Zompist Bboard Again

It is well known - admired by some, resented by many - that the pop culture of the USA has spread far and wide across the world, with popular movies, shows, and songs being watched or listened to even in places that are otherwise culturally very different from the USA. What is less talked about is that this thing can be pretty uneven - the most popular blockbuster movies are really known almost everywhere, while some other aspects are, or at least used to be, mostly or entirely unknown outside the USA. For instance, before the rise of high-speed internet, even very popular TV chat show hosts weren't known that well in other countries. Back in the day, Johnny Carson was famously able to walk the streets of London without being recognized.

A few days ago, zompist and me had a brief exchange about that on Mastodon. I wrote:

If you make a very long list of all the things connected to the USA's pop culture, it can be weird to research which things on the list are known the world over, and which things are more or less unknown outside the USA.

zompist replied:

That would be interesting to see! Try it!

To which I had to respond:

Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have the cultural knowledge for that at all.

For a start, I'm pretty out of touch, so I don't really know what is popular or even known among young people today.

But perhaps this could work as a collaborative project? Like, someone mentions a pop cultural thing, and others try to supply information about its spread?

That does sound interesting! (Although my own pop culture knowledge is limited.)

the butter of us culture is unevenly spread even within the bread that is each country. for example, I always thought watching the wizard of oz was like a yanqui thing (as opposed to a world thing originating in the SU like, say, pizza) until, adulthood, where I learned that, instead, almost all chileans watched it growing and I just hadn't heard of it. other things which have struck me as us-culture-what-hasn't-become-world-culture include the game jeopardy, dr phil, family feud, farenheit, baseball, the funny armored rugby, nascar, the concept of "college"₁, an obsession with race, previously libertarianism₂, unironically eating a hot dog with just mustard, thanksgiving, previously halloween₃, higher education being about sports, not knowing much about other countries and world geography, and pastors and protestantism₄.

1 which I don't fully understand: you guys have unis, but you also have 'colleges' and also 'community colleges'... is this a matter of the prestige of the institution? could el paso community college become el paso university if it, say, got a few nobel laureates? we here have universities, where university degrees are given, and also technical institutes, where technical institute degrees are given such that uni degrees are like social work and dentistry, whereas in technical institutes you study technician in dentistry and stuff like electricianship etcetera
2 alas, the Cato institute, the CIA and god knows who else has made it so it's very world culture by now
3 it became a thing chilean kids did right about the time I would have been too old for it.
4 alas, same as halloween and libertarianism.

I once had an exchange student from the us in my... call it high school, and I was quite shocked to learn from him that high school movie tropes (strong cliqueism, lunch seating being super ritualized, a very rigid and explicit popularity hierarchy, mean girls, jocks, blabla) are, for the most part, true! he was looking around during lunch and started asking questions like "yo where do the popular kids sit" and we all looked at him like "what, you mean like in the movies?" it's not that chilean schools are great either, and of course we have people who are more well liked, more socially connected and overall higher status than other kids, but my intuitions strongly suggest that it would have been incredibly, to use an anachronic term, cringe to say something like "you can't sit here, you're not popular enough" or something, which is what he was apparently worried about: "yeah, I don't want to sit in the wrong place by mistake" like he would have asked about whether it was legal to drink beer in the parks.

I should ask my wife about this... she grew up in Peru, and we've definitely discovered that she knows a lot of US culture but also doesn't know about lots of things. But I didn't keep notes.

Apparently it was really arbitrary which US TV shows got shown in Peru. One thing I recall from Mafalda is that the comic strip Nancy is apparently way better known in Argentina. The kids in that strip love the Lone Ranger but don't seem to know about Superman.

Torco wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 1:47 pm 1 which I don't fully understand: you guys have unis, but you also have 'colleges' and also 'community colleges'... is this a matter of the prestige of the institution? could el paso community college become el paso university if it, say, got a few nobel laureates?

Absolutely. Right near me, "Rosary College" some years ago renamed itself "Dominican University". No change in size, importance, or number of laureates, to my knowledge.

