The Bermuda Triangle in popular culture
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The legend of the Bermuda Triangle has had an active life in cinema, television, literature, popular music, and elsewhere in the arts. A few samples follow.
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[edit] Cinema
- The first documentary about the Triangle was The Devil's Triangle (1975), based on the book by Richard Winer, narrated by Vincent Price, and released to a modest number of theaters. It also offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone solving it.
- In the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind an alien spaceship returns the crew members of Flight 19, along with many other missing humans, to Earth at Devil's Tower, Wyoming. The Avenger aircraft themselves are returned earlier, in the middle of the night to the Sonora Desert in pristine working condition, and a ship, the SS Cotopaxi, is also returned to the Gobi Desert.
- In the 2006 film "Scooby Doo! Pirates Ahoy!" Scooby-Doo and the gang sail to the Bermuda Triangle, taken hostage by a crew of ghost pirates seeking the "Heaven's Light."
- There is a 1990 film The Dark Side Of The Moon
- In the 1991 film The Addams Family, Abigail Craven tries to pass off her son Gordon as the long-lost Uncle Fester, explaining his long absence with an onset of amnesia after a vacation in the Bermuda Triangle.
- There is a 1978 film entitled The Bermuda Triangle.
- The 2001 film Lost Voyage is about a ship which was lost in Bermuda Triangle and returns after 30 years.
[edit] Television
- The episode "Bad Water" of seaQuest DSV deals with four crewmembers trapped on the surface of the water in a lifeboat within the Bermuda Triangle as a hurricane passes over them.
- An episode of Disney's DuckTales, "Bermuda Triangle Tangle", left Scrooge a prisoner in the mysterious Sargasso Sea after a search for his missing ships.
- One episode of Quantum Leap featured Sam as a pilot flying through the triangle. Mysterious ghost ships and odd transmissions from planes that went missing 20 years ago are featured.
- One episode of Rocko's Modern Life featured the main characters going on a cruise which ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. Chaos ensues as the young become old, old become young, and a strange alien-like aircraft appears.
- A season 6 The X-Files episode, aptly named "Triangle", featured a Bermuda Triangle storyline about a 1939 luxury liner that appeared in the present day.
- On December 5, 2005, the Sci Fi Channel began broadcasting its three-part series called The Triangle. This series features a theory on electromagnetic disruptions and space-time holes. This series was then shown in the UK on BBC1 over May 27-May 29, 2006.
- In an episode of Nickelodeon's The Fairly OddParents, Timmy's most dangerous wishes are transported to an island in the Bermuda Triangle. Jorgan Von Strangle gives the reasoning that it is so dangerous, nobody would be crazy enough to go there.
- In a 1978 episode of Scooby-Doo titled "A Creepy Tangle in the Bermuda Triangle", the gang enters the Triangle on a ship helmed by an evil captain and becomes involved in many mysterious incidents.
- In the 1977 television series The Fantastic Journey, the main characters traveled through different places and times trying to escape the Bermuda Triangle.
- The 1976 television series Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter, featured the title character residing on an island within the Bermuda Triangle known as Paradise Island. In addition, a season two episode is entitled "The Bermuda Triangle Crisis."
- In a 2006 episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius titled "The Evil Beneath", Jimmy and his friends travel to a region called the Bahama Quadrangle (Bermuda Triangle parody).
- In an episode of the 1987 animated series The Real Ghostbusters titled "Venkman's Ghost Repellers", the Ghostbusters become trapped in a region akin to the Bermuda Triangle off the coast of New York - the New Jersey Parallelogram.
- In the pilot episode for the 2006 cancelled TV show Mercy Reef (aka Aquaman), the basis of a sub-plot focuses on Admiral Brigman conducting an investigation concerning the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. It is also was supposively cloaks Atlantis from the rest of the world.
- In a Season 2 episode of Ben 10 known as "They Lurk Below", the Bermuda Triangle disappearances are exaggerated, as the episode features extraterrestrial lifeforms there.
- In the 3-episode series The Triangle (miniseries), four scientists/researchers are paid 5 Million USD by a shipping company owner to solve the disappearance of one of his ships and its crew. They encounter strange occurrences and are briefly detained by the government, ultimately solving the mystery of The (Bermuda) Triangle.
- Satan's Triangle, an eerie, made-for-television film, was first broadcast on ABC in 1975, starring Doug McClure as a coast guard officer forced to spend the night on a derelict yacht during a rescue in bad weather. The film briefly mentions a few of the incidents, such as Flight 19 and the loss of the Great Issac lighthouse keepers. [1]
[edit] Literature
- While the triangle isn't mentioned by name, William Shakespeare's The Tempest is about fantastical events related to a shipwreck in Bermuda.
