Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D

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‘‘Renny,’’ a grim-faced giant of a man who likes to smash his huge

ﬁsts through solid panel doors and is the greatest engineering expert

of his time; the tall, gaunt, bespectacled Johnny, with his bulging

forehead and big words, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on

geology and archaeology; ‘‘Ham,’’ who is a dapper clothes horse and

possibly the greatest lawyer Harvard has ever produced; and the most

remarkable of Doc’s companions ‘‘Monk,’’ a short, barrel-chested

man whose knuckles nearly drag the ground. Although he looks like a

red-haired ape pretending to be a man, he is one of the world’s top

chemists. Monk, however, would much rather work with his ﬁsts than

with test tubes. The frontispiece of the Bantam paperbacks gives this

characterization of the men who joined Doc Savage in his work:

‘‘Together with their leader, they would go anywhere, ﬁght anyone,

dare everything—seeking excitement and perilous adventure.’’

Although Doc Savage is a relatively minor ﬁctional character, he

has inﬂuenced some major popular culture icons. Superman is the

most obvious ‘‘descendent’’ of Doc. In fact, in the stories themselves

and in the advertisements for the magazine, Doc was often referred to

as a ‘‘superman.’’ In addition to sharing the ﬁrst name Clark, both

heroes have a Fortress of Solitude somewhere in the arctic. Both also

have female cousins that look like them, have their powers, and want

to horn in on their adventures. Doc was known as the Man of Bronze,

and Superman is known as the Man of Steel. Doc’s connection to

Batman is less obvious, but more fundamental. Both heroes are ‘‘self-

made supermen’’ who, beginning in childhood, devoted themselves

to intense training. Both have considerable scientiﬁc know-how, as

evidenced by Doc’s utility vest and Batman’s very similar utility belt.

It is even possible that the batmobile is patterned after Doc’s

bulletproof and gadget-ﬁlled sedan.

—Randy Duncan

URTHER READING:

Cannaday, Marilyn. Bigger Than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage.

Bowling Green, Ohio, Bowling Green State University Popular

Press, 1990.

Farmer, Philip Jose. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. New York,

Playboy Paperbacks, 1973.

Murray, Will. Secrets of Doc Savage. Odyssey Publications, 1981.

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is the world’s longest continually produced science

ﬁction serial. It aired on the British BBC network from 1963 until

1989, and was revived brieﬂy as a television movie in 1996. In the

United States, Doctor Who ﬁrst began broadcasts on independent

channels in 1972, and was still broadcasting on some local PBS

afﬁliates in the late 1990s. It has, like Star Trek, engendered movies,

radio dramas, lucrative novel series, non-ﬁction, comic books, and an

extensive home video market.

Doctor Who revolves around the adventures of the mysterious

time-traveling title character, simply known throughout as The Doc-

tor. The Doctor, as ﬁrst seen in the 1963 pilot episode, broadcast in the

midst of the BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy Assassination, is

outwardly human. William Hartnell, the actor to ﬁrst portray the

Doctor (1963-1966), presented audiences with a cranky old man who

had a gross lack of basic human kindness. Initially, the Doctor was

accompanied on his travels through time and space by his grand-

daughter and her human school teachers. In the serial’s second

episode, he seemed to encourage his companion to kill an incapacitat-

ed caveman. Later, his selﬁsh, obsessive desire to learn placed him

and his companions in danger when they met the alien Daleks. The

character began to soften his edges as he was exposed to the ideals and

attitudes of his human companions. His scientiﬁc curiosity and

towering ego remain, but his ego became tempered with an increasing

respect for his companions and the races that he encountered.

When Hartnell became too ill to continue the role, the producers

came up with the ingenious idea of having the character ‘‘regenerate’’

into a new body with a new personality. Since 1966, the Doctor has

been played by seven more actors: Patrick Troughton (1966-1970),

Jon Pertwee (1970-1974), Tom Baker (1974-1981), Peter Davison

(1981-1983), Colin Baker (1983-1986), Sylvester McCoy (1986-

1989), and Paul McGann (1996). Richard Hurndall also played the

role of the First Doctor in place of the late William Hartnell in the

1983 anniversary serial ‘‘The Five Doctors.’’ This change in the lead

actor (and usually in the rest of the cast and the production teams)

allowed the show to adapt to and change with the times. Hartnell’s

serials began originally as a children’s program, but by the late 1970s

Tom Baker’s serials were also targeted towards the science ﬁction

aﬁcionado. Low ratings and lack of support from the BBC (it went on

an 18 month hiatus in the middle of Colin Baker’s tenure) soon saw

the serial descending into self-parody. Towards the end it began to

recover some of its ground, but in 1989 it was taken off the air, though

never ofﬁcially canceled. The 1996 television movie was co-pro-

duced by the BBC and the FOX Network in the United States at a sum

of $5 million (an unusual amount for such a production), but it did not

achieve great ratings. There are constant rumors among fans of

another revival; meanwhile the serial continues in original novels

published ﬁrst by Virgin Books and later by BBC Books.