We would expect that a university is bigger and offers a wider number of fields.

In Bengal, science fiction is synonymous with Professor Shonku: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Shonku I have to warn non-Bengalis that Bengali literary culture places a premium on silliness that I have only observed among non-Bengalis with fans of the original Alice in Wonderland. Silliness is also hard to translate.

I asked my wife about this... here is a list of things she knew well growing up, and things she didn't. This is just her experience, not the last word on US culture as known in Peru. In case it's not obvious, this relates to the '60s and '70s.

Known: Flintstones, Mr Magoo, Wally Gator, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, Superman, Archie, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear, Star Wars, Star Trek, various Westerns.

Not known: The Addams Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Peanuts in book form at least, Monty Python, Dr Who, US soap operas.

(The soap operas popular in Peru were from Mexico and Brazil.)

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 6:34 pm I asked my wife about this... here is a list of things she knew well growing up, and things she didn't. This is just her experience, not the last word on US culture as known in Peru. In case it's not obvious, this relates to the '60s and '70s.

Known: Flintstones, Mr Magoo, Wally Gator, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, Superman, Archie, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear, Star Wars, Star Trek, various Westerns.

Not known: The Addams Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Peanuts in book form at least, Monty Python, Dr Who, US soap operas.

(The soap operas popular in Peru were from Mexico and Brazil.)

My own notes (France in the '80s and 90's). Interestingly the lists are pretty different!

Known: Flintstones, The Addams Family, Superman, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear, Star Wars, Star Trek, various Westerns, Peanuts (only in book form) Monty Python, US soap operas.

Not known: Mr Magoo, Wally Gator, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, Archie, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Dr Who,

I should add that Star Trek, while known, was never really popular. I don't think people would even know about TNG except for all the Internet memes.

While I'm at it, let's go through the American culture test:
Known: Bewitched, the Flintstones, Sesame Street, Bill Cosby, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Donald Duck, Star Trek, the Addams Family,
Not known: David Letterman, Mary Tyler Moore, Saturday Night Live, Mr. Rogers, Bob Newhart, the Fonz, Archie Bunker, the Honeymooners, the Three Stooges, and Beetle Bailey.

For Sesame Street it depends mostly on age. My sister (born in the seventies) remembers it, but it was no longer on TV when I grew up. It's possible she remembers Happy Days, I'll have to ask her sometime.

I do a lot better on the more recent stuff:
Known: Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Buffy, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Lara Croft, GlaDOS, The Sims, Farmville, and Reading Rainbow.
Not known: Reading Rainbow.
Stephen Colbert and Rush Limbaugh are borderline cases. I think people usually don't know about them, but they're mentioned in the news in relation to Donald Trump.

The movies are mostly familiar, except for Blazing Saddles. I think Casablanca is less popular too. I recognize most of the names given under music, except for Linda Ronstadt and Tony Bennett.
Billy Joel isn't mentioned in the test, but he really isn't known much here. (Except for Honesty, I think.)

As for comics, Nancy, Family Circus and Doonesbury I learned about from your website As far as I know none of them made it here.

I second Torco's comments about college and high school. As far as I'm aware, American high schools are places where American kids go to be mercilessly bullied. Then they go to college and get very drunk?
You'll find some libertarian-like sentiment. But nobody's heard about Ayn Rand.

Miscellanea:

other things which have struck me as us-culture-what-hasn't-become-world-culture include the game jeopardy, dr phil, family feud, farenheit, baseball, the funny armored rugby, nascar,

We don't know about Jeopardy or Dr Phil. We do know about Family Feud (which was adapted here to some success). Nascar and American football are unfamiliar too (though you can find enthusiasts for both.) As far as I know, though, nobody cares about baseball. There seem to be a lot of baseball metaphors in American culture, all of them go way over our head.

Church in general is a complete mystery. French people aren't very religious as a rule, and what little religion there is is Catholic. I think the collective image involves fire-and-brimstone preachers?
A big difference is that people here are completely unfamiliar with the Bible, whereas Americans seem more familiar with it. This means a whole host of common cultural references go unnoted.

