Talk:Mount Rushmore in popular culture

Attribution

Some material on this page initially appeared in the article, Mount Rushmore. Edit history may be found in the history of that article. bd2412 T 01:48, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Addition Suggestions

Post suggestions for references here if you're not 100% sure if or where in the article it should go.

Would the Plumber complex under Mount Rushmore on Ben 10 qualify? Rushmore has played a key role in multiple episodes of the series, including "Secrets," "Truth", the "Ben 10,000" episodes, and the "Ben 10 vs. The Negative 10" double-length episode. DanMat6288 (talk) 02:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

• It's in there, in the secret bases section (funny, actually I added it literally five minutes before you asked!). bd2412 T 19:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Notre Dame Mount Rushmore In the mid-90s, students at Notre Dame created a T shirt (which they do annualy to coincide with the start of football season) featuring Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Knute Rockne and Lou Holtz (in the Roosevelt role). A pic and mention of this would be a solid addition to the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.115.155.55 (talk) 19:07, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Combine Suggestions

I have 3 ideas:

• wouldn’t it be more appropriate to add the "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" comment to the "Appearances set in the future" section? I feel it fits more there because it does take place in the future (the year 2293) and shows a positive contrast to the mostly negative outlook of the section?
• maybe rename the section "Replacement or destruction of the existing faces" to "Replacement or Addition of existing faces" and list everything in the original "Replacement or destruction of the existing faces" and "addition of faces" sections together. Move the Mario and pilotwing facts to just the "In video games" section to help expand that more?

maybe moving "Appearances set in the future" into the "Other appearance" since its so small? If we add the Star trek picture it can help spread out the pictures?

Pwojdacz (talk) 06:17, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

• My thinking is that the Star Trek appearance is significant precisely because of the addition of the fifth face. That's one of the most significant things about depictions of Mount Rushmore, the tendency of people to seek the symbolism of altering, adding to, or subtracting from it. bd2412 T 06:26, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
  • is it uncommon to mention things twice? Pwojdacz (talk) 06:39, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
    • What I've done is to give the full description the first time, and then make a brief note of it the second. I see no harm in that (it could go either way). But the Star Trek setting is not notable simply for showing the monument still exists in a few hundred years, but for having that fifth face (symbolizing events in that time). bd2412 T 06:44, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Family guy and NbyNW

There has been some reverting of the statement "During the scene, Peter refers to one of the faces as "President Rushmore"". I feel it fits but I'm newer at this. Pwojdacz (talk) 06:24, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

• I think it should stay in, but I'm not going to start an edit war over it. The removing party correctly notes that it is not really relevant to the "North By Northwest" section. bd2412 T 06:36, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Another MAD Magazine one

MAD parodied the "Keep America Clean" campaign by printing a picture of the mountain on the back cover, covered in simulated graffiti. I don't remember which issue, I think it was in the late 70's. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 06:44, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

At Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg, Germany

See MiWuLa website and Google Images --84.60.147.95 (talk) 12:05, 28 January 2009 (UTC) (Vossi75 @ de.wikipedia)

What about destruction and repair?

In Marvel Comics, a battle with a red version of the Hulk caused Lincoln's face to fall off. It was swiftly repaired. And IIRC, the entire mountain was destroyed three times (In Captain Marvel, Hulk and Secret Wars) and repaired each and every time. The 'second' Hulk one was the combination of a terrorist attack and later, Bruce Banner pretending to be crazy to defeat a villain. Anyway, I think it's all notable but with the exception of the Red Hulk (see 'Thundra' 'Marvel Comics') I don't have the refs and I wouldn't know where to put them in the article as it is now. 10:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

• If the proper references can be found, this material would be appropriate to include. bd2412 T 15:09, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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• South Dakota quarter, reverse side, 2006.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 20:43, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Unsourced or insufficiently sourced content removed from the article

In the universe of the Ben 10 franchise, Mount Rushmore is the location of the main Plumbers (a sort of intergalactic police force) complex, and plays a key role in multiple episodes of the series, including "Secrets", "Truth", the "Ben 10,000" episodes, and "Ben 10 vs. The Negative 10". The monument is inadvertently destroyed by Upchuck in the latter episode, during the final battle with the Forever King. Another group shown as having a secret base inside the mountain is the "All Purpose Enforcement Squad" of Young Justice, in the DC Universe series, with the team accidentally damaging Washington's head when they break into the facility to rescue their teammate Secret. The comic book superhero Mister Majestic, a character in the Wildstorm Productions universe, also had a secret base of operations inside Mount Rushmore, analogous to Superman's "Fortress of Solitude". In Ultraman: The Adventure Begins, a 1981 animated movie jointly produced by Hanna-Barbera and Tsuburaya Productions, the heroic Ultra Force is headquartered within Mount Rushmore.