Two theatrical movies were made in the 1960s, based on the

scripts of two of the television serials, Doctor Who and the Daleks

(1965) and Daleks—Invasion Earth, 2150 A.D. (1966), starring Peter

Cushing as the Doctor. In the television serial, it was the popularity of

the Daleks, created by writer Terry Nation and a BBC special effects

wizard, that propelled the Doctor to instant stardom in the United

Kingdom. It was not until the ﬁrst Tom Baker serials began broad-

casting in the United States, however, that the show earned anything

more than an American cult audience. The Doctor has since earned

cameos in episodes of The Simpsons, and cancellation of the serial

usually results in a PBS station being inundated with masses of

fan mail.

Like Star Trek, the fans of Doctor Who run major conventions

every year which are attended in the thousands by fans sporting

scarves and cricket jackets. Instantly recognizable at these conven-

tions is the Doctor’s unique TARDIS—an acronym for Time and

Relative Dimension in Space. On the outside it resembles a battered

London police call box. Inside, however, it is, in reality, a large ship,

its cavernous interior seemingly endless. The Doctor and his fans also

have a strong presence on the Internet, where hints of new television

projects compete for attention with spoilers of the novel plots.

Icons of the show include the pepperpot shaped Daleks, and the

silver enshrouded Cybermen. Also earning a place in history was the

show’s electronic theme music, which evolved over the years but still

retained an eerie hint of the otherworldly. On the whole, the show was

a hodge-podge of what is good and bad about long-running serial

television: devoted audiences, a long history, and very bad continuity.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

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The video market ensures that the show is introduced to new

audiences and that it has a life beyond its original television run.

—John J. Doherty

FURTHER READING:

Consumer’s Guide, editors. Do-It-Yourself and Save Money! New

York, Harper & Rowe, 1980.

Family Handyman Magazine, editors. The Family Handyman Home

Improvement Book. New York, Scribner, 1973.

Gladstone, Bernard. The Simon and Schuster Complete Guide to

Home Repair and Maintenance. New York, Simon and

Schuster, 1984.

Price, Bernard. Do-It-Yourself Projects from Attic to Basement. New

York, Rodale Press/Popular Science Books, 1986.

Reader’s Digest, editors. New Fix-It-Yourself Manual. Pleasantville,

New York, Reader’s Digest Association, 1996.

Roberts, Jason, editor. The Learn 2 Guide: How to Do Almost

Anything. New York, Villard, 1998.

Schultz, Morton. Fix It Yourself for Less. Yonkers, New York,

Consumer Reports Books, 1992.

Tompkins, Susie. I Can Fix That: A Guide for Women Who Want to

Do It Themselves. Toronto/New York, Harlequin Books, 1996.

Vivian, John, editor. Living On Less. Arden, North Carolina, Mother

Earth News, 1997.

Domino, Fats (1928—)

The music of Fats Domino embodies the spirit of early rock and

roll. His work reveals the links between rock and roll, rhythm and

blues, and the black Southern singers of the early twentieth century.

His music was recorded by most of the rock artists of the 1950s, who

recognized his signiﬁcant contribution to establishing the rock and

roll sound, and he is acknowledged as a pioneer in leading the way

across the racial barriers of the music industry. With more than 65

million record sales, Domino was second only to Elvis Presley in

popularity during the 1950s, and is credited with bringing mass

attention to the New Orleans sound, inspiring many other Southern

black singers to record for white audiences.

Domino’s New Orleans style of piano playing is a combination

of traditional jazz, Latin rhythms, blues, Cajun, and boogie woogie

that reﬂects that city’s rich heritage of cultural amalgamation. From

the mid-1940s through the early 1950s he was an established rhythm

and blues recording artist who had successfully toured the nation, but

his pounding playing style made him well suited to crossover into the

emerging rock format. Domino’s greatest popularity arrived in 1955

with the release of ‘‘Ain’t That a Shame,’’ which became an early

rock hit, and although his career began to fade somewhat in the 1960s,

he continued to tour and record into the 1990s.

