Use in Popular Culture
- "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied the song as "Grapefruit Diet" on his 1999 album Running with Scissors. Perry stated in an interview that he felt "honored" to have been parodied, though didn't quite understand "why Weird Al is such an icon".
- "Zoot Suit Riot" was featured on two episodes of the competitive dancing series So You Think You Can Dance in 2006 and 2007, included under the quickstep and jive dance styles, respectively.
- The song appears in the films Urban Legend and Simon Says.
- The song is part of a continuous song loop during pre-show entertainment at the Jordan's Furniture IMAX Theater in Natick, Massachusetts. This has actually become a running joke among theater attendees about how the song is still played throughout the years, despite almost everything else about the theater changing such as seats, sound system, and company owners.
Read more about this topic: Zoot Suit Riot (song)
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)