In the early 1980s television series, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a flashback sequence in the episode, "Testimony of a Traitor", shows Rogers meeting with the President of the United States in a secret base inside Mount Rushmore.

Despite its remoteness,

Alan Weisman, in his 2007 book The World Without Us, suggests that the Mount Rushmore memorial could last up to 7.2 million years and thus be one of the longest-lasting human artifacts.

Because of this enduring structure, it has appeared in some science fiction set in the distant future.

Replacement or destruction of the existing faces

• In the 2000 Courage The Cowardly Dog episode "Family Business", Muriel wondered what her nephew Basil did with Mount Rushmore (since he stole the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt). The camera zooms out with the president's heads underneath the house.
• In the 1992 film Buried on Sunday, an unarmed nuclear missile is accidentally launched and it breaks the nose of Theodore Roosevelt off before landing next to a group of bikers in Sturgis, who decide to trade it for speed.
• In the 2011 film The Muppets, Crazy Harry dynamite and destroys Lincoln's face and replace with his own.
• In the 1996 film Mars Attacks!, the Martians in a UFO carve their leaders' faces into Mount Rushmore, replacing the Presidents' heads.
• The cover of the Chipmunks' 1982 album, Chipmunk Rock, depicts Roosevelt replaced by Alvin the Chipmunk.
• In a viral video teaser for the Watchmen film, "The Keene Act and You", a brief scene depicts Richard Nixon in place of Abraham Lincoln.
• In the 2005 miniseries Category 7: The End of the World, global warming causes the moisture inside the mountain to expand, which causes the head of George Washington to break off.
• In the 2006 miniseries 10.5 Apocalypse, an earthquake hits the site as a fault-line begins to recreate the Western Interior Seaway, destroying the faces of the presidents, which eventually fall.
• In an episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Ned Bigby and his friend, Jennifer "Moze" Mosely, collaborate on a project involving Mount Rushmore with Ned in place of Thomas Jefferson. By the end of the episode, the project gets ruined after Ned frees himself after getting stuck and the project falls over.
• In Robert Ferrigno's Assassin trilogy, fundamentalist Islamic clerics dynamite Mount Rushmore in a failed attempt to destroy it.
• In the 1993 Roger Rabbit short Trail Mix-Up, Roger, Baby Herman, a bear, and a beaver are sent flying by an erupting geyser, and crash into Mount Rushmore, destroying it (the faces comically screaming before the crash).
• In Poul Anderson's 1973 dystopian novelette The Pugilist, the United States is defeated and conquered by the Soviet Union. The puppet American government installed by the Soviets orders what is left of the US Army to turn its artillery at the Heads on Mount Rushmore and destroy them.
• In the beginning of the "Boom Boom" trailer for the 2014 video game Wolfenstein: The New Order, Mount Rushmore is seen being destroyed by Nazi soldiers after their victory in World War II, with a general observing the destruction of the landmark.
• In the 2009 film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, four colossal vanilla cream pies hit the faces of the statues of the presidents on the mountain, except for the one of Abraham Lincoln. Which got hit in the back of the head referencing his assassination.
• In the 1964 film, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Don Knott's title character is transformed into a fish resembling a tilefish. He helps the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. For these exploits, his tilefish image is added (during a fantasy sequence) to Mount Rushmore, to Lincoln's right (viewer's perspective).
• In the 1978 Judge Dredd comic "The Cursed Earth" two faces are added: President Jimmy Carter to the left of Washington, and the leader of a group of mutants to the right of Lincoln.
• In the American television sitcom ALF (TV series), Kate dreams that Alf becomes president and has his face is added to Mt. Rushmore (Episode: "Hail to the Chief").
• In the final scene of the 2003 film Head of State, fictional president Mays Gilliam's face has been added into Mount Rushmore next to George Washington.
• In the opening titles of the 2001 British satirical animated series 2DTV, George W. Bush erects his face in the gap between Roosevelt and Lincoln. A nuclear warhead is then deployed from the top of Bush's sculpture, much to the shock of the other presidents.
• In a deleted scene from the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a fifth face carved into the mountain is that of an African-American woman (named in the novelization as Sarah Susan Eckert).
• Prior to the retirement of Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant in 1982, fans of the University of Alabama football team generated an image with Bryant's face added to the left of Lincoln.
• In the popular cartoon, Phineas and Ferb, the character Candace gets her face carved into Mount Rushmore by her brothers for her birthday, but afterwards, lava destroys it.
• In the Doctor Who episode Last of the Timelords the Master is described as having himself carved into Mount Rushmore after he conquered the Earth.
• In the 2019 limited series Years and Years, the likeness of Donald Trump (depicted in the series as having won re-election in 2020) is mentioned as having been carved into Mount Rushmore by 2027.

