Pacific Vortex: DC-10 and more

pg 203

"DG-10," Denver said briefly. "One of the deadliest poisons around."

A poison gas made up by Cussler.

"It's Aloha Willie, the late night disc jockey on radio station POPO."

A phony radio station. This dialog is from a radio transmission in which Pitt's men are trying to contact the Navy surreptitiously.

"Big Daddy calling Our Gang."

Many men throughout history have probably been known by the nickname "Big Daddy," but the most famous is from the 1955 Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams. One of Williams's best-known works and his personal favorite, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in "the bed-sitting room of a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta"of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Brick's wife Maggie the "Cat".
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features several recurring motifs, such as social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity, decay, sexual desire, repression, and death. Dialogue throughout is often rendered phonetically to represent accents of the Southern United States.
The play was adapted as a motion picture of the same name in 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick, respectively. Williams made substantial excisions and alterations to the play for a revival in 1974. This has been the version used for most subsequent revivals, which have been numerous.

Our Gang, also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals, was a series of American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood children and the adventures they had together. Created by comedy producer Hal Roach, the series is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively natural way, as Roach and original director Robert F. McGowan worked to film the unaffected, raw nuances apparent in regular children rather than have them imitate adult acting styles.
In addition, Our Gang notably put boys, girls, whites and blacks together in a group as equals, something that "broke new ground," according to film historian Leonard Maltin.Such a thing had never been done before in cinema but has since been repeated after the success of Our Gang.
The first production at the Roach studio was in 1922 was a series of silent short subjects. When Roach changed distributors from Pathé to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1927, and converted the series to sound in 1929 the series took off even further. Production continued at the Roach studio until 1938, when the series was sold to MGM, who then continued producing the comedies for another six years. A total of 220 shorts were produced as well as one feature film, General Spanky, featuring over forty-one child actors. As MGM owned the rights to the Our Gang trademark, beginning in the mid-1950s, 80 of the original Roach-produced "talkies" were syndicated for television under the title The Little Rascals. The series has since remained in syndication, with periodic new productions based on the shorts surfacing over the years, including a 1994 Little Rascals feature film released by Universal Pictures.