Moby-Dick

:For the Led Zeppelin song, see Moby Dick (song).

Selected adaptations and references

• Jules Verne's 1870 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea references a hunt for a dangerous ship-sinking "Moby-Dick", which turns out to be the Nautilus.
• A 1926 silent movie, The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore as a heroic Ahab with a fiancee and an evil brother, loosely based on the novel. (IMDb link) Remade as Moby Dick in 1930. (IMDb link)
• Moby Dick Rehearsed a 1955 television "play within a play" directed by Orson Welles. (IMDb link)
• Moby Duck is a character created for Disney's line of comic books, a relative of Donald and the other ducks in the Disney mythos.
• A 1956 film directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck, with screenplay by Ray Bradbury. (IMDb link)
• Tom and Jerry meet `Dicky Moe` in a 1961 MGM cartoon of the same name.
• "The Doomsday Machine" is a Star Trek episode written by Norman Spinrad that is loosely based on the Moby Dick story.
• "Obsession (Star Trek)" is another Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk tries to destroy a vampire-like cloud creature that attacked and killed his captain and his crew on his old ship, the Farragut. Kirk was like Ahab and the creature resembled Moby Dick. However, the story ends with the crew learning about the creature, its menace to known space and deciding that Kirk was fundamentally correct in hunting it.
• Nova, a 1968 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany, features a starship voyage with a misfit crew, and an obsessive and facially scarred captain strongly resembling Ahab.
• The Wind Whales of Ishmael, a 1971 science fiction sequel by Philip José Farmer, transports Ishmael to the far future.
• "Moby Dick" was an instrumental recording by Led Zeppelin featuring a drum solo by John Bonham.
• "Nantucket Sleighride" was a recording by Mountain describing a ship's crew "in search of the mighty sperm whale" and referring to "Starbuck sharpening his harpoon".
• Bruce Sterling's 1977 novel Involution Ocean is a science fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick.
• ' (1982) borrows liberally from Moby-Dick. Khan and his first officer Joachim are based on Ahab and Starbuck, and many of Khan's lines are taken almost verbatim from the novel, a paperback copy of which is seen on a shelf in Khan's exile quarters at the film's beginning. (IMDb link)
• In ' (1996) Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fight against the Borg is compared to that of Captain Ahab against Moby Dick. (IMDb link)
• Moby Dick! The Musical, a 1990s West End musical about a girls' boarding school production of the classic tale.
• Moby Dick, a 1998 television movie starring Patrick Stewart as Ahab. (IMDb link)
• Capitaine Achab a 2004 french movie directed by Philippe Ramos with Valérie Crunchant and Frédéric Bonpart (IMDb link)
• In the late 1990s, performance artist Laurie Anderson produced the multimedia stage presentation Songs and Stories From Moby Dick. Several songs from this project were included on her 2001 CD, Life on a String.
• Rakhnam, a purple arcwhale which threatens the party at various points in the 2001 video game Skies of Arcadia, is an homage to Moby-Dick (his name in the Japanese version of the game is "Mobys").
• Francis Macbeth composed a five-movement suite for wind band named 'Of Sailors and Whales' which is based on scenes from the book Moby-Dick. The bombastic suite begins with the quiet Ishmael, which builds to a heavy climax. Queequeg follows with a flitting melody and ends with bleak chords and finally a quick note at the end. The middle movement Father Mapple is supposed to be a hymn that an imaginary man sings during the voyage. This movement is actually sung by the band, and begins very wearily but has a rather strong ending. Next is Ahab and this movement readily depicts the captain. The same is true of The White Whale, the final movement of the suite and by far one of the most fearsome pieces composed for a wind band. Each movement is preceded by some text supposed to be read to give an indication of the movement.
• The musician Moby is a descendant of Herman Melville.
• The American heavy metal band Mastodon released a 2004 album named Leviathan, which contained lyrics based on Moby Dick. Some song titles include "I Am Ahab" and "Seabeast".
• In the comic book series Bone by Jeff Smith, the protagonist (named Fone Bone) is a great admirer of Moby-Dick and refers to it frequently. When he tries to read passages from the book to his friends, they immediately fall asleep. His dreams contain a great deal of Moby-Dick imagery, and when he and his companions pass through a region in which their thoughts become reality, his cousin Phoney suddenly gains a peg-leg, a facial scar and a costume like Ahab's.
• The word Moby appears to be an invention of Melville's. It has passed into colloquial English as a rough synonym for "very large".
• In Marvel Comics' Livewires the ultimate goal of Project Livewire is to seek out and destroy the most secret of all black ops projects, the one they refer to as "The White Whale", because they don't actually know its real codename
• The New England Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts hosts a Moby Dick Marathon http://www.whalingmuseum.org/calendar/index_cal.html reading of the novel every January 3rd to January 4th. The next Marathon (2006) will be the 10th anniversary of this event. Volunteer readers are alloted 10 minute time slots over the approximately 25 hours it takes to read this novel aloud. Among the hundreds of Moby Dick fans who flock to this event, descendants of Melville attend every year.