Mount Rushmore in popular culture
[3] In 2016, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the monument, Time Magazine published a 90-second video listing "Mount Rushmore's Most Memorable Moments at the Movies", including North by Northwest, Head of State, Team America: World Police, Nebraska, Mars Attacks!, Superman II, Richie Rich, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
[5] Erika Doss notes that Mount Rushmore is a common target in movies showing an attack on a landmark to signify the scope of a threat, "destroyed by lasers in Richie Rich (1994), ruined by an earthquake in 10.5: Apocalypse (2006), blown up by terrorist missiles in The Peacekeeper (1997), annihilated by Michael Moore (playing a suicide bomber) in Team America: World Police (2004) and defaced (or rather, refaced) in movies like Superman II (1980), Mars Attacks!
[3] Examples include the 1980 film Superman II, in which supervillain General Zod and his criminal partners Ursa and Non use their superpowers to replace the faces of Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt with their own, while destroying Lincoln's.
[17] In the Japanese manga Naruto, the main leaders of Konohagakure have had their faces carved into a mountain overlooking the village in the style of Mount Rushmore.
[19] The memorial was used as the location of the climactic chase scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest, which has been described as "[t]he mountain's primary visual association—aside from souvenir postcards".
[20] Scriptwriter Ernest Lehman later recalled that, as they were developing their story idea, Hitchcock "murmured wistfully, 'I always wanted to do a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.
It has been noted that "the Mount Rushmore sequence undermines name, identity, and national purpose", with the protagonists of the film fleeing for their lives across the famous faces, which themselves are of no help.
