Of New York City
Famous quotes containing the words mayor, popular and/or culture:
“If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)
“There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)