In Popular Culture
The Ride of The Valkyries is frequently used in filmmaking and television productions. In the earliest days of Hollywood, the original score for D. W. Griffith's controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915), compiled by Joseph Carl Breil and Griffith, used the music in the climactic scene of the third act, when "The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright" against liberated former black slaves after the end of the American Civil War. The beleaguered white group is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan to the sound of the music.
More recent examples include its usage in Chuck Jones's 1957 animated short What's Opera, Doc? and the 1979 Academy Award winning war film Apocalypse Now, where the 1/9 Air Cavalry regiment plays the piece of music on helicopter-mounted loudspeakers during their assault on a Vietnamese village.
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