Imitation of the style

The title is an obvious pun, the music genre of the album being rock music, while the monument is carved from what is essentially a very large rock. In turn, the English cover of the volume 4 DVD release of the anime series Cromartie High School (entitled "Mount Rockmore") is a parody of the Deep Purple album. Here, the anime characters' faces replace those of the band members.

The fictional nuclear-equipped warship Outer Haven, in the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, features a Mount Rushmore-esque sculpture of the four "Snake" characters that have appeared thorough the Metal Gear series (Solidus Snake, Old Snake, Liquid Snake and Big Boss).

In the 1994 live action version of Richie Rich starring Macaulay Culkin, the Rich family has their own version of Mount Rushmore, named Mount Richmore in the movie, built on their property with their own faces sculpted into it. It becomes the setting for the film's finale, echoing the finale of North by Northwest.

The WWE had their own version of Mount Rushmore consisting of the best wrestlers in the company's history. The ones sculpted into the mountain are The Undertaker, Steve Austin, John Cena, and Hulk Hogan.

In Series 9, episode 7 (A Cuddle) of Taskmaster, the contestants David Baddiel, Ed Gamble, Jo Brand, Katy Wix and Rose Matafeo are tasked to 'forge the best Mount Rushmore'. Baddiel and Wix were the joint winners of the task with five points each.

Other appearances

Alan Weisman, in his 2007 book The World Without Us, suggests that the Mount Rushmore memorial could last up to 7.2 million years and thus be one of the longest-lasting human artifacts. Because of this enduring structure, it has appeared in some science fiction set in the distant future:

• A 1980 episode of the post-apocalyptic cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian, "Attack of the Amazon Women", uses Mount Rushmore as its setting.
• The altered appearance in the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is also a future setting, specifically the late 23rd century.
• In Nelson S. Bond's "Meg the Priestess" series, the short story "Pilgrimage" involves a journey to the "Place of the Gods": Jarg, Ibrim, Taamuz and Tedhi, revealed to be Mount Rushmore.
• The speculative documentary series Life After People predicts that, while the faces of Mount Rushmore are expected to still be recognizable in 10,000 years, in five million years the sculpture will no longer exist due to erosion.

The Nintendo 64 video game Pilotwings 64 (which features a level based on United States geography and landmarks) shows the monument in the approximate location of South Dakota, but replaces Washington's head with that of Nintendo's mascot Mario. The player can change Mario into his rival Wario by crashing into his face or by shooting him from the Gyrocopter.

Mount Rushmore has been featured prominently on South Dakota's automobile license plates since 1952, and the flag of South Dakota was changed in 1992 to feature the phrase "THE MOUNT RUSHMORE STATE", although the image on the flag does not include the monument.

[Red Dwarf content] The monument is half-buried underneath billions of glass bottles, Earth having been turned into a garbage dump for the human-colonised Solar System in the centuries after Lister entered stasis aboard Red Dwarf.

In literature

• In Donald E. Westlake's 1990 crime novel Drowned Hopes, protagonist John Dortmunder climbs the mountain and into Abraham Lincoln's nose to retrieve a stash of stolen money hidden there years earlier.

In theme parks

• Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls at Universal's Islands of Adventure featuring the parody of Mount Rushmore.
• Mount Rushmore is one of the landmarks reproduced at the Window of the World theme park located in the western part of the city of Shenzhen in the People's Republic of China.
• A version made out of 1.5 million Lego bricks is featured at Legoland Billund in Denmark. The one at Legoland California has minifigures that move a giant cotton swab in and out of Washington's right ear.

