RMS Titanic in popular culture

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The Titanic Museum in Branson, Missouri was built in the wave of interest after the 1997 film.
The Titanic Museum in Branson, Missouri was built in the wave of interest after the 1997 film.

RMS Titanic was a passenger liner that became infamous for its collision with an iceberg and dramatic sinking in 1912. It has been featured or referenced in many works.

Contents

[edit] Literature

First edition cover
First edition cover

The Titanic sinking has become the best-known seafaring disaster and therefore an archetype for a disaster involving multiple casualties, which might not necessarily involve ships. The metaphor "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic", meaning making trivial changes when a fundamental change of course is needed, has come into common usage. Another, though less well known metaphor concerning the disaster is "To win tickets for the Titanic", meaning an event that at first seems to be fortuitous, but which turns out to have dire consequences. Tickets for the Titanic was used as the title of a 1987 British TV show, whose theme tune was all about the sinking, but with little to do with the actual disaster.

The sinking of Titanic has been the basis for many years and novels describing fictionalised events on board the ship. Many reference books about the disaster have also been written since Titanic sank, the first of these appearing within months of the sinking. Survivors like Second Officer Charles Lightoller and passenger Jack Thayer have written books describing their experiences. Some like Walter Lord, who wrote the popular A Night to Remember, did independent research and interviews to describe the events that happened on board the ship.

Morgan Robertson's 1898 novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, which was written 14 years before RMS Titanic's ill-fated voyage, was found to have many parallels with the Titanic disaster; Robertson's work concerned a fictional state-of-the-art ocean liner called Titan, which eventually collides with an iceberg on a calm April night while en route to New York. Most of those aboard die because of the lack of lifeboats. Both Titan itself and the manner of its demise bore many striking similarities to Titanic and its eventual fate, and Robertson's novella remains in print today as an unnerving curiosity.

Clive Cussler's 1976 Dirk Pitt novel Raise the Titanic detailed raising the Titanic using inflatable bags in order to recover a mineral vital to national security. Because it was written before the Titanic was discovered, its premise was based on the theory that the ship remained in one piece. The novel was made into a movie in 1980 starring Richard Jordan in the lead role and included Anne Archer and Jason Robards. The film did not perform at the box office, prompting the producer, Sir (later Lord) Lew Grade to famously remark, "It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!"

In 1997, a novel very similar to the 1997 film was published. It was called Titanic: The Long Night and it was written by Diane Hoh.

Arthur C. Clarke's 1990 novel The Ghost from the Grand Banks detailed the attempts by two groups to raise the Titanic in time for the centenary of its sinking.

Connie Willis's 2001 novel Passage uses the sinking of the Titanic as the setting for the near-death experiences of some of the characters.

[edit] Media and Entertainment

Titanic
Titanic

Titanic has been featured in a large number of films and TV movies, most notably:


The most widely viewed is the 1997 film Titanic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. It became the highest-grossing film in history by far, taking over $600 million in the U.S. and beating the 20-year record-holder Star Wars by $140 million.[2] The film grossed over $1.8 billion worldwide. It also won 11 Academy Awards, tying with Ben-Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) for the most awards won. The wide success of the film spurred additional interest in the Titanic story over a variety of media.

The story was also made into a Broadway musical, Titanic, written by Peter Stone with music by Maury Yeston. It ran from 23 April 1997 to 21 March 1999 and won five Tony Awards for 1997, including Best Score, Best Book, and Best Musical. The production originally starred Michael Cerveris, John Cunningham, David Garrison, Victoria Clark, Brian d'Arcy James, Jennifer Piech, and Martin Moran.

The 1960 Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown tells survivor Margaret Brown's life story, which included the events onboard Titanic. Interviewed following the disaster, she commented, "I'm a Brown. We're unsinkable." The musical was written by Richard Morris with music by Meredith Willson. A film version starring Debbie Reynolds was released in 1964.

Many television shows have also referenced the Titanic disaster. The second episode of the series One Step Beyond was titled "Night of April 14th". The show The Time Tunnel featured a visit to the ship on its first episode. Lady Marjorie Bellamy, a character in the British drama Upstairs, Downstairs, went down in the Titanic. A character on the TV show Dead Like Me became a grim reaper when she died on the Titanic. The titanic is also been in the show seconds from disaster.

In 1989 the American heavy metal band Metal Church released the album Blessing in Disguise which contains the song "Rest In Pieces (April 15, 1912)", which details the sinking and aftermath of the Titanic tragedy.