The most popular science-fiction is American, but interestingly French SF fans didn't pick the same favorite authors. SF fans here love Herbert, Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Heinlein is kind of obscure. Nobody has read Andre Norton.

I love Stephen King -- he's big on pop culture and most of the references I just don't get. Nursery rhymes, kids' games, and so on -- completely unfamiliar. One thing that comes to mind is that there are a lot of Paul Bunyan references in It. I gathered from context that he's kind of a New England folk hero, but that's all.

Thank you for the interesting discussion, everyone! More on the details later, if I don't get interrupted.

Picking up on other people's lists, I'd say for 1990s Germany, it was something like:

Known: Flintstones, The Munsters (though not that well known), Bugs Bunny, Star Wars, Star Trek (in fact, for a while I had the impression that Germany had the biggest Star Trek fandom outside the English-speaking world), various Westerns, The Addams Family (though, again, not that well known), Monty Python (though I have the impression that it's watched more for crassness than subtlety).

Most US soap operas were unknown. However, somewhat related to that, both Dallas and Dynasty were fairly well-known during their original runs. (German TV showed Dynasty under the title "Der Denver-Clan", which fans sometimes shortened to simply "Denver".)

Sesame Street was very well known, though in a locally produced "franchised" version, not the original US shows.

Superman has always been pretty well-known as a character, but traditionally, no one read comics featuring him.

Archie Bunker is basically unknown, but that's simply because the original British show from which he was copied had its own local copy in Germany.

Dr Who wasn't known back in the 1990s; I don't know how well he's been known since the revival.

Peanuts was in some newspapers, so people might be familiar with it, but I think it never became a really big pop cultural thing.

Wizard of Oz isn't that well known, I think.

There was a local version of Jeopardy once.

Back in his day, some people had heard of Letterman - I remember a cartoon in a magazine featuring a few German tourists in the USA watching TV and complaining about how Letterman was "copying" a popular German late night chat show host of the time.

Not known: I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Mr Magoo (I do remember seeing ads for a movie version once, but it would have been a movie with a main character audiences didn't know), Wally Gator (I think this thread is the first place I've heard of this one), Archie, Saturday Night Live (though there was a German copy), Mr. Rogers, Bob Newhart, the Fonz, the Three Stooges, and Beetle Bailey.

Sports: Baseball is as unknown as in France. OK, people know that characters in movies and TV shows sometimes play or watch baseball, but that's about it. Except that unfortunately, baseball bats, as a weapon-that's-legally-sports-equipment, have long been popular among skinheads.

American football is far from a major sport here, but it is a well-established minor sport, which is apparently more than you can say about it in most of Europe. Better known than rugby, AFAICT.

Back in my day, no one here knew about NASCAR.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 3:39 am

The most popular science-fiction is American, but interestingly French SF fans didn't pick the same favorite authors. SF fans here love Herbert, Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Heinlein is kind of obscure. Nobody has read Andre Norton.

When I first got interested in written SF, more than 20 years ago, the SF racks in the bookstores were still full of Big Three books, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. I don't think that's still the case.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 5:23 amWally Gator (I think this thread is the first place I've heard of this one)

Honestly I don't remember Wally Gator either. But my wife knew him under his Spanish name, El Lagarto Juancho.

Nursery rhymes, kids' games, and so on -- completely unfamiliar.

Oh, yeah, totally. the whole of children's culture gets exported much less than, say, TV, I would think. children's culture is very local: here we have this one ritual singsong, "arturo prat chacón dispara por este cañón" with a particular rhythm and grabbing one's package
to mean the cannon is cock. another thing like that is expressions of affection and stuff about home cooking: back in the day I used to videocall a lot with a chick I met here and, through that, I realized the existence of vast swathes of vocab I simply didn't know: I knew, say, asset flipping but not aubergine or glomp, since I learned eng from videogames and not, I dunno, cooking shows or fanfiction.