In comics and cartoons

• In the Justice League Adventures comics, Superman is shown as going to Mount Rushmore to seek solitude on at least one occasion.
• Several Don Martin cartoons in MAD magazine feature Mount Rushmore gags. One from 1965 shows a presidential barber being urgently dispatched from Washington, D.C. The barber - dangling precariously from the rope ladder - reaches out with his scissors and snips the stem of a small tree growing from Abraham Lincoln's left nostril as though it were a nose hair. A gag from 1973 shows helicopter tourists flying to the back side of the mountain, where the Presidents are kneeling as if they are peering through holes in a fence. A 1976 entry depicts work crews cleaning the monument. While some workers clean the Presidents’ heads, other workers descend by elevator into a huge cavernous underground chamber to clean the Presidents’ shoes and boots.
• In the manga Naruto, the heads of all Hokage (Leader of the Hidden Leaf Village) are carved into a mountain in the background of the main village.
• The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode, "The Big Blowout" shows Mount Rushmore and depicts one scene showing Krang replacing George Washington. Also, Krang attempts to blow it up, just to get the Turtles to prevent it and therefore abandoning their attempt to break into the Technodrome.
• In the James Bond Jr episode, "Far Out West", the villain Dr. No plots to destroy Mount Rushmore with a laser weapon.
• In the 2005 Family Guy episode, "North by North Quahog", Mount Rushmore is featured as being the location of Mel Gibson's home where Peter Griffin and his wife Lois are chased by him. After he falls to his apparent death, Peter and Lois make out on top of Washington's head (to which Washington mentions this to Jefferson and Roosevelt, who both then taunt Lincoln).
• In the animated sitcom South Park, there is a picture of Eric Cartman and his mother Liane in the Mount Rushmore in his living room.
• In the Dexter's Laboratory episode, "Rushmore Rumble", Dexter and Mandark bring the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington faces respectively on Mount Rushmore to life and make them fight each other to determine who is the best.
• In the American Dad! episode, "Honey, I'm Homeland", a leftist terrorist cell attempts to blow up the faces to re-sculpt Washington, Roosevelt and Lincoln into those of leftist heroes including Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Captain Planet.
• Mount Rushmore also appears on the Cartoon Network media franchise Ben 10 as a Plumbers base. It was destroyed by Ben as Upchuck two times,
• In an episode of The Berenstain Bears, the Bear family visited a monument that was obviously a parody of Mount Rushmore, featuring a scene inside a replica of Abraham Lincoln's ear.
• In the reboot of Animaniacs, Washington's head gets replaced with the Brain's head in Season 1 Episode 1, with the other heads pushed to the side, much to their annoyance.
• During season four of Daria, in the end credits of select episodes showing various alter egos of the show's characters, the Fashion Club is depicted on Mount Rushmore instead of the four Presidents. Sandi, the club's president, is shown where Washington is; Tiffany, Stacy and Quinn are in place of Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, respectively.

User:TompaDompa's version

Mount Rushmore in South Dakota has appeared in several films, comic books, and television series. Its functions vary from settings for action scenes to the site of hidden locations. Its most famous appearance is as the location of the final chase scene in the 1959 film North by Northwest. It is used as a secret base of operations by the protagonists in the 2004 film Team America: World Police, and the secret underground city of Cíbola is located there in the 2007 film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. In some films, the presidential faces are replaced with others; examples include the 1980 film Superman II and the 1996 film Mars Attacks! where the villains add their faces to the monument, and the 2003 film Head of State where the newly-elected president's face is added. In works showing attacks on landmarks to signify the scope of a threat, Mount Rushmore is a common target; examples include the aforementioned facial replacements in Superman II and Mars Attacks! as well as natural disasters in works like the 2006 miniseries 10.5: Apocalypse and terrorist attacks as in the 1997 film The Peacekeeper. An atypical representation of the monument appears in the 2013 film Nebraska, where instead of being treated with reverence it is criticized for being unfinished.

References

Music and baseball

This article has noted the fact that Mount Rushmore is referenced in music and in the Washington Nationals for over ten years, which is the very definition of longstanding content. A clear consensus is needed to remove this content. Anyone who has an argument for removing it is welcome to make their case that music and baseball are not part of popular culture. BD2412 T 00:23, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

It was merged to Mount Rushmore#Legacy and commemoration by Piotrus on 15 May with these two edits, the edit summary for the first one stating merged to Mount_Rushmore#Legacy_and_commemoration. There is no source that ties any of this to popculture. TompaDompa (talk) 00:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Then why don't you go over to the article Popular culture and make the argument that the sections Popular culture#Music and Popular culture#Sports should be removed, because it seems apparent that these things are aspects of popular culture. BD2412 T 00:40, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

@BD2412 Per WP:IPC and MOS:CULTURALREFS, I think we need to show how those things are relevant to popculture, through non-trivial analysis. Otherwise we risk this again becoming a list of random mentions that MR appeared in such and such. The stamps seem totally irrelevant. As is the baseball trivia. The music might be rescuable if better (in-depth) discussion is found. So please tell us (quote is ok) which source says that the Daugherty's piece or the Protest the Hero piece discusses cultural significance of the monument? The part that the latter ""addresses the violent colonial history involved in the sculpting of Mount Rushmore", critiquing the monument as a..." seems ok, and I' like to hear User:TompaDompa thoughts about leaving it. The rest, right now, should go. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:30, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I would remove it. It's analysis, yes, but it's fundamentally—and crucially—analysis of the song "Little Snakes" by Protest the Hero, not of Mount Rushmore in popular culture (it might be appropriate to move the analysis to an article on the song, album, or band). It could perhaps be used as an example of popular culture criticizing Mount Rushmore for its history, if we have proper sourcing for that being a thing in more general terms.

