In Popular Culture
The 1989 film Dead Poets Society also makes repeated references to the poem, especially when English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students that they may call him "O Captain! My Captain!" if they feel daring. At the end of the film, the students show their support to the recently-dismissed Keating in defiance against the school's headmaster, by calling the phrase in the classroom.
In the 1996 science fiction novel The Truth Machine, the protagonist places a back door in the book's otherwise infallible lie detector that allows him to avoid detection when he repeats fragments of the poem in his mind.
In referencing a scene from Dead Poets Society, the phrase was used in A Nutcracker in Paradise episode of television comedy-drama Bunheads. It has also been used in such shows as Archer, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, Family Guy, South Park, the BBC show Bad Education, and the video game Mass Effect.
Read more about this topic: O Captain! My Captain!
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The popular colleges of the United States are turning out more educated people with less originality and fewer geniuses than any other country.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)