I feel like there’s been numerous other shipwrecks that are more interesting like the Eastland Steamer that sunk in harbor.
I was going to give the example of the Carnival cruise ship that sank in the 2010s (I think) largely due to the captain’s incompetence but when searching for the name of it I just found a wild amount of other Carnival cruise ship shenanigans.
Either way maybe I’m underestimating the amount of trivia people know. Either way I feel like it would randomly pop up when Youtubers like Casual Navigation or documentaries cover it.
If you are reading this do you know much about the Titanic? Have you heard of the Olympus?
Bonus:
There’s a mod for Mafia 2 that is attempting to recreate the Titanic. You can find it here. Youtuber minimme created a good video talking about it that’s 24 minutes long you can find here. I’d recommend watching it if you are into Mafia 2, modding, the Titanic, or want to kill some time.
There’s a reason “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” is a saying and “rearranging the deck chairs on the Eastland Steamer” isn’t.
People may be forgetting about the Lusitania though.
Dear lord, no. That is not at all true. I am 51 and when I was a kid, the wreck of the Titanic hadn’t been found yet. People were still fascinated. I remeber watching a movie called Raise The Titanic, which in turn was based on a best selling book. Why do you think James Cameron was obsessed with the Titanic?
clearly youre not a child of the 80s… when they found the titanic it was a huge deal and was all over the media for years
anyone old enough to remember the 80s would know the titanic
Also, that boat was full of rich folks and their belongings. There’s always going to be people who want to recover items from a boat littered with gold, jewelry, etc.
It was already very famous because they called it unsinkable and then it sank on its maiden voyage.
I’m having trouble finding examples but I feel like other things have had similar dramatic claims and failed spectacularly
Maybe, but where they repeatedly covered in the press for being insanely shinny and expensive, and were they full of the world’s upper crust when they failed?
The titanic was the titan submersible on steroids.
It already was pretty famous in pop culture before the movie. I guess that’s one of the reasons how it got its budget approved.
It was popular in the 80s with references in Ghostbusters and Timebandits and that was easy to stretch on into the 90s.
There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them
It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s
Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.
It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.
It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.
If you think the Eastland Steamer is a story you should check out the Cleveland Steamer.
Thought #2….maybe don’t.
Before the movie came out, the Titanic was probably the only shipwreck I had ever heard of.
Have you heard of the Olympus?
If you’re talking about the Titanic’s sister ship, it was the Olympic, not Olympus. There was also a third ship in the same class called the Britannic which was also sunk.
IMHO, that Eastland article’s last paragraph explains why people know about the Titanic. It was a bit glitzy boat full of important and influential rich folks. One of the world’s richest men died on that boat.
The Eastland was just a bunch of normal Joes. And just like today, the rich got much more attention.
I was going to give the example of the Carnival cruise ship that sank in the 2010s (I think) largely due to the captain’s incompetence[…]
That’s Costa Concordia. It received extra media attention and is mostly known due to the awful behavior of the captain who first directly caused the accident and then fled the ship before most of his passengers.
IIRC wasn’t it also cause the higher ups cheaped out on personnel and hired a bunch of people who didn’t speak proper Italian, let alone the same language, to man the boat?
The location of the wreck wasn’t found until 1985 and it was definitely still a popular disaster story to tell. I remember books about it in my elementary school library in the late 1980s alongside volcanos and dinosaurs.
What’s the timeline for when a fictional love story about 911 is acceptable?
Well, it took them 60 years to make Pearl Harbor…
If the Titanic is any indication, about 85 years.
!Remindme in 62 years
