Cultural Impact
The Death Star is one of the better-known concepts from the Star Wars universe and is widely recognizable outside of that context.
In The Fairly OddParents, Dark Laser (a play on Darth Vader) planned to build a space station, known as the "Death Ball", a space station with Laser's face on it. It is also known as the World's Largest Disco Ball in the series.
In 1981, following the Voyager spacecraft's flight past Saturn, scientists noticed a resemblance between one of the planet's moons, Mimas, and the Death Star.
The video games Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Sonic & Knuckles contain plotlines centered around the "Death Egg", a space station resembling the Death Star, though altered to feature the face of series villain Doctor Robotnik. The Death Egg is built as a destructive superweapon; the story revolves around destroying this object. A similar superweapon, the Space Colony ARK (with the Eclipse Cannon), appears in Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog.
The Death Star placed ninth in a 2008 20th Century Fox poll of the most popular movie weapons.
In the US, networks that compete with Fox refer to American Idol as the Death Star due to its destructive effects on their schedules and ratings.
In Canada, the term "death stars" was used to describe U.S. Direct Broadcast Satellites capable of broadcasting signals into Canada that were not regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
The Creative Artists Agency's headquarters has been nicknamed the "Death Star" by the entertainment media.
RAF Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands is nicknamed "Death Star" due to its confusing layout.
KTCK (SportsRadio 1310 The Ticket) in Dallas were the first to use the term "Death Star" to describe the new mammoth Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The term has since spread to local media and is generally accepted as a proper nickname for the stadium.
In February 2012, students from Lehigh University of Pennsylvania published a blog post that priced the Death Star based on the cost of steel to produce it. The students believed that in today's economy, it would cost $852,000,000,000,000,000 assuming that the diameter of the Death Star was 140 kilometres but that it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work.
In Kevin Smith's movie Clerks characters discuss the fate of independent contractors on Death Star, who were not parts of the evil empire, yet died when the weapon was destroyed.
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Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)