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)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)