In Popular Culture
The character was played by Danny Kaye in the 1947 film version. Thurber opposed the 1947 production. A new Walter Mitty remake is scheduled for release in 2013, directed by and starring Ben Stiller. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and John Goldwyn produced the picture, while John Bard Manulis and Richard Vane served as executive producers.
Walter Mitty is referenced in the lyrics to the songs "T&P Combo" by 311, "Vacation" by Alabama, "Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" by Ian Dury, "Kitty Ricketts" by Radiator, "In The City" by Madness, "Dreams" by The Descendents, "Walter Mitty Blues" by The Meteors, "All Dressed Up For San Francisco" by The Philosopher Kings, "Silver Bird" by Mark Lindsay, and "Sammy Davis City" by Joe Strummer and Brian Setzer. In 2008, the popular band Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra emerged; they have released two albums.
The official Peanuts website describes the character of Snoopy as "... an extroverted Beagle with a Walter Mitty complex", a reference to the many fantasy segments in which Snoopy imagines he is a World War I flying ace battling the Red Baron. The children's television programme The Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty parodied the story as well as many others, with a mix of live footage and animation featuring anthropomorphic animals.
Author William Gibson in his novel Zero History uses the term "Mitty demographic" to describe young men that want to dress like soldiers and have an "equipment fetishism" for products that are derived from police and military equipment.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)