Popular Culture Usage
The 1974 film Blazing Saddles included Madeline Kahn's German-accented Marlene Dietrich-style chanteuse character "Lili Von Shtupp" (according to the credits). She is announced on a poster outside the music hall as "Lili von Shtüpp"; the film's characters pronounce the name without any change to the vowel. The name itself is clearly intended as an allusion to Yiddish, which is used elsewhere throughout the movie, rather than German. In Yiddish, shtup, a cognate of the English verb "to stuff", is a vulgarism best translated into English as "to fuck".
In the mid-1980s, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed parodied the metal umlaut in the comic strip Bloom County with the fictional group Deathtöngue. Breathed eventually had Deathtöngue change their name to the umlaut-free Billy and the Boingers following pressure, in the strip, from congressional hearings on "porn rock".
In 1997, parody newspaper The Onion published an article called "Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts", about a congressional attempt to add umlauts to the name of the United States of America to make it seem "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy metal manner".
Journalist and author Steve Almond coined the term "spandex and umlaut circuit" in 2002 to describe the heavy metal touring scene. Rock critic Chuck Klosterman subtitled his 2001 book Fargo Rock City, A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta.
The Guitar Hero video games contain the character "Lars Ümlaüt". In the 2006 book "To Air Is Human", New York Times writer Dan Crane describes competing in the 2003 Air Guitar World Championships under the name Björn Türoque (a play on "Born to rock"). In October 2007, LucasArts alumnus Tim Schafer announced his newest project, the heavy metal adventure game Brütal Legend, which was released in 2009. Earlier in 2009, comedic sword and sorcery series Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire was released on Comedy Central.
Read more about this topic: Metal Umlaut
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