Cultural Impact
The phrase "Roy of the Rovers" has become a trope familiar to generations of British football fans and sports commentators, used to describe a memorable sporting achievement such as winning against the odds, or an unexpected comeback. The Guardian newspaper of 10 April 1995, for instance, described future England captain Alan Shearer as "the classic working class sporting hero ... everything legend demands an English centre-forward should be ... As a striker he comes closer to fitting the Roy of the Rovers fantasy than anyone else lately admired by English crowds". Shearer was at that time the leading goal-scorer for "unfashionable" Blackburn Rovers F.C., who were on the verge of winning the Premiership title.
Comparisons have been drawn between the fictional Roy Race and the captain of England's 1966 World Cup winning team, Bobby Moore, whose playing career spanned a similar time-scale to that of Roy's. Moore's death in 1993, just days after the last edition of the Roy of the Rovers comic was published, produced a "literature of tribute", framed around themes "remarkably similar to those at the center of the Roy Race fiction and ideology ... there was a clear sense of mourning for the loss of an age".
Reading Roy of the Rovers and reflecting on the response to the death of sporting heroes such as Bobby Moore, demonstrates how children's popular cultural experiences, and the recollections of them in later life, traverse the boundaries of, and fuse, the fictional and the real ... The world of representation in the comic strip is mobilized as an everyday trope, tapping into modes of thinking within the reality of football discourse; and in turn, football discourse draws upon the narratives, conventions, and myths of football fictions.Read more about this topic: Roy Of The Rovers
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)