An additional problem is that the section is currently labelled "In music", which is clearly out of WP:PROPORTION to how much music is covered in sources on the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture—the ones I've come across basically focus exclusively on visual media such as film and television (and not, say, literature and music). I would be happy to be proven wrong, if anybody has located sources on the topic that I've missed. TompaDompa (talk) 17:38, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Sources

Note: This was copied from User talk:TompaDompa 00:26, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Sources that are generally permissible for use in Wikipedia articles do not suddenly become impermissible with respect to articles in disfavored subjects. If you think a better source is needed for a proposition in an article, tag it as needing a better source. If that tag is removed, do not restore it. Rather, begin a discussion on the talk page with respect to that source, and seek to gain consensus that a different source is needed. BD2412 T 19:06, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I take it this is about Mount Rushmore in popular culture. The issue is not that the sources is unusable. The issue is—as you well know because Piotrus and I both pointed it out to you during the AfD—one of WP:MINORASPECTS, WP:COATRACK, and WP:OFFTOPIC. The foundation for a Mount Rushmore in popular culture needs to be sources on, well, Mount Rushmore in popular culture. You can't just assemble a bunch of sources on disparate topics that mention Mount Rushmore; that does not produce a proper encyclopedic article on the topic, it produces a TV Tropes article. The guideline MOS:POPCULT is explicit on this: Cultural references about a subject should not be included simply because they exist. Rather, all such references should be discussed in at least one reliable secondary or tertiary source which specifically links the cultural item to the subject of the article. This source should cover the subject of the article in some depth; it should not be a source that merely mentions the subject's appearance in a movie, song, television show, or other cultural item. Likewise, the essay WP:CARGO notes that Simply amassing raw data, and hoping that an encyclopaedia article will magically arise from it, doesn't work. [...] Collecting raw data does not produce an analysis. The raw data can be examples, that demonstrate the analysis. (There are some elephant jokes in elephant joke, for example.) But simply amassing huge piles of them doesn't make an analysis. What makes an analysis is finding the works of experts in the field who have done analyses of the raw data, and then condensing and summarizing their published analyses into the article. (Collecting raw data and then producing our own novel analyses of those data is, of course, original research that is forbidden here.)

The version of the article at the time the AfD was closed was, not to put too fine a point on it, really bad. It had a terrible over-reliance on verbatim quotes (sometimes unattributed, sometimes attributed to "a source" or similar phrasing). It had a bunch of unsourced content. It had a bunch of content that turned out to fail verification. It quoted sources out of context. It had quite a problem with straying off-topic with the North by Northwest section especially (also, why two pictures for that section?). It unnecessarily duplicated the scope of Mount Rushmore#Legacy and commemoration. And of course, it included a bunch of examples without much regard as to the sourcing and WP:PROPORTION issues mentioned above, seemingly indeed included simply because they exist contrary to MOS:POPCULT. It all looks decidedly amateurish and is rather an embarrassment to Wikipedia. Indeed, the AfD close explicitly said keep but continue cleanup. If you have specific ideas about how these massive issues might be addressed, feel free to either make those suggestions on the talk page or implement them yourself. Otherwise, this just comes off as an indiscriminate knee-jerk revert of the necessary cleanup I had undertaken. TompaDompa (talk) 20:48, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Nevertheless, your drive by tagging and removal of sourced content are bordering on bad faith. Verbatim quotes are, of course, permissible in Wikipedia articles—if you look at our GA and FA articles, they contain numerous examples of these in greater measure than in this article. I really don't know why you think this your conduct towards this article is permissible when no one else in Wikipedia is behaving like this. I would suggest that you focus on finding sources and building the article. Improve, rather than trying to destroy. BD2412 T 21:13, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