The man considered the most famous New Orleans-born musi-

cian since Louis Armstrong was born Antoine Domino, one of a large

family, on February 26, 1928. He developed an early interest in

music, began playing the piano at age nine, and was performing

publicly at local honky-tonks a year later. He quit school at 14 and

took a job at a bedspring factory so that his nights would be free to

play the area bars and clubs. A large young man, at this time he

acquired the nickname ‘‘Fats’’ from bandleader Bill Diamond. The

entertainer was spotted in 1949 by trumpeter Dave Bartholomew and

Lew Chudd of Imperial Records, who soon signed him to a recording

contract. His ﬁrst hit song, ‘‘The Fat Man,’’ sold more than a million

Fats Domino

copies. Domino formed an especially close professional relationship

with Bartholomew, and the pair co-wrote, arranged, and produced

most of the singer’s material for the next two decades. Among his hits

of this period are ‘‘Goin’ Home,’’ ‘‘Goin’ to the River,’’ and ‘‘Every

Night about This Time.’’

Domino’s rollicking piano playing allowed him to cross onto the

pop charts in the mid-1950s, the time when young white audiences

were discovering rock and roll. However, white artists were also

covering his initial pop records—Teresa Brewer recorded ‘‘Bo Wee-

vil’’ and Pat Boone’s mild version of ‘‘Ain’t That a Shame’’ sold

even more copies than Domino’s own—but he broke into the pop Top

Ten himself with the release of ‘‘I’m in Love Again.’’ Fats Domino

became a national sensation and was one of the ﬁrst black recording

stars to prove that he could appeal to white listeners. He proceeded to

enjoy a string of major hits from 1955 to 1960, of which the most

instantly recognizable are ‘‘Blueberry Hill,’’ ‘‘Blue Monday,’’ ‘‘I’m

Walkin’,’’ ‘‘My Blue Heaven,’’ ‘‘Whole Lotta Loving,’’ and ‘‘Walk-

ing to New Orleans.’’

The second half of Fats Domino’s career lacked the continuous

commercial success of the ﬁrst half. Although he continued to tour

and did occasionally produce some notable recordings, more magnet-

ic (and frenetic) performers such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and

Jerry Lee Lewis eclipsed his gentle, laid-back stage persona. In the

1970s, he released a New Orleans-style version of the Beatles’ ‘‘Lady

Madonna’’ that gained some attention, and in 1993 he returned to the

recording studio for the ﬁrst time in nearly 25 years to produce his

Christmas Is a Special Day set. The results received much critical

acclaim. In his later years Domino was much honored for his

DONAHUE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

744

achievements: in 1986 he was in the inaugural group of artists

inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 1998 President

Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts. By the late 1990s,

though entering his seventies, Fats Domino was still touring in

between enjoying life in his palatial New Orleans home.

—Charles Coletta

URTHER READING:

Aquila, Richard. That Old Time Rock & Roll: A Chronicle of an Era,

1954-1963. New York, Schirmer Books, 1989.

Donahue, Phil (1935—)

Talk show host Phil Donahue is credited with pioneering the

daytime television talk show format. His programs introduced view-

ers to sensitive and intelligent discussions of topics and issues that

had never before been seen on the small screen. From the debut of The

Phil Donahue Show in 1969, which originated out of Dayton, Ohio,

Donahue challenged, informed, and entertained daytime audiences

and helped establish the talk show as one of television’s most proliﬁc

Phil Donahue (right) and guests on The Phil Donahue Show.

and proﬁtable formats. Beginning in the 1970s, his promotion of

feminism, and the frequent airing of women’s health issues on his

program identiﬁed him as the embodiment of the ‘‘sensitive man.’’

As daytime TV shows became raunchier in the 1990s, Donahue came

to be viewed as the patriarch of the genre. While he did present

programs with outrageous content—senior citizen strippers, for ex-

ample—he continued to offer sober conversations about politics and

social concerns and a mix of celebrity interviews. Phil Donahue’s

decision to treat the female television viewer as an intelligent, active,

and aware participant in society challenged those programmers

wedded to the conviction that women would only watch soap operas

and cookery demonstrations.

For a man who later symbolized the modern era’s willingness to

talk openly about the most personal issues, Donahue’s beginnings

were very traditional. He was born Phillip John Donahue, the son of a

furniture salesman in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 21, 1935. He

was an altar boy and, after graduating high school, studied for a B.A.

in theology at the University of Notre Dame. After completing his

degree, he found work as a radio announcer in Cleveland and, later,

Dayton. (One of his ﬁrst professional positions involved delivering

the ﬁve a.m. hog report.) His ﬁrst talk show was a Dayton radio

program titled Conversation Piece, which aired from 1963 to 1967.

He later accepted a position with Dayton’s WLWD television station

DONOVANENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

745

to host a local call-in talk show but, unable to attract top guests, he and

his producers focused each episode on relevant issues of the day.