El lagarto juancho was common on tv in chile, too, as late as the early nineties. likely things were similar in peru, but back in the day we had mostly local channels and they bought, seemingly, stuff on sale or something: the selection feels kind of random.

my own first bit of the American culture test is very similar to Ares':

Known: Bewitched, the Flintstones, Sesame Street (in its mexican version, where the big bird was called Abelardo), Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Donald Duck, both Star Treks, the Addams Family,
Not known: David Letterman, Mary Tyler Moore, Saturday Night Live, Mr. Rogers, Bob Newhart, the Fonz, Archie Bunker, the Honeymooners, the Three Stooges, Beetle Bailey. in italics, the ones I don't know to this day.

I think I know exactly one american soap, melrose place, and by name only.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 8:39 am I knew, say, antidisestablishmentarianism but not aubergine, since I learned eng from videogames and not, I dunno, cooking shows.

‘Aubergine’ is itself regional, though. Here we call them ‘eggplants’.

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 8:40 am

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 8:39 am I knew, say, antidisestablishmentarianism but not aubergine, since I learned eng from videogames and not, I dunno, cooking shows.

‘Aubergine’ is itself regional, though. Here we call them ‘eggplants’.

yeah, iirc the exchange somewhat like this

- i ate some eggplant
- ... your plants lay eggs?
- nono, aubergine
- shit, i thought i spoke english but apparently not.

emoji hadn't gotten to the west yet.

other things which have struck me as us-culture-what-hasn't-become-world-culture include the game jeopardy, dr phil, family feud, farenheit, baseball, the funny armored rugby, nascar,

Are you sure about baseball being on that list? Baseball has become quite big in some non-American countries (Japan, Korea, Central American countries). So big, in fact, that the "World Baseball Classic" (basically the World Cup of baseball) is now watched more than the World Series (the MLB's championship series). However, ironically, the WBC hasn't become popular in America (despite being created by the MLB), because most of the best American players skip it, because their respective MLB teams don't want them to get hurt, thus earning the series in America a reputation as "just a bunch of exhibition games" instead of an opportunity to win immortal national glory (like how most soccer fans think of their country winning the World Cup). ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB5Lj_anzPU )

1 which I don't fully understand: you guys have unis, but you also have 'colleges' and also 'community colleges'... is this a matter of the prestige of the institution? could el paso community college become el paso university if it, say, got a few nobel laureates? we here have universities, where university degrees are given, and also technical institutes, where technical institute degrees are given such that uni degrees are like social work and dentistry, whereas in technical institutes you study technician in dentistry and stuff like electricianship etcetera

When most people say they're "going to college", their actually going to a school with "university" in the name. I don't think there's an official difference between "university" and "college", but I'd consider a university to be more rigorous and difficult, offer a wider variety of courses and degrees, and take longer to complete (4 years instead of 2 years). I think that a (community) college offers fewer degrees (usually more practical), but within a single degree/program/tract there is only a single set of classes to take (that is, having no choice between taking which one of three classes) and has fewer "general education" classes (like taking a psychology class when you're studying to get an electrical engineering degree).

Archie Bunker is basically unknown, but that's simply because the original British show from which he was copied had its own local copy in Germany.

I didn't know that Archie Bunker was a cultural calque! The only other shows I can think of that did that are "The Office" (UK → US) (The American one ending up becoming more popular than the original and lasting for 9 seasons.) and "That 70s Show" (US → UK). (However, they made only a couple pilot episodes because it didn't catch on in the UK. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va-Aeqh ... x9pn0tbsLP ) If you're familiar with the original American version, watching the British one feels like peeking into a strange alternate universe where everybody is British.)

Here's a video about a similar topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xgd79wuriQ It's about things that other countries *think* are American, but actually aren't. My favorite: putting quail eggs on a hot dog. (The logic is: America is the land of Big Things. Quail eggs are big. Therefore, quail eggs are American.)

jcb wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 1:03 pm I didn't know that Archie Bunker was a cultural calque! The only other shows I can think of that did that are "The Office" (UK → US) (The American one ending up becoming more popular than the original and lasting for 9 seasons.) and "That 70s Show" (US → UK). (However, they made only a couple pilot episodes because it didn't catch on in the UK. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va-Aeqh ... x9pn0tbsLP ) If you're familiar with the original American version, watching the British one feels like peeking into a strange alternate universe where everybody is British.)

