As much as the hamburgers won the Americans on the taste ground, it also caught fancy of the American Print and Tele media quite soon after opening of commercialized restaurant chains like The White Castle.
An example of this was the prominent appearance of hamburgers in E.C. Segar’s Thimble comic strip, featuring prominently a cartoon character called Popeye the Sailor who ate spinach to sustain his superhuman strength. Popeye first appeared on January 17, 1929 along with the gang of supporting characters, one of these being J. Wellington (often shortened to just “Wimpy”), a lover of hamburgers who was both polite and gluttonous. His signature phrase, “I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today”, became popular and widely known. During the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Wimpy introduced the hamburger to the youth of the time as a healthy food. It also resulted in the creation of a chain of fast food restaurants called Wimpy’s in his honor, which sold hamburgers for ten cents.
Like Wimpy, the fictional character Jughead Jones, who first appeared in Archie Comics in 1941, was passionate about food generally, and hamburgers specifically. The burger also appeared in underground comix such as Zap Comix#2 during the late 1960s, wherein cartoonist Robert Crumb had designed a character called “Hamburger Hi-Jinx”.
Fictional characters related to the hamburger, such as the Ronald McDonald clown character designed by Willard Scott made its debut on television in 1963 and soon became a recognizable part of American culture. By the end of the decade, pop art was including the hamburger as an artistic element and it appeared in the works of Andy Warho (Dual Hamburger), Claes Oldenburg (Floor Burger), Mel Ramos (Vinaburger, 1965), and more recently, David LaChapelle (Death by Hamburger, 2002).
An example of the popularity and identification that the burger enjoyed among the American public was the name of the Battle of Hamburger Hill, which occurred in May 1969 during the Vietnam War, the name indicating the heavy casualties on both sides that made the place look like a butcher ground.
Hamburgers also appear in computer games like BurgerTime, an arcade style game created in 1982 by Data East Corporation and TV shows such as American Eats and Man V. Food.