In Popular Culture
Manx-type cars have appeared in several movies, including Elvis Presley films and the 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair, which contains a lengthy beach-driving scene where a heavily modified Meyers Manx equipped with a Chevrolet Corvair flat-six engine is launched over several dunes.
The Manx-style dune buggy was introduced to a younger generation in the late 1970s, in the form of Wonderbug", a segment of the first two seasons (1976–1978) of the American Sunday-morning children's television program The Krofft Supershow on the ABC network. The series of live-action episodic shorts centered on an sentient car named Schlepcar, made up of rusty old dune buggy and Jeep parts, who could magically transform into the superhero Wonderbug, a fancy, talking Manx-like dune buggy with movable dual front bumpers for a mouth and movable headlights for eyes. Ironically, the actual car used for Wonderbug was a Dune Runner knock-off, not a genuine Meyers Manx.
The Barbie doll accessory collection long featured a pink and white Manx-like dune buggy toy. Matchbox toy cars come in several Manx-inspired dune buggy models (e.g. the #47b Beach Hopper in 1974, up to the #59 Baja Bandit and its variants still released as recently as 2011).
Read more about this topic: Meyers Manx
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)