Offutt Air Force Base - Offutt in Popular Culture

Offutt in Popular Culture

Offutt was brought to popular attention during its SAC period when the command was depicted in the 1955 film Strategic Air Command starring Jimmy Stewart, the 1963 film A Gathering of Eagles starring Rock Hudson, and 1964's Fail-Safe starring Henry Fonda (which not only claimed to show portions of the base but also a nearby Omaha neighborhood) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb starring Peter Sellers (which depicts a nuclear first strike from a mad general at the fictional Burpelson Air Force Base). Offutt also appeared in the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (identified as 'the Omaha installation'), when a fighter pilot stationed there detects the approaching USS Enterprise and is transported aboard. The Dale Brown novel Plan of Attack saw nuclear missiles launched by Russian bombers attacking multiple bomber bases all over the U.S, including Offutt, which is destroyed by four Kh-15 (AS-17 Kickback) missiles. Only one E-4B NEACP escapes in time, and the officials of the Eighth Air Force and STRATCOM are eliminated in the process.

Read more about this topic:  Offutt Air Force Base

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
    Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)