It's not really drive-by tagging when I tag issues that I have previously identified and addressed before you reverted me wholesale, now is it? I could equally well say that you seem to be acting in bad faith by needlessly impeding the necessary cleanup, and in doing so restoring misrepresentations of sources, quote mining, original research, and so on. But I don't think you did it out of malice—I think you did it because you saw that the article was suddenly way shorter and figured that I had been excessive in my cleanup. I did in fact locate sources, read the sources, assess due weight in WP:PROPORTION to the weight given by those sources, and rewrite the article based on that. This version may be brief, but it is free of the massive issues I pointed out above. That's not destroying, that's improving. I might suggest that it would be better to expand my version than to clean up your version all over again. TompaDompa (talk) 21:26, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I would suggest that you brush up on the permissibility of the use of quotes in articles, since your view of that topic seems to be alien to the view taken by the Wikipedia community. Beyond that, you have added a tag asserting things like grammar and spelling errors, which I would be very keen for you to point out. If you disagree with Wikipedia policy on permitting quotations, start an RfC to prohibit them, but start with the GA and FA articles that have more quotations than this one. The same thing with sources you disagree with.

This article has survived AfD with a "keep" outcome. It is here forever, now. It will not be deleted from Wikipedia, merged into another article, redirected, moved back to draft space, or otherwise removed from its status as an article for as long as Wikipedia exists. No amount of tags thrown on the page will change that fact. BD2412 T 21:36, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Stop implying I said things I never said, you're better than that. I know we use verbatim quotes occasionally, but an over-reliance on them makes for poorly written articles. We can improve articles by summarizing the sources in our own words rather than using verbatim quotes for that which can be paraphrased instead. Likewise, the issue here wasn't that Mount Rushmore's remoteness was unsourced, but that by saying Despite its remoteness, Mount Rushmore features as a monumental setting in a number of films we're implying that this is unexpected in light of its remoteness, and that WP:ANALYSIS needs to come from the sources. "Despite X, Y" is textbook WP:Synthesis if it doesn't come from the sources. As for the sources, we have MOS:POPCULT, the current phrasing of which was indeed the result of a very lengthy community-wide discussion. I'm not sure why you feel the need to say that the article will not be deleted from Wikipedia, merged into another article, redirected, moved back to draft space, or otherwise removed from its status as an article for as long as Wikipedia exists as if I wanted it deleted. If that were what I wanted, I wouldn't have spent so much time cleaning it up in accordance with the AfD close ("keep but continue cleanup"). What I want is to improve the quality. That can be done by adding good content, removing bad content, or rewriting bad content to turn it into good content. I have done all three. TompaDompa (talk) 22:14, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

As I was pinged. First, I think this discussion should be copied to the talk page of the article. Second, I mostly agree with TD that there is a lot of OR in the article. The topic is notable, but there is still a lot of OR, trivia and so on. I merged some off topic content and removed some triva, but I think more pruning is needed. Frankly, as I said before, what's rescuable here are just a few sentences. Given the keep verdict, fine, we can just have a stand-alone stub intead of merging it back, shrug. In theory, it can be expanded, we just have to be vigilant to ensure it will not start accumilating TVtropic fancruft of "the Mountain appeared in media x". --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:13, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Come on you guys, some of us really like popular culture pages and so do the readers (per daily views). What you call tropes, and yes, your viewpoint doesn't like them, others call quality well presented fun material. People often work on these for years. Mount Rushmore in pc is also special because it's about an artwork, a sculpture, a rare and well viewed topic for such a list. Please consider lightening up and stop taking WP guidelines as gospel-down-to-the-period as hammers to go in and harm well-loved and long-worked on pages. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:40, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Randy Kryn, and would also note that everything in this article is now sourced. Everything unsourced has been removed. Whether individual items longstanding in this article should be removed should be the subject of discussion and consensus. BD2412 T 00:46, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

WP:NPOV, of which WP:PROPORTION is part, is Wikipedia policy. Not only that, WP:NPOV clearly states that This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus. WP:PROPORTION says An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. You keep ducking this point. The subject of this article is Mount Rushmore in popular culture. If the individual items longstanding in this article get treated with a similar weight in the body of reliable, published material on the subject of Mount Rushmore in popular culture, they should stay. If not, they must go. TompaDompa (talk) 01:03, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

No one is "ducking this point"; we are merely having a disagreement, here in this discussion, about what is proportionate. The burden is on those seeking to remove longstanding sourced content to gain consensus on this point. The notion that this justifies removal of any mention at all of Mount Rushmore being referenced in music, or in a professional baseball team's long-running promotion, is purely destructive to the encyclopedia. BD2412 T 01:15, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Very well, I'll rephrase: you have thus far not corroborated the proportionality of including the various disputed pieces of content by citing sources on the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture that demonstrate that the coverage here is in WP:PROPORTION to their treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. And per WP:ONUS The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. TompaDompa (talk) 01:26, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I'll provide an example. The article states

