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"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their liquor and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
The concept is ancient, including the 70 year nap by Choni HaMeA-Gail.
Irving, inspired by a conversation on nostalgia with his American expatriate brother-in-law, wrote his story while temporarily living in Birmingham, England. It was published in his collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. While the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains near where Irving later took up residence, he admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."
The name Rip Van Winkle has been used to name
infrastructure (Rip Van Winkle Bridge),
consumer goods (Old Rip Van Winkle whiskey) and
Music: American composer George Whitefield Chadwick wrote a concert overture entitled Rip Van Winkle in 1879, when he was a student in Leipzig.
Video games: The 1990 video game Super Mario World features an enemy known as "Rip Van Fish" which constantly sleeps unless disturbed.
Television:
In the 1961 The Twilight Zone episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", four gold thieves place themselves in suspended animation for 100 years in order to escape the law and, upon revival, spend their stolen fortune with impunity.
In the 1963 The Twilight Zone episode "In His Image", Rip Van Winkle is mentioned after a man realizes his hometown has greatly changed in supposedly one week.
In the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics", 147-year-old Captain Montgomery Scott is revived after 75 years in a transport buffer.
In the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, 138-year-old Admiral James T. Kirk comes back to life after being "suspended" in a Nexus for 78 years.
In the BBC television show Doctor Who, the tenth episode of the ninth series (titled "Sleep no More") involves a machine called Morpheus which can condense a full night's worth of sleep into mere minutes. People who refuse to use Morpheus are colloquially called "Rips", referencing Rip van Winkle. (wikipedia.org)
