Not only that, but they went to the trouble of making a recreation of “Funky Bones” to film on, rather than doing it in Indy. Which seems such an odd way to stick to the source material - if you’re going to do everything in Pittsburgh, just make the characters be from Pittsburgh.
Baby from “Dirty Dancing” who went to Mount Holyoke College after having the time of her life in the Poconos.
Brian Westlake was a mythical schoolboy in Australian high schools in the 1970s-80s, who was usually blamed for miscellaneous crimes, or reported as being absent when a relief teacher took over the class. I’ve since found that he’s been a feature in lots of other schools, but at the time we believed that we were the only bunch of schoolkids who were so witty and clever to have made him up.
I’m pretty sure someone from a Stephen King book must have gone to U Maine.
Not my college, but my high school, Wilde Lake High, in Columbia, MD, figures in Laura Lippman’s novel, Wilde Lake, which I have not read. But I assume that a few characters in it graduated from the school.
Also, there’s a small indy film from the 1990s, I think, whose name I can’t remember right now, set in a small liberal arts college in Santa Fe, NM. I don’t think it is named, but it’s a thinly disguised version of St. John’s College, whose campus in Annapolis, MD, I graduated from. (It’s not the 2012 Liberal Arts.) Its lead character was played by a scruffy, pudgy actor, kind of like Zach Galifianakis, whose name I just can’t dredge up out of my so-called memory.
I have not one, but TWO Simpsons characters.
Both Superintendent (Super Nintendo) Chalmers and Snake (who played LaCrosse) are pround Ball State Cardinals
Though I don’t think it’s mentioned specifically, Mia Evans in last year’s TV show Emergence would have to have attended my old high school, since it’s “set” in my home town. Most likely other characters in the show would have, too.
Ah, dear old U of Maine. The only university whose fight song became a #1 pop recording.
Rudy Vallee spent his freshman year there before transferring to Yale, where he earned a BA in Philosophy before becoming one of the great crooners of the 1920s-30s. As a student, he formed a jazz band in which he sang and played saxophone. His piano player was Peter Arno, the great New Yorker cartoonist.
The long-running webcomic Dumbing of Age is set at Indiana University.
I went to Rutgers, just like Mr. Magoo.
The most famous (IRL) person, IMvHO, that went to my high school was Kirsten Johnston. Sally from Third Rock. I assume she still has family in the area as I know my mom has bumped into her once or twice at the local gym.
There are Meg Wolitzer’s “death girls” of Swarthmore, but no one more fictionally famous that I know of. Some of my non-fictional friends appeared as semi-fictional musicians:
As for real people who didn’t go to Swarthmore, I got in and Obama didn’t.
Randall and Beth Pearson from This is Us went to Carnegie Mellon.
Cal State, Long Beach has a lot of real life notable alumni (Steven Spielberg, Steve Martin, The Carpenters, etc) but apparently the only fictional one is Jon Cryer’s character on Two and a Half Men.
And Ellie Arroway from Contact. But we have more interesting real grads than fictional ones.
The symbol was just what was worn when I went to grad school there, but I wonder what it looked like when he went, which was probably in the 1930s.
Me too! I remember hurrying down Bascom Hill to get to class in Helen C. White and being late because they were filming on Bascom.
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The only times I can remember even encountering the place in works of fiction were in:
- One of Tom Clancy’s novels (Executive Orders, maybe) where the Foleys’ son gets accepted there and plans to play hockey, and,
- Possibly in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” when Willow is getting accepted into various colleges, and Xander says, “Harvard…Yale…Wesleyan…some German polytechnical institute whose name I, uh, I can’t pronounce.” Since “Rensselaer” is actually Dutch, it makes it funnier to me, assuming Joss was referring to RPI. Xander can’t pronounce the name, doesn’t know where it is, and gets the wrong nationality.
That’s all I got. :-/
Plenty of scientist types have been said to have graduated from MIT in fiction, although I can’t recall any of them right now.
More interesting are the ones who went to MIT, but were freakin’ huge and were better known as actors. I’ve written before on this Board about Erland van Lidthe de Jeude. He was so big that they had to hire a pro football player to spar with him when he was on the wrestling team. We were in the Musical Theater Guild together in two productions, and he had a loud and melodious voice. (They called him out of “retirement” to play Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and he was the very best Miles I ever saw. The lines about being huge actually applied in his case. When he grabbed the guy playing Pseudolus at one point, he could do pull-ups on Erland’s arm without moving Erland at all.) Although majoring in computer science (and working at it for a time), he sang down in Greenwich Village, and was spotted by Philip Kaufman, who convinced him to shave his head and play the lead Fordham Baldy in his movie The Wanderers. He went on to other roles – most notably Grossberger in the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy Stir Crazy, in which he wore his MIT “brass rat” class ring. Unfortunately, they dubbed his singing voice because of some union rule (I was appalled when I heard it – “That’s not Erland singing!” I said). He finally did get to sing when he played Dynamo in The Running Man, but there are so many explosions and things that you really can’t hear it. He died, tragically, at age 34 in 1987.
Dolph Lundgren technically never attended MIT, but he got a Fulbright Scholarship to attend, but before he could get there he was spotted in a Sydney nightclub and became first a bodyguard to Grace Jones and then her lover. (things like this never happen to me, alas). as a result, he got a small part in the James Bond film Jones was in, A View to a Kill and was able to get the role of Rocky’s opponent, Ivan Drago, in Rocky IV. After that he was He-Man in Masters of the Universe, but then slipped down into direct-to-video territory.
Also an RPI grad, and I couldn’t remember any mentions of it in fiction, so thank you for that. (Actually, there was one, in the Doonesbury comic strip; Alex Doonesbury, daughter of Mike Doonesbury and J.J. Caucus was trying decide among Cornell, RPI and MIT. The strip had a website contest where you could vote for which school she would attend. All three schools hacked the contest but I think MIT did it first and also best so she ended up there.)