...the song, "Little Snakes", by Protest The Hero, "addresses the violent colonial history involved in the sculpting of Mount Rushmore", critiquing the monument as a symbol of colonialism, referencing the genocide of indigenous peoples and the ownership of slaves by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

So far as I understand, there is no argument that the source from which this quote is taken and to which the other content is cited is not "reliable, published material". That leaves the question of whether it is "on the subject", but that would seem to be pretty directly answered by the fact that the source itself says that this is on the subject of Mount Rushmore. BD2412 T 01:55, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Well, no. It isn't. That's not a source on Mount Rushmore in popular culture, it's a source on the song (or rather the album more broadly). It may demonstrate that Mount Rushmore is an important aspect of the song, but it does not demonstrate that the song is an important aspect of the topic Mount Rushmore in popular culture (and the subject here is Mount Rushmore in popular culture, not just Mount Rushmore). One does not imply the other. This is precisely why MOS:POPCULT says This source should cover the subject of the article in some depth; it should not be a source that merely mentions the subject's appearance in a movie, song, television show, or other cultural item. I put it to you that the sources that do indeed cover the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture in some depth do not discuss this particular song (or at least the ones I have seen don't). TompaDompa (talk) 04:58, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

The source is about a song—a 2020 song, by the way—which is about Mount Rushmore, which the source makes clear. I certainly don't believe that it the guideline would require that any reliably sourced new event relating to an article must be in a source entirely about the subject of that article. This would mean that if, for example, Bill Barr were to write a memoir of his entire 40-year career, with some content on his two years working as Attorney General for Donald Trump (but, obviously not being entirely about Trump), and a reliable source reviewing that book were to note some claim that Barr made about Trump, this would be barred from being included in an article on Trump or his presidential administration, because the book isn't about that. Keeping such information out of an article where it is clearly relevant would just be rules lawyering, to the detriment of the reader. BD2412 T 05:34, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make here. Do you think you could clarify?

Sticking with analogies using political figures in the US: a biography on Barack Obama will inevitably contain quite a bit of material on Joe Biden, but is not an appropriate source to use when assessing due weight for the article Joe Biden; the relevance and relative importance of various aspects of subject X is properly assessed by surveying the literature on subject X. That's what WP:PROPORTION is all about. TompaDompa (talk) 17:48, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I am leaning to keeping the sentence about that particular song, since we have a non-trivial analysis (if, currently one sentence-long), and a song is a part of popculture. If we look at MOS:POPCULT and their bone broth example, my reading of it is that a source simply mentioning that song x mentions the topic would not be sufficient ("does not go into any detail about bone broth but simply mentions that Baby Yoda drank some in that episode") for inclusion, but a source that goes into some details ("If Bon Appetit mentions how Baby Yoda drank bone broth, it may be suitable for inclusion in the bone broth article") would be permissible; mind you, I interpret the word "how" in the quoted sentence as "going into some details", which we have here. So I suggest we compromise - remove the trivial mentions that MR appeared in some stamps and marketing campaigns, but keep this one which provides some deeper analysis. (Anyway, most of those trivial mentions were merged into MR#Commemoration section anyway, so there's little information loss, if any). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:42, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Of course the critical "woke" song fits the topic "Mount Rushmore in popular culture", as do the honors depicting the artwork. Common sense. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:51, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Unfortunately, commons sense is not the policy around here, as bizarre as that is. Those include WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, WP:DUE, etc. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:36, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I think we're getting somewhere. Despite the popularity of philately and numismatics and vexillology, I will concede that stamps, coins, and flags featuring the monument are reasonably accommodated in the article on the monument itself (although we could likely expand that content into an entirely separate article on Commemorations of Mount Rushmore). I would still contend that the baseball promotion is more than just a "marketing" effort, since the racing "Rushmore Four" mascots are part of the entertainment at the games, and should be included in this article rather than the main article on the monument. BD2412 T 15:49, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I should say that if the connection between the Presidents Race and Mount Rushmore is only ever mentioned by sources in the context of discussing the Presidents Race and never in the context of discussing the topic of Mount Rushmore or more specifically Mount Rushmore in popular culture, the proper place to cover that connection on Wikipedia is the article Presidents Race and not Mount Rushmore or Mount Rushmore in popular culture. Likewise, if the connection between the song and Mount Rushmore is only mentioned by sources in the context of discussing the song, it belongs at the article for the song (or in this case I guess the album or band since the song itself doesn't currently seem to have an article, and I'm not sure if it should)—assuming covering it there would be appropriate per WP:PROPORTION. It's possible for A to be an important aspect of B without B being an important aspect of A. Of course, sources on the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture covering this would render the whole discussion moot. TompaDompa (talk) 17:54, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't see how discussion of the song can not be discussion about the monument, when the song is discussed in the context of its analysis of the monument, and specifically describes how the monument was built on land stolen from Native Americans, and contains images of people viewed as oppressors and slaughterers of Native Americans. There is a certain racial insensitivity to excluding that part of the discussion. BD2412 T 18:57, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't know a better way of explaining the difference between "when analysing this song, Mount Rushmore is brought up" and "when analysing the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture, this song is brought up" than phrasing it as such. This is an example of analysing a song and finding Mount Rushmore, whereas this is an example of analysing the topic of Mount Rushmore in popular culture and finding a song (actually, in both cases "album" might be more accurate than "song").