The Phil Donahue Show premiered in November 1967 with an

appearance by celebrated atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was

considered by some the most hated woman in America for her anti-

religion stance. That ﬁrst week also included ﬁlm of a woman giving

birth and a discussion on the appropriateness of anatomically correct

male dolls. Donahue’s likable personality and his ease in addressing

often uncomfortable issues tempered the daring subject matter. A

further innovation was his solicitation of questions and comments

from the studio audience, previously regarded as little more than

background for hosts and their guests. Donahue’s charm, coupled

with his bold choice of topics, attracted national attention when he

moved his show, renamed simply Donahue, to Chicago in 1974. The

program was soon syndicated nationwide and boasted millions of

viewers, of whom 85 percent were women.

In a career that spanned more than 6000 hours of programming,

there was no subject that Phil Donahue was unwilling to confront and

present to mainstream America. Some complained that his choices

were often inappropriate or too outlandish. TV host Merv Grifﬁn

expressed the opinion of many when he complained that Donahue and

his imitators were most interested in controversy and titillation.

Grifﬁn stated, ‘‘What they have to resort to in subject matter is

sometimes a pain in the neck. You know, the sex lives of Lithuanian

doctors and dentists is not all that interesting.’’ Donahue did, indeed,

parade bizarre guests at times and was not above risking offense to

capture high ratings. He interviewed nudists, drag queens, neo-Nazis,

and strippers of all sorts. The episode that caused the most controver-

sy and hysteria was titled ‘‘Transvestite Fashion Show’’ and featured

Donahue wearing a dress.

However, complaints that daytime talk shows peddled only

salacious material ignored Donahue’s many episodes that focused on

serious issues such as race relations, class differences, and feminist

causes. In 1982, he presented the ﬁrst national program devoted to the

AIDS crisis, and a high point of his series was a 1988 discussion of the

disease in children, led by the HIV-positive boy Ryan White. Over the

years the series also welcomed politicians and advocates from across

the political spectrum to express their views. In the late 1980s,

Donahue initiated a series of ‘‘space bridge’’ shows with Russian TV

host Vladimir Pozner, designed to promote understanding between

the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union. The host’s own

stand on abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other

feminist causes, identiﬁed him as one of TV’s outstanding liberal voices.

Donahue’s success continued into the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980,

the divorced father of ﬁve married actress Marlo Thomas, best known

for TV’s That Girl. The couple had met several years earlier when

Thomas was a guest on Donahue’s program. The series relocated to

New York in 1985, but the following year saw the ﬁrst real challenge

to Donahue’s ratings dominance with the arrival of Oprah Winfrey.

The pair battled for the position of TV’s top daytime talk show host

for a decade until Donahue announced his retirement in 1996. The

ﬁnal episode of his show was a national event.

After his departure, daytime TV sank into a mire of freak shows,

ﬁghts, and shocking behavior. The intelligence, curiosity, and hu-

mane probing that characterized Donahue’s approach were sadly

absent in an era ﬁlled with hosts such as Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones,

and Jerry Springer. Where Donahue had sought to inform and

entertain, others set out to demean, to provoke and to shock—an

unworthy tribute to Phil Donahue’s ability to present often controver-

sial subjects to the mass American audience which had once appeared

to mark the nation’s growing willingness to confront previously

taboo topics.

—Charles Coletta

URTHER READING:

Anderson, Christopher. The New Book of People. New York, G.P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1986.

Donahue, Phil. My Own Story. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Winship, Michael. Television. New York, Random House, 1988.

Donovan (1946—)

The rise and fall of British singer Donovan’s career and popu-

larity paralleled that of the 1960s counterculture. In the dreamy world

of the late 1960s, the exotic and popular performer personiﬁed the

earthly ﬂower child. Appearing simultaneously wide-eyed and cyni-

cal, a little silly yet nobody’s fool, and an intensely commercial

hippie, he seemed to embrace antithetical categories in popular

Donovan (right) with his musical director, David John Mills.

DONOVAN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

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culture. For ﬁve years between 1965 and 1970, he lived so close to the

cutting edge of each new trend that it almost seemed as if he had

initiated them. Then, with shocking rapidity, he became irrelevant,

discarded—like the counterculture—by critics and audiences alike as

passé and/or uncool. Yet, for a singer so identiﬁed with that speciﬁc

time and world view, his best songs never lost either their catchiness

or their ability to charm.