Futurama
Futurama

The animated series Futurama did a parody where it had the cast boarding a space–faring vessel called Titanic ("A Flight to Remember"). The spaceship was torn in half by a black hole on its maiden voyage. Titanic was once used in the plot of the NBC soap opera Passions, where the lovers Luis and Sheridan discovered that they were passengers on the ship in past lives. The show NewsRadio used the Titanic as the setting for their fourth season finale.

The ship has been referenced a few times in the popular show Doctor Who. The first is in the Fourth Doctor story Robot, in which the Doctor claims he doesn't like the word 'impregnable' because it sounds too much like 'unsinkable', which reminds him of the Titanic. In another Fourth Doctor story, The Invasion of Time, the Doctor claims that he "wasn't responsible" for the disaster. In the episode Rose, the Ninth Doctor is said to have been present at Southampton at the time of Titanic's launch; in the next episode, "The End of the World", [the Doctor comments that he was "clinging to an iceberg" after surviving the sinking of an 'unsinkable ship'. In the 2007 series, at the end of the "Last of the Time Lords", the Titanic crashes into the TARDIS. An alien spaceship replica of the ship featured in the 2007 Christmas special, "Voyage of the Damned".

The cartoon series Animaniacs also depicts the Titanic sinking, and in one Pinky and the Brain cartoon, the sunken ship is all in one piece, and was somehow brought back to the surface of the ocean. In movies, Titanic made brief appearances in Time Bandits, Cavalcade, Ghostbusters 2, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In a multi-part story in the Dark Horse Comics Godzilla series, an evil scientist transports Godzilla to various points in time, one issue focusing on Godzilla running into the Titanic and being responsible for its sinking.

Songs about the disaster feature in folk songs and popular music including the Polish rock group Lady Pank's song "Zostawcie Titanica", which is a plea to not disturb the wreck. The Buffalo Sabres' 2006–2007 season is referred to as the Titanic.

Using Titanic as humour or reference has not been exclusive to popular entertainment. Gus Grissom, whose Liberty Bell 7 Mercury spacecraft sank after his 1961 flight, named his Gemini 3 spacecraft Molly Brown as a reference to the play and his hopes that his second craft would be unsinkable. The Intel Itanium microprocessor has often been jokingly called "Itanic", since (as of 2007) its sales have fallen spectacularly short of expectations.

On SeaQuest DSV, the shipwreck "King George" is a Olympic class Liner

There was a Star Trek: Hidden Frontier episode called "Two Hours" that featured the sinking of Titanic, and the situation had something to do with a man from the future who had been tampering with the timeline.

In 1998, Titanic: The Board Game became available briefly in Great Britain but has not been re-released.

On the May 23, 2007 episode of The Daily Show, fictional comedian Geoffrey Foxworthington (a knock off of Jeff Foxworthy) quotes, "If you've recently booked a trip on the RMSTitanic, you might be a puzzlewit."

  • There are several references to the part of the 1997 movie where the band plays "Nearer, My God, to Thee", the song reportedly played during the sinking
    • In the film The Simpsons Movie, the band Green Day plays as they and the stage they are atop sinks to the bottom of then toxic Springfield Lake.
    • In the film Osmosis Jones, as Frank starts to die, due to Drax's interferrence, some cells, dressed in the same clothes the band on the Titanic wore, play the song, and one of the cells says, "Gentleman, it's been a pleasure playing with you."
    • In the South Park episode, "Summer Sucks", Stan, Kyle, and Cartman pick up their instruments and play "Nearer, My God, to Thee", amid the chaos created by the black snake.

In the show TUGS, the SS Duchess is based on the Titanic and her sisters.

[edit] Video Games

Front cover of the box from the original US Windows 95 CD-ROM release of Starship Titanic, by Simon & Schuster Interactive.
Front cover of the box from the original US Windows 95 CD-ROM release of Starship Titanic, by Simon & Schuster Interactive.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Unknown Movies - unknownmovies.com
  2. ^ Box Office - Movies - New York Times
  3. ^ Titanic at World of Spectrum
  4. ^ Lemon64: R.M.S. Titanic
  5. ^ Titanic at World of Spectrum
  6. ^ Lemon 64: Search for the Titanic
  7. ^ Titanic Blinky at World of Spectrum
  8. ^ Pussy: Love Story from Titanic at World of Spectrum