Criticizing Mount Rushmore's legacy on these grounds (or noting that others have, at any rate) is not exactly uncommon outside of popular culture works—see e.g. [1][2][3][4][5]—and the extent to which that should be covered at Mount Rushmore could certainly be discussed, but that's a discussion to be held at Talk:Mount Rushmore. Whether the same type of criticism in popular culture is something that should be covered at this article comes down to whether that would be in WP:PROPORTION to how that aspect has been treated in the body of reliable, published material on the subject—Mount Rushmore in popular culture. Ultimately, we as Wikipedia editors are not supposed to decide what aspects are important (and should therefore be included) and which ones are not—we leave that to the sources. TompaDompa (talk) 01:03, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I do wonder if we are shooting ourselves in the foot with the "in popular culture" focus. What is and isn't popular culture is debatable. Could, perhaps, a solution to cut this Gordian knot be to rename this article into "Cultural depictions of Mount Rushmore"? Expand the scope of this from popculture to culture in general? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:24, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

@Piotrus: I have no objections to a title/scope change to Cultural depictions of Mount Rushmore. Actually, the source added by TompaDompa, Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places, is brilliant in that regard. BD2412 T 19:13, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

If there is to be a change of both title and scope, it should go through WP:RM. TompaDompa (talk) 20:00, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

@TompaDompa: It certainly could, but bold moves are as permissible as any other bold edit. If it is generally agreed in this discussion that such a move would be beneficial, we can skip the bureaucracy part. BD2412 T 20:34, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I know, but I'm not sure it would be beneficial. Hence why I think this should go through WP:RM, to get wider input as to pros and cons. TompaDompa (talk) 20:37, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we need RM sine all interested editors are here and nobody objects? Per WP:BRD, I think we can move it and RM only when somebody reverts. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:27, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

To be clear: I object to moving the page to the proposed new title without going through WP:RM. It is not, to me, a self-evidently good idea. TompaDompa (talk) 10:40, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

@BD2412 It's nice to agree on something. Commemoration =/= pop culture, but both can have stand-alone notability. Focusing on baseball, it may or may not be more than just marketing. What we need is a source that discusses this marketing event in the context of popular culture. If it can't be found, I'd suggest that the best place to preserve this is the article on that baseball team. Use of Mount Rushmore in marketing by team X is more relevant to that team than to the "MR in popcultue" article. Note that if the main MR article had a section about its economic impact, maybe info on MR use in marketing and such could be relevant there, but again, that would require finding a source that discusses the topic of MR and economy, including its use in marketing, in depth. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:21, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree with BD2412 that the page has reached a point where each further deletion should be discussed, others should be reverted, and, if need be, fully RfCed for drawing lines. This is a popular culture article yet seems more a WikiProject Visual Art page and a WikiProject Sculpture page. A local consensus at popular culture interpreted in an unusually strict way has nothing to do with this page. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:51, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

This topic is a nice change of pace from things I've been editing recently. Having read the comments by both sides, I agree with TompaDompa and Piotrus. WP:OR needs to be avoided. - GizzyCatBella🍁 03:10, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

@GizzyCatBella: I would say that is the point of the metric ton of content removed from the article and now on this page under #Unsourced or insufficiently sourced content removed from the article. Every point in the article at this point is sourced, and, I think, serves the interests of readers looking up this topic. BD2412 T 03:49, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Sourcing is all dandy, WP:V is met, but we also have other policies. WP:UNDUE, WP:IPC, WP:OR, and others cited by TompaDompa. The content has to be relevant, and that relevance should be evaluated not by our common sense but by whether reliable sources say that this is part of popular culture. - GizzyCatBella🍁 02:59, 22 May 2022 (UTC)