The Crying of Lot 49 - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

• The Yoyodyne company, which first appears in V., is also referenced in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and it is a manufacturer of starship drives in the Star Trek universe. Angel, the spin-off series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, includes a firm named Yoyodyne, although this may be an indirect allusion via the Buckaroo Banzai film. ABC television created a website for a fictional company named PB-Sales, in connection with their TV show Lost; PB-Sales specializes in managing and controlling other corporations, including Yoyodyne and Daystrom Data Concepts (a nod to the Star Trek episode "The Ultimate Computer"). The GNU General Public License uses "Yoyodyne, Inc." as the name of a company in an example of a copyright disclaimer.
• Both Radiohead and Yo La Tengo have included Pynchonian motifs in their works, some of them hinging upon TCL49. Yo La Tengo named a song "The Crying of Lot G" on their album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Radiohead also references the novel in the name of their online merchandise shop and mailing list, W.A.S.T.E. (which originally sent out physical mail, making the reference more apt).
• Nicholas Meyer's 1993 novel The Canary Trainer describes a fictional painting by the famous Impressionist Degas, which happens to show Sherlock Holmes playing violin in the Opera Garnier. To explain why this work is not prominently displayed in an art gallery, Meyer adds a tongue-in-cheek footnote, explaining that it was bought by the late "Marquis de Tour et Tassis", then auctioned off by the Marquis's widow. Both the aristocrat's name (a clear variant of "Thurn and Taxis") and the auction are nods to Pynchon.
• In the William Gibson novel Count Zero (1986), the multinational corporation Maas Neotek is named in honor of Oedipa Maas.
• In 2003, the peer-to-peer program WASTE briefly appeared, designed by Justin Frankel as a reference to the book's dark postal service W.A.S.T.E. It uses encryption to maintain privacy, while also requiring encryption keys on both sides to get into the network in the first place.
• In the opening shot of the Mad Men episode "Lady Lazarus" (season 5, episode 8), character Peter Campbell is reading the novel.
• The anime film Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space(2002) generously borrows its plot element about a religious cult becoming a mail company and a monopolistic intergalactic power from Tristero.