Some things where, instead of importing original shows, media execs "just" imported formats include late night chat shows (as mentioned) and 1990s-style trash talk shows.

A word on US soap operas... Dynasty, Dallas, and Melrose Place are not really soaps, they're ordinary high-budget weekly nighttime shows; they just focus on interpersonal drama, like soaps.

The soaps air in the daytime, typically with a new show every day. The quintessential soap is General Hospital which started in 1963 and is still going on, with 15,000 total episodes. The name comes from the earlier radio incarnations, which were often sponsored by soap companies. They're traditionally aimed at women— there were enough of them that a stay-at-home mom could have the TV on all day— and featured lots of romance, convoluted plotlines, and melodramatic stuff (kidnappings, identical twins, long-term illness, etc.). Soaps were once the profit center of television, but they've declined precipitously as women entered the workplace and tastes changed.

The Latin American equivalent is the telenovela, and Mexico and Brazil are the biggest producers. Wikipedia says the second-largest producer of soap operas worldwide is Turkey.

Here the big ones were The Young and the Restless, the Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, similarly marketed to stay-at-home moms. I think they're still on TV. Oddly enough, plenty of US soaps didn't work well here. The vagaries of TV licensing, I guess. I checked these on Wikipedia to get the English titles, and very appropriately some of them are owned by Procter and Gamble

That zompist brought up the distinction between nighttime weeklies and daytime dailies reminds me that German TV traditionally broke that distinction a lot when it came to US imports. What they would typically do was show all the episodes that they already had of a US weekly show as a Monday-to-Friday daytime rerun, and then add all new episodes of the show that had been produced since the last rerun cycle at the end.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 6:34 pm I asked my wife about this... here is a list of things she knew well growing up, and things she didn't. This is just her experience, not the last word on US culture as known in Peru. In case it's not obvious, this relates to the '60s and '70s.

Known: Flintstones, Mr Magoo, Wally Gator, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, Superman, Archie, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear, Star Wars, Star Trek, various Westerns.

Not known: The Addams Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Peanuts in book form at least, Monty Python, Dr Who, US soap operas.

(The soap operas popular in Peru were from Mexico and Brazil.)

Known: The Addams Family, Flintstones, Superman, Archie, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear.

Peripherally known but not consumed because my parents didn't pay for cable TV: Star Wars, Star Trek, various Westerns.

Not Known: Mr Magoo, Wally Gator, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Peanuts in book form at least, Monty Python, Dr Who, US soap operas.

In addition, there is a whole Bengali literary ecosystem that's unknown to the outside world. E.g. The most famous detective is Feluda. Joi Baba Felunath is a classic. Bantul the Great is a universally known comic character.

Bantul The Great's Wikipedia page gives a false impression of what I remember of his comic book appearances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantul_the_Great (Linguistic note: The "n" signifies that the preceding "a" is nasal, so it's left out of some romanizations.) He is not really a superhero or super-intelligent. He's more like a random super-strong dude who lives in a neighborhood, probably a caricature of a bodybuilder. He has two kid nephews or friends or something who are thugs, plain and simple. Bantul's moral position is that he's not exactly a thug all the time. Maybe his character changes into something like a superhero later.

To make sure I didn't misremember, I Googled this: https://skmobi.files.wordpress.com/2014 ... -great.pdf The thugs are trying to chisel through a wall to rob the bank, but the concrete is too hard. One of the thugs draw a target on the wall and tells Bantul he made a bet Bantul can hit the target with a football. The football punches through the wall and cracks the safe. (Edit: The football was a concrete sphere in disguise.) When Bantul realizes the thugs were robbing a bank, he catches them using the football as a projectile weapon. That's the first story.

This exemplifies what I remember: Bantul is a direct cause of the crisis most of the time. I would say he's more of a meathead than clever most of the time.