It’s come to this. Beyond ridiculous.

I feel like you’re jumping to conclusions

I don’t know how big an impact celebrity is, but if you watch almost any media from the 80s or 90s you’ll eventually come across a DT reference, either the man himself or something about him, and it’s usually fawning. Like I said, I don’t know how much a thing like that is representative of how people actually thought/think about him, but it feels like it helped.