Popular Culture
Large billboards in space have been featured in several science fiction books, films and television series, most notably the animated series Futurama. They are usually shown as satire of commercialisation.
In Fredric Brown's 1945 short story, "Pi in the Sky," an inventor rearranges the apparent positions of the stars to form an advertising slogan.
In Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 novella The Man Who Sold the Moon the protagonist raises funds for his lunar ambitions by publicly describing means of covering the visible lunar face in advertising and propaganda, and then taking money not to do so.
In Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story Buy Jupiter, a group of extraterrestrials broker a deal with the governments of Earth to purchase the right to replace the planet Jupiter with a device in the size and shape of the planet that would generate advertisements to the starships from their worlds that passed by the planet.
A Red Dwarf novel features an advertising campaign whereby a ship is sent on a mission by The Coca-Cola Company to cause 128 stars to go supernova in order to visibly spell the words "Coke Adds Life!" across the sky on earth. The message is intended to last five weeks, and be visible even in daylight.
In an episode of Carmen Sandiego's television show, she plans to launch rockets to transform the moon's face into the show's logo.
Read more about this topic: Space Advertising
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)