Donovan Leitch was born in an old section of Glasgow, Scot-

land, but his family moved to the outskirts of London in 1955. He

learned the rudiments of music at folk enclaves in St. Albans, north of

London and in the coastal artists’colony of St. Ives in Cornwall. At

age 18 he began recording demo discs which were heard by talent

scouts from the British rock television show Ready Steady Go, and he

began appearing regularly on the program in 1965. Initially, Dono-

van’s music was entirely acoustic and, while noting his English

accent and more romantic attitude, critics labeled him ‘‘Britain’s

answer to Bob Dylan.’’ In 1965, thousands of youngsters learned to

play the guitar using the chords to his ﬁrst hit, ‘‘Catch the Wind.’’

Follow-up singles included the folksy ‘‘Colours,’’ Buffy St. Marie’s

‘‘Universal Soldier’’ (a standard of the anti-war movement), and

a jazzy drug-tour of ‘‘Sunny Goodge Street,’’ with one of the

ﬁrst explicit references to hashish in rock music. Donovan made

his American debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the

same year the crowd booed Bob Dylan for performing with

electric accompaniment.

By 1966, the 20-year-old Donovan had shed his anti-bomb

rhetoric and completely reinvented himself as a psychedelic trouba-

dour of ‘‘ﬂower power,’’ the epitome of 1960s mysticism. With

Mickie Most, his new producer at Epic Records (with whom he

worked until 1969), Donovan kept the folk-like refrains of his songs,

but added quirky pop instrumentation (sitars, ﬂutes, cellos, and

harps). His work in this period often exhibited wonderful musical

inventiveness and a ﬁne ear for a lyrical phrase, although he occasion-

ally crossed the line into pomposity and pretension. His biggest hit,

‘‘Sunshine Superman,’’ reached number one in July 1966 in both

Britain and the United States, and remains one of the most engaging

and innovative singles of the 1960s. The album of the same name also

included drug favorites, ‘‘The Trip,’’ and the ominous ‘‘Season of the

Witch.’’ Later that year, Donovan released ‘‘Mellow Yellow’’ (which

reached the number two spot with lines whispered by Paul McCartney).

Baby boomers everywhere debated whether the lyrics advocated

smoking banana peels, although Donovan later claimed the song

concerned an electric dildo. His subtle drug references endeared him

to the hippie movement, though some complained that his songs were

mawkish, the lyrics overloaded with images of trees, sunny days, and

laughing children.

Donovan seemed omnipresent in the late 1960s, hanging out

with the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, and Dylan, and parodied in Peter,

Paul and Mary’s ‘‘I Dig Rock ’n’ Roll Music.’’ The hits kept coming,

including the druggie ‘‘Epistle to Dippy,’’ and ‘‘Young Girl Blues,’’

with its perfectly captured sense of rock ennui set off by the shocking-

for-the-times sexual imagery. He was a ‘‘must’’ to headline the

Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but his visa was revoked due to a drug

charge. He then traveled to India at the same time as the Beatles to

study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Shortly thereafter, he public-

ly renounced drug use and requested that his followers substitute

meditation for getting stoned. Donovan now appeared on stage in

ﬂowing robes with love beads; one album cover depicted him, scepter

in hand, in a ceremonial barge at England’s romantic Bodiam Castle,

a leaf-strewn lake in the foreground.

Nowhere was Donovan’s versatility better displayed than in the

hit singles he penned in rapid succession in 1968. His acoustic skill

was featured in the sweet hymn to childhood, ‘‘Jennifer Juniper’’; in

‘‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven,’’ the soft, layered harmonies con-

sisted of little more than the names of exotic colors, and the song later

gained wide circulation as the ubiquitous advertising jingle for Love

cosmetics. At the other end of the popular music spectrum, the drug/

fairy tale imagery of the Top Ten hit ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man,’’ featured

Donovan’s distinctive, tremulous intonation against layers of Jimmy

Page’s wailing guitars. Three-quarters of the future Led Zeppelin

group played on the single, and they later used the same contrast

between acoustic and electric sound to great effect.

Donovan’s work continually displayed an original bent and a

desire to move beyond traditional popular forms while retaining

commercial appeal. ‘‘There is a Mountain,’’ a hypnotic calypso-

based song with lyrics inspired by Japanese haiku, reached the top

ﬁfteen in 1967, and he also borrowed successfully from West Indian

traditions in ‘‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’’ (1970). In 1969, the unique, albeit

bizarre story-song ‘‘Atlantis’’ was the last of his efforts to make the

top ten. He also experimented with jazz-based sound, most noticeably

in ‘‘Goo Goo Barabajagal (Love is Hot),’’ a searing collaboration

with the Jeff Beck Group that marked the end of his string of

popular hits.

Ironically, just as the singer-songwriter movement seemed to

peak in the early 1970s, Donovan completely fell from commercial

grace. A critical backlash intensiﬁed after he released a double album

of children’s songs, and the underrated album Open Road in 1970

failed to stem the decline. After his sparsely attended 1971 American

tour, he became involved with movies, and wrote scores for, among

others, Franco Zefﬁrelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973 ). His early

1970s albums met with mixed critical acclaim and declining sales.

