The ocean liner Titanic has been extensively portrayed in films, books, memorials and museums.
Films and literature
Titanic has played a prominent role in popular culture ever since her sinking. The disaster has inspired numerous books, plays, films, songs, poems and works of art, and has lent itself to a great variety of interpretations of its significance, meaning and legacy. The immediate aftermath of the sinking saw an outpouring of poetry, though much of it was dismissed by The New York Times as "worthless" and "intolerably bad" and by Current Literature as "unutterably horrible", though Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" (1912) was one of the more significant works to emerge from the disaster. Several survivors wrote books about their experiences and various hack writers cashed in on the tragedy by producing sensationalist "dollar books" culled from the often inaccurate press coverage. 1955 saw the publication of Walter Lord's influential non-fiction book A Night to Remember which weaved numerous personal accounts from survivors.
The sinking of the Titanic has been a popular subject for visual artists, whether in paintings and illustrations or on the screen. The first Titanic newsreel films were released within days of the disaster; one by the Gaumont Film Company was a huge hit and played to packed houses around the world, often accompanied by the audience singing the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee at the climax of the film. There have also been many drama films set aboard Titanic. The first such film about the disaster, Saved from the Titanic, is now lost. It was released only 29 days after the ship sank and had an actual survivor as its star—the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson. The story of the sinking was also told in heavily fictionalised form as a Nazi propaganda movie (Titanic, 1943) and as an American melodrama (Titanic, 1953). The British film A Night to Remember (1958) is still widely regarded as the most historically accurate movie portrayal of the sinking, but the most successful by far has been James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film in history up to that time.
A great variety of memorabilia was also produced. Memorial postcards sold in huge numbers; one popular series produced in Britain showed verses from Nearer, My God, to Thee alongside a mourning woman and Titanic sinking in the background. The disaster was commemorated in numerous other forms, ranging from tin candy boxes to commemorative plates, whiskey jiggers, and even black mourning teddy bears. The latter are now hugely sought-after and examples have sold for over $135,000.
In anime and manga
In the Japanese spinoff series The Doraemons, it depicts a scene of the Titanic in a famous chapter, Titanic the Ghost ship, in which Dora-the-Kid acts as Jack facing on Rose. In the anime movie Black Butler: Book of the Atlantic, the fictional ocean liner Campania suffers a similar fate to Titanic including getting hit by an iceberg and splitting in half as well as lifeboats being filled by women and children first. The Campania also appears in the Black butler manga, in volumes IX-XIV, and it is filled with corpses that have been made to appear revived, or to use their terms, "Absolute Salvation".
On stage
In 1997, the musical Titanic was made. It won Tony Award for Best Musical.
Legends and myths
The Titanic has gone down in history as the ship that was called unsinkable. However, even though countless news stories after the sinking called Titanic unsinkable, prior to the sinking the White Star Line had used the term "designed to be unsinkable", and other pre-sinking publications described the ship as "virtually unsinkable". Another well-known story is that of the ship's band, led by Wallace Hartley, who heroically played on while the great steamer was sinking. This seems to be true but there has been conflicting information about which song was the last to be heard. The most reported is "Nearer, My God, to Thee", though "Autumn" has been mentioned. Finally, a widespread myth is that the internationally recognised Morse code distress signal "SOS" was first put to use when the Titanic sank. While it is true that British wireless operators rarely used the "SOS" signal at the time, preferring the older "CQD" code, "SOS" had been used internationally since 1908. The first wireless operator on Titanic, Jack Phillips, sent both "SOS" and "CQD" as distress calls.