Fifteen years ago today — Aug. 20, 2004 — the movie Garden State premiered. Near the beginning of the film, Zach Braff’s character Andrew Largeman is threatened by his boss.
You have two tables. You are 30 minutes late. And if I ever say this again, your job will go to … Todd Slauson from Duluth, Minnesota.
What is Lake Superior? According to the television game show Jeopardy! and host Alex Trebek, it’s the place where “the lives of 3 women centuries apart intertwine upon the shores” in Duluth author Danielle Sosin‘s The Long-Shining Waters. The answer/question was part of episode #8030, which aired Friday, July 5, on the CBS network.
It was 40 years ago today — June 29, 1979 — that the screwball summer camp film Meatballs premiered in theaters. In one scene, Tripper and Rudy (Bill Murray and Chris Makepeace) have a conversation while a Duluth pennant hangs in the background.
New Duluth-based fiction vignettes on the podcast: “I Destroyed the Universe,” “Intimations of Time’s Imaginings,” and “Menno Zwonk, Amish Outlaw: Monkey Porn.”
Duluth’s Homegrown Music Festival gets five minutes of attention on Rockin’ the Suburbs, a “podcast dedicated to exploring all forms of rock and pop music, from the perspective of two music-crazed suburbanites, Jim Lenahan and Patrick Foster.”
Doughboys, the podcast about chain restaurants, mentions Duluth in episode 77, “Cold Stone Creamery with Kevin T. Porter,” released Nov. 2, 2016.
The podcast Omnibus! with Ken Jennings and John Roderick references Duluth in the March 12 episode “Tippi Hedren’s Fingernails.”
At the beginning of the show the hosts talk about reasons to get married and note it might assure more frequent sexual intercourse. Around the 4-minute mark, Jennings refers to an unmentioned source — “what the numbers say” — and comments that “far from the stereotypes about cold marriage beds, in fact, married people are having more and better and freakier sex than all of us. Some youth pastor in Duluth is having the craziest sex.”
The latest Duluth mention on a national television show is in season 1, episode 3 of the new Fox series The Passage, which aired on Monday night.
Season two of American Crime Story, which dramatizes the five murders committed by Andrew Cunanan and is subtitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, features a quick Duluth mention. The character David Madson is portrayed as an award-winning student at the University of Minnesota Duluth, which is sort of true.
National Public Radio’s Scott Simon begins the Nov. 17 “Saturday Sports” segment on Weekend Edition asking: “Anybody here want to host the 2026 Winter Olympics? Hey there, Duluth, you hear us? Are you just going to stand there with your hands in your pockets?”
Jonathan Richman, founder of famed proto-punk band the Modern Lovers, dropped a Duluth reference on his third solo album, 1991’s Having a Party with Jonathan Richman.
We missed it in 2015, but here’s a belated clip of Lance Armstrong on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast dropping a reference to Duluth.
Last night’s episode of Supernatural took place in Duluth. The episode “Gods And Monsters” aired on the CW network.
This isn’t the first time Duluth has been featured in the long running show. The second season’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” episode had a character who was working at a Duluth bar. Several episodes have featured other Minnesota towns, such as Hibbing and Stillwater.
It’s been mentioned a few times in “Duluth reference” posts on PDD, but the clip has never been featured. So here it is, the cold open from season 2, episode 20 of Cheers.
This clip features a Duluth reference from the 11th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, released in 2017. It’s from episode 199, which features the 1987 movie Cry Wilderness.
