In Popular Culture
The American TV show Gilligan's Island had an episode where an explorer came to the island seeking a rare "pussycat swallowtail."
Swallowtails have appeared in various forms of Japanese entertainment, such as tokusatsu, manga and anime. In the 1996 Season of the popular Japanese tokusatsu Metal Hero Series B-Fighter Kabuto and the 1997 American show Beetleborgs Metallix, one of the B-fighters/Astral Borgs motifs was a swallowtail hence her Japanese designated name "B-Fighter Ageha". In the manga and anime Bleach, Shinigami use Hell Butterflies to send messages and travel between Soul Society and the Living World (Earth); the same butterflies also guide souls during soul burials. These swallowtails are entirely black except for a few red markings on the wings, making them resemble Papilio protenor. The butterfly-based entity Beautifly from the Pokémon anime series is pictured as a swallowtail. Swallowtail butterflies also appear in the manga xxxHolic. The antagonist Koushaku Chono (Papillon) in the manga/anime Busou Renkin features swallowtail-like imagery.
The band Rudolf Steiner, later known as Schwarz Stein, recorded a song entitled 黒揚羽 (lit. Black Swallowtail) on an early demotape. It is a track on the 2006 collaboration album Another Cell. The band Elvenking recorded a song titled "Swallowtail", which was released on their 2006 album, The Winter Wake. Paramore's 2009 release "Brand New Eyes" features a dissected swallowtail butterfly on its cover.
In the Japanese video game Bayonetta the main character Bayonetta is a witch who is in a pact with a demoness who takes on a Swallowtail form
Read more about this topic: Swallowtail Butterfly
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“O, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)