Pop Culture
- The first motion picture depiction of the driving of the Golden Spike occurred in "The Iron Horse", a silent film directed by John Ford in 1924 and produced by Fox Film. In 2011, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
- The "Inyo", a 4-4-0 steam locomotive built for the Virginia & Truckee Railroad (V&T #22) in 1875 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, appeared in both the Golden Spike ceremony scene in "Union Pacific" (1939) and in the 1960s TV series The Wild Wild West. In May, 1969, the "Inyo" participated in the Golden Spike Centennial at Promontory, Utah, and then served as the replica of the Central Pacific's "Jupiter" (CPRR #60) at the Golden Spike National Historical Site until the current replica was built in 1979. Purchased by the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City, NV, in 1974, it was eventually brought back to Nevada and fully restored there in 1983 where it still runs today.
- In the 1999 fictional action adventure comedy film, Wild Wild West, the joining ceremony is the setting of an assassination attempt on then U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant by the film's antagonist Dr. Arliss Loveless. (In reality Grant did not actually attend the Golden Spike ceremony.) The extensive Promontory Summit set for the film's Golden Spike ceremony scenes was built at the 20,000 acre Cook's Ranch near Santa Fe, NM.
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Famous quotes containing the words pop culture, pop and/or culture:
“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”
—Charles Krauthammer (b. 1950)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)