- In Stephen King's novel Wizard and Glass, Roland's Ka-tet comes upon a "thinny" to which Eddie relates to the Bermuda Triangle.
- Jaws author Peter Benchley wrote a novel called The Island in which a journalist investigates the Triangle and discovers the disappearances are the work of pirates — specifically the descendants of buccaneers who live isolated from civilization and raid shipping to survive. In 1980, the book was made into a film directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Michael Caine.
- The narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Diary often refers to any item which has disappeared as having been "Bermuda triangulated".
- The British playwright Snoo Wilson won the John Whiting Award in 1978 for his dramatic fantasy The Glad Hand in which a South African millionaire hires actors to perform scenes from the history of the American West in an oil tanker while it sails through the Bermuda Triangle, in the hopes of summoning up the Anti-Christ for a shoot-out.
- Author Clive Cussler is an avid investigator of bizarre disappearances, and wrote a fictional novel entitled Cyclops, in which the disappearance of the ship USS Cyclops (AC-4) played a prominent role.
- A novelization of Dean Devlin's The Triangle, which is based around the Bermuda Triangle mystery.
- Bob Mayer's (wrighting as Greg Donegan) Atlantis series involved the Bermuda Triangle heavily, especially the second in the series: Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle.
- Author, Edwin Corley's 1977 novel, Sargasso, has the crew of Apollo 19, a fictitious second Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission vanish from their spacecraft when they land in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
[edit] Comics
- DC Comics' Paradise Island city-state, controlled by Amazons and the home of Wonder Woman, is located in the Bermuda Triangle.
- The Marvel Comics series Skull the Slayer was set in a world inhabited by people who had been swallowed by the Triangle, which was actually a trap created by aliens.
- A one-off edition of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, "Follow That TARDIS!" (featuring the Sleeze Brothers), saw the Meddling Monk's badly-damaged TARDIS explode after landing in Bermuda, creating a time-space distortion resulting in the disappearance of Flight 19.
- Starlord, a British comic book, ran a story called "Planet of the Damned", which portrays the triangle as a vortex in space and time leading to a hostile planet where survivors struggle against the alien environment. The story relies on a number of documented disappearances for its background. The story began 13 May 1978.
[edit] Music
- in 1980, American New Wave band Talking Heads were not content with just recording their album Remain in Light in Nassau (in the Triangle), they also put a picture on the back cover of four TBM Avengers - the type of plane that comprised Flight 19.
- 70s and 80s New Wave rock group Blondie's album Plastic Letters features the song "Flight 45 (Bermuda Triangle Blues)" about the mysterious disappearance of an aircraft which was "leaving for some fun in the hot tropic sun, back next Monday."
- Barry Manilow sang a UK no. 15 hit in 1981 titled "Bermuda Triangle".
- Fleetwood Mac had a song called "The Bermuda Triangle" on their 1974 album Heroes are Hard to Find.
- Buckethead released an album named Bermuda Triangle in 2002.
- Japanese electronic music artist Isao Tomita in 1979 released an album titled "Bermuda Triangle".
- Hard rock band Vengeance released an album named Back From Flight 19 in 1997.
[edit] Games
- Milton Bradley released a board game named Bermuda Triangle in 1975.
- In the first level of the game Splashdown: Rides Gone Wild, Bermuda Blast, the racers are sucked into the Triangle at the beginning of the race.
- There is a Bermuda Triangle level that you can play in the game Jet Ski Pro.
- In the Rifts role-playing game, Atlantis was located at the present-day location of the Bermuda triangle before they disappeared in a dimensional shift the Atlanteans created. Atlantis has returned with extra-dimensional creatures in charge. Extra-dimensional creatures would be indistinguishable from aliens to most.
- In the video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2, there is a level of the Bermuda Triangle which includes aliens, flying saucers, wrecked ships and planes, and other elements of the supernatural.
- The triangle is featured as the final level in the video game Impossamole by Core Design.
[edit] Other references
- A region of the city of Vienna, Austria stretching between Schwedenplatz, the Hohermarkt and Morzinplatz is nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle (Bermuda Dreieck) originally as a local joke on account of its steep, winding, small alleys and numerous bars where visitors could be lost for days.
- American illusionist David Copperfield's tenth television special was titled "The Bermuda Triangle." In it, the magician performs a visual trick by supposedly entering the "dark dimension" of the Bermuda Triangle at one spot and coming out, seconds later, at another spot hundreds of feet away.
- The Bermuda Trinagle is a popular Sea World or SeaWorld ride in which aliens are used as an explanation for the strange events.