Among these was 7-Tease (1974), a conceptual album about a young

hippie and his search for inner peace, which also toured as a stage

revue with some collaboration from David Bowie. By 1980 Donovan

had ceased to be a concert attraction and lacked any major record

company afﬁliation. He recorded only sporadically in the next decade.

After several inactive years, the musician enjoyed a minor

renaissance in the 1990s. The spacey British dance band Happy

Mondays brought Donovan back into favor by praising his work and

touring with him. In 1991, they included an irreverent tribute to

Donovan on Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches; the hit album precipitat-

ed a ﬂood of Donovan reissues. There was considerable interest in

Sutras, Donovan’s ‘‘comeback’’ effort in 1996, but the purely acous-

tic work, ﬁlled with cosmically sincere and occasionally cloying

material, found no audience.

Donovan will undoubtedly be forever associated with naive

psychedelia. This is unfortunate, because he was a consistently

imaginative lyricist who pioneered novel sounds such as Caribbean

forms long before such work became fashionable. His popular music

career may have ﬁt the typical rock star paradigm, but the best of his

work remains uniquely original.

—Jon Sterngass

URTHER READING:

Donovan. Troubadour: The Deﬁnitive Collection, 1964-1976, com-

pact disc. Epic/Legacy E2K 46986, 1992.

DOONESBURYENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

747

Friedenberg, Edgar. ‘‘Current Patterns of a Generational Conﬂict.’’

Journal of Social Issues. 25, 1969, 21-38.

Leitch, Donovan. Dry Songs and Scribbles. Garden City, New York,

Doubleday, 1971.

The Doobie Brothers

The Doobie Brothers, or ‘‘Doobies,’’ are a California-based

rock band, formed in 1970, whose most popular singles stand among

the deﬁnitive songs in 1970s rock and roll. Their hits ‘‘Listen to the

Music,’’ ‘‘Long Train Running,’’ ‘‘China Grove,’’ and ‘‘Takin’ It to

the Streets’’ all possess the trademark upbeat, easygoing, Doobie

Brothers sound, inﬂuenced by R&B and soul. Their two number one

hits, ‘‘Black Water’’ (1975) and ‘‘What a Fool Believes’’ (1979)

have become soft-rock classics. Not quite as original or as inﬂuential

as the Eagles, the Allman Brothers, or Steely Dan, the Doobie

Brothers must yet be counted among the best of the American light

rock and country rock groups of the 1970s. Successful on stage as

well as over the airwaves, they continued to tour after the peak of their

popularity had passed, and still released occasional albums throughout

the 1980s and 1990s.

—Dave Goldweber

URTHER READING:

Bego, Mark. The Doobie Brothers. New York, Fawcett, 1980.

Christgau, Robert. Rock Albums of the ’70s. New York, Da Ca-

po, 1981.

Edwards, John W. Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1970-1979. Jefferson,

McFarland, 1993.

Doonesbury

On October 26, 1970, Garry Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury

debuted in 28 newspapers around the United States, revolutionizing

the language and cultural signiﬁcance of cartoon art forever with its

depth of focus, breadth of satirical targets, and richness of character

development. From its roots as a Yale Daily News strip satirizing

college life, Doonesbury expanded the horizons of its content and its

popularity until, almost 30 years after its ﬁrst national appearance, it

was a feature in over 1,350 newspapers across the country.

Following on ground broken by Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Trudeau

challenged the deﬁnition of the comic page as escape and silliness by

bringing sharp satire, social commentary, and adult issues into his

strip. His heroes, and their quirky responses to the ups and downs of

life in the late twentieth century, have stood the test of time,

chronicling the changing priorities and dilemmas of the baby-boom

generation from college into middle age. His style of cartooning, with

its panels of complex artwork and extensive bubble-free dialogue, has

been much imitated.

In the 1970s, the initial Doonesbury focus was on the inhabitants

of an anonymous eastern college campus and its nearby Walden

commune. Conservative, gung-ho football star B.D. (a tribute to a real

Yale athlete, Brian Dowling) and his loopy, girl-crazy roommate

Mike Doonesbury formed the initial core of the strip. Soon they were

joined by ‘‘Megaphone Mark’’ Slackmeyer, a campus radical, Cal-

vin, a revolutionary Black Panther, and Zonker, a stoned, irreverent

hippie. B.D.’s cheerleader girlfriend Boopsie, and her intellectual

roommate Nicole have perpetual disagreements about women’s lib-

eration, while the clueless college president constantly tries to side-

step controversy. As time passes, Mike learns about economics,

racism, and class when he tutors a savvy inner-city black kid, while

B.D. takes his raging drive to win from the football ﬁeld to Vietnam,

where he is captured by Phred, a charming Viet Cong terrorist who

teaches him something about the history of Vietnam and the absurdi-

ties of war. Those still left at school move to a communal house on

idyllic Walden Puddle, where they are joined by still more refugees of

the turbulent 1970. One such is Joanie Caucus, an older housewife

who has left her stiﬂing life and her husband behind to return to

college, and becomes the spokesperson for women’s liberation while

she tries to get into law school.

