In Popular Culture
- Bruce Springsteen refers to the song in his song, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy). In the first verse, he sings, "As the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark."
- The track is featured on the video games Rock Band 2, Rock Band Unplugged and Karaoke Revolution: American Idol Encore 2, as well as on The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard.
- The videogame Peggle Nights also features this song as a parody.
- Spinball Whizzer (name based on Pinball Wizard) is located at Alton Towers Resort and plays 60s pop music in the queue.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sweet and Sour Squidward", the song is parodied by Plankton and Squidward.
- The song is a part of the soundtrack for a pinball machine, The Party Zone
- A pinball machine of the same name and based on the Broadway musical of Townshend's rock opera was produced by Data East in the 1990s. It plays every song from the album during gameplay, performed by the original musical cast.
Read more about this topic: Pinball Wizard
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“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)