References in Popular Culture
Satirical magazine Private Eye produced a book Thomas the Privatised Tank Engine, written in the style of The Railway Series. The stories were strongly critical of private railway companies and the Government of John Major, and covered subjects such as the Channel Tunnel, London Underground, transport of radioactive waste and the perceived dangerous state of the railways.
Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to produce a musical based on The Railway Series, but Awdry couldn't give Lloyd Webber the control he wanted. Lloyd Webber would go on to compose Starlight Express, and create The Really Useful Group, a name inspired by the catchphrase "Really Useful Engines".
Read more about this topic: The Railway Series
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)
“I am glad of this war. It kicks the pasteboard bottom in of the usual “good” popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)