Across the decades, these core characters, and many others,

tracked the trends and current events of their time and place in history,

graduating from college, surviving the yuppie years, and experienc-

ing marriage, divorce, and parenthood. Through many thousands of

ingeniously created panels, Doonesbury has offered complex insights

into personal relationships together with incisive social commentary.

Joanie Caucus, remarried to Washington, D.C. columnist Rick Redfern,

bemoans the difﬁculty of non-sexist child rearing as her young son,

holding the doll she gave him for Christmas as if it were the riﬂe she

would never buy him, aims it straight at her. Radio talk-show host

Mark Slackmeyer, still the leftist radical, comes out as gay late in the

1980s, but his boyfriend is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who gets

along with Mark’s right wing father better than Mark ever did. The

quandaries of everyday modern life ring true, as does Trudeau’s

ironic, wish-I’d-said-that dialogue.

Interspersed with the ‘‘personal’’ stories of the characters are

direct visitations from public ﬁgures. A favorite Doonesbury scenario

is a four-panel strip with the White House in each panel, unchanged

except for dialogue. In these, presidents from Nixon to Clinton are

effectively skewered by the words Trudeau puts in their mouths. In

later years, with a technique possibly inspired by the icons of modern

computer jargon, presidents and others have been represented only by

meaningful icons—a ﬂoating feather for vice-president Dan Quayle,

for example, or a buttery wafﬂe for Bill Clinton, proving perhaps that

a symbol may be worth a thousand caricatures.

One of the most powerful symbols Trudeau created is that of Mr.

Butts, the talking spokes-cigarette for the tobacco lobby. Mr. Butts

originally appeared in a troubled Mike Doonesbury’s nightmares

when Mike, by then an advertising agent, is asked to design a

campaign to improve tobacco’s image. The cynical Mr. Butts has

reappeared frequently thereafter to lampoon the tobacco lobby,

becoming a powerful image in the anti-smoking campaign. Indeed,

Doonesbury has frequently been a catalyst for change as well as

presaging events. Senator Bob Dole once called the strip the ‘‘best

source for what’s going on in Washington.’’ In 1971, well before the

conservative Reagan years, a forward-looking B.D. called Ronald

Reagan his ‘‘hero.’’ In 1984, almost 10 years before Congressman

Gingrich became Speaker of the House, another character worried

DOORS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

748

that he would ‘‘wake up someday in a country run by Newt Gingrich.’’

Repressive laws in the wealthy town of Palm Beach, Florida, allowed

people of color to be stopped regularly by police, and required

domestic servants to register with local authorities. After the bright

light of Doonesbury’s satire was focused on the town’s policies for a

time, the laws were repealed.

Because of its mission to attack difﬁcult issues and mock public

ﬁgures, Doonesbury has always roused controversy. Many newspa-

pers place the strip on their editorial page, considering it inappropriate

for the comics, while others regularly pull individual strips when the

content is judged too extreme. In the 1990s, when Doonesbury came

out with a series of strips in support of legalization of marijuana for

medical use, the attorney general of California railed against the strip

and tried unsuccessfully to have it pulled from papers in the state. It is

this hard-hitting political satire that earned Garry Trudeau the Pulitzer

Prize for political cartoon commentary in 1975, the ﬁrst time that

honor had ever been conferred on a comic strip.

Trudeau, born into a family of physicians in New York City in

1948, came honestly by his gift for trouble-causing satire—his great-

great-grandfather was driven out of New York because of the carica-

tured sculptures he made of his colleagues. Known for his avoidance

of the press, Trudeau, an avid student and researcher of the U.S.

political scene, also writes editorials and draws editorial cartoons for

the New York Times. He has written ﬁlm scripts, and the book for a

Broadway musical of Doonesbury in 1983, though many critics did

not think the cartoon translated well to the stage. He has also created

Doonesbury television specials and a musical revue called Rap

Master Ronnie, spooﬁng the Reagan years. For decades, he refused to

compromise the principles of his creation by allowing merchandising,

but he ﬁnally succumbed in 1998, when he permitted Doonesbury

products to be sold, with all proceeds going to the campaign for literacy.

