Suez Canal - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

• Suez, a film made in 1938, starred Tyrone Power as de Lesseps and Loretta Young as a love interest. An epic, it is very loosely based on history.
• The Suez Canal appears in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, where it marks the end of T. E. Lawrence's march across the Sinai Peninsula to report to his superiors in Cairo.
• The Suez Crisis is mentioned in the 1989 hit song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel.
• Michael Palin visited the Suez Canal in 1988 as part of his TV adventure series, Around the World in 80 Days.
• The Suez Canal is also a map in the game Battlefield 2142.
• The idea of the Suez Canal is mentioned in the Asterix comic book series, Asterix and Cleopatra by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. It was first published in serial form in Pilote magazine, issues 215–257, in 1963. On page 47, Asterix offers the future assistance of the Gaulish people should Egypt consider a passage linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. This offer is taken up 1,900 years later.
• In Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Nautilus travels through an underwater passage beneath the Suez Canal.
• On an episode of the TV series Glee, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) claims she was a sniper and an aid to the storming of the Suez Canal.
• Sailors that are aboard a U.S. Navy ship while it transits the full length of the Suez canal are deemed part of the "Safari to Suez" fraternity.