Oliver in Popular Culture
The decades long speculation about Oliver's origins and the possibility that he was a human-chimp hybrid have led to numerous references in popular culture. Many of these are satirical in nature or at least intended to be humorous. For example, the popular Church of the SubGenius assigns a feast day or holy day (sometimes several) to every day of the year and has seen fit to assign October 20 as The Feast of Saint Oliver the humanzee.
In addition, there are musical outfits appearing in North America referencing Oliver's legacy, such as The Humanzees from Ontario, as well as a New Mexico Jam band calling itself Oliver and The Humanzees. Pop culture depictions like these generally ignore or predate the more recent proof that Oliver is not a hybrid. Oliver has been regularly talked about by Karl Pilkington on The Ricky Gervais Show on a feature called "Monkey News".
The character Caesar in the 1972 film "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" is actually based on Oliver, according to the actor Andy Serkis who played the character in a 2010 remake.
Read more about this topic: Oliver (chimpanzee)
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, oliver, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be impossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don’t much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous—but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)