In 1988, when president George Bush said of Trudeau, ‘‘He

speaks for a bunch of Brie-tasting, Chardonnay-sipping elitists,’’ he

was simply referring to the most negative baby boomer stereotype of

the 1980s, the pampered yuppie. But Trudeau’s strip speaks for more

than the elite, clearly addressing a far wider audience than liberal

Americans of a certain generation. Doonesbury ﬁlls a need in

the American press for progressive readers who appreciate the

demystiﬁcation of complex issues through no-nonsense, direct lan-

guage and humor. Though, by the late 1990s, many other comics had

appeared that attempted to ﬁll this need (even one especially for

conservative readers), Doonesbury paved the way for these, and for a

comics page that explores adult issues through humor. The characters

who inhabit the panels of Doonesbury are old friends to its readers,

and one of Trudeau’s great talents is his ability to make these

characters—with the possible exception of faceless politicos—lov-

able to his readers. They keep reading to enjoy a cynical and satirical

take on current events. And they keep reading to see how life is

turning out for the old gang.

—Tina Gianoulis

URTHER READING:

Satin, Allan D. A Doonesbury Index: 1970-1983. Metuchen, New

Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1985.

Trudeau, G. B. Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury.

Kansas City, Andrews and McMeel, 1995.

The Doors

With their mix of music, poetry, theater, and daring, the Doors

emerged as America’s most darkly innovative, eerily mesmerizing

musical group of the 1960s. Founded concurrently with the English

invasion, the college-educated, Los Angeles-based group stood apart

from the folk-rock movement of Southern California and the peace

and ﬂower power bands of San Francisco. In exploring death, doom,

fear, and sex, their music reﬂected the hedonistic side of the era.

Writing for the Saturday Evening Post in 1967, Joan Didion called

them ‘‘the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic

sex.’’ The group’s ﬂamboyant lead singer, Jim Morrison, said,

‘‘Think of us as erotic politicians.’’ A seminal rock ﬁgure, Morrison’s

dark good looks and overt sexuality catapulted him to sex symbol

status, akin to that of Elvis Presley.

Morrison’s provocative stage presence, combined with the group’s

mournfully textured, blues-rooted music, suggested the musical thea-

ter of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and the edginess of the avant-

garde troupe, The Living Theater. But the complicated, clearly

troubled Morrison could not overcome personal demons, which he

sated with drugs and alcohol. By late 1968, his frequently ‘‘stoned’’

demeanor became off-putting, his on-stage rants pretentious. His

behavior at a Miami concert in March 1969, and his resulting arrest on

charges including indecent exposure, represented not only his down-

fall but also the Doors’ looming disintegration. But if the group’s rise

and fall was fast and furious, encompassing just four years, their

anarchist inﬂuence is undeniable. Their hard-driving music bridged

the heavy-metal 1970s; their murky, cerebral lyrics spanned the new

wave 1980s, and the alternative 1990s, and Jim Morrison remains the

undisputed forerunner of the sexy, leather-clad, on-the-edge rock martyr.

The Doors’ saga began in the summer of 1965 on the beach at

Venice, California, where singer-musician Ray Manzarek ran into his

former UCLA classmate, Jim Morrison. After listening to Morrison

sing the haunting lyrics to a song he had written called ‘‘Moonlight

Drive,’’ Manzarek proposed they start a band, and ‘‘make a million

dollars.’’ Manzarek then approached two other musicians who were

studying with him at a Maharishi meditation center. Thus, with

Manzarek on piano and organ, songwriter Robbie Krieger on guitar,

John Densmore on drums, and Morrison before the microphone, the

group was in place. It was Morrison who came up with their moniker,

derived from a William Blake passage, which had inspired the title of

Aldous Huxley’s book about his mescaline experiences, The Doors of

Perception. As paraphrased by Morrison: ‘‘There are things that are

known and things that are unknown, in between [are] the doors.’’

Working their way through the Los Angeles club scene, the

Doors initially performed blues and rock ’n’ roll standards, in

addition to material written by Morrison. They were playing the

London Fog on the Sunset Strip, making ﬁve dollars apiece on

weeknights, ten dollars apiece weekends, when they were spotted by a

female talent booker who was especially struck by the star quality of

the lead singer. Hired to work the Strip’s popular Whiskey a Go Go,

the Doors became the club’s unofﬁcial house band, second-billed to

groups including the Turtles, Them, and Love. During sets, the group

was an anomaly; the four members appeared disparate, as if each were

on a plane all his own, but their sound had a synchronicity. And there

was no denying the allure of the group’s pretty-boy singer.