Popular Culture
The long-running success of the strip made the character a pop culture icon referenced in fiction, pop music, dance and sports:
- An educated Neanderthal known as "Alley Oop" is a character in Clifford D. Simak's science fiction novel The Goblin Reservation (1968).
- "O. Paley" (a quasi-anagram of "Alley Oop") was the central figure in Philip José Farmer's The Alley Man, a 1959 novella about the last Neanderthal who has survived into the 20th century.
- The character was the subject of the 1960 #1 single "Alley Oop," which was the only hit for short-lived studio band The Hollywood Argyles. It was written in 1957 by Dallas Frazier, and musicians on the record included Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. Lead vocalist Norm Davis, who was paid a one-time flat fee of $25, is currently a poet and poetry teacher in Rochester, New York. The song was later covered by Dante & the Evergreens and George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and it was included in choreographer Twyla Tharp's 1970s ballet Deuce Coupe.
Read more about this topic: Alley Oop
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)
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)