By Annie Holub
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 22, 1998

Titanic mania spills over online

Photo courtesy of http://members.aol.com/robkeeton2/TitanicAOL.htm Arizona Daily Wildcat

The recent insanity surrounding the movie "Titanic" is a classic example of people obsessing over freaks of nature. Suddenly, everyone in America is enraptured with the story of the RMS Titanic. Previously, it was just a select few who spent their free time researching everything from the design of the barge to the on-board gymnasium. (The gym, by the way, had a motorized horse and camel to keep riders fit, a piece of info. found on the Web site created for the film, http://www.titanicmovie.com. Seems strange they didn't spend the extra $1 million to get replicas.)

So now this huge ship that is decomposing at the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland, that went down with something like 1500 passengers, is the latest American craze. The movie about said ship has become one of those films people seem to either love or hate - few are indifferent. Everyone seems to want to learn more about it.

All because of one solitary, indisputable fact: the Titanic is freaky.

Things that are freaky are often hypnotic, as well; the easiest way to be hypnotized, is, of course on the World Wide Web, and the Titanic information out there really pulls you under. Take, for example, this Titanic fact learned while sailing the Web, caught in the suction of the Titanic's sinking: A book published in 1898 entitled Futilty, by one Morgan Robertson, told the tale of a ship called the Titan, whose physical description almost exactly matches that of the Titanic, and how it sank on an April night after colliding with an iceberg.

Photo courtesy of http://members.aol.com/robkeeton2/TitanicAOL.htm Arizona Daily Wildcat

People on the Web have devoted a good part of their lives to the story of this ship. The Titanic Historical Society (http://www2.titanic1.org/titanic1) and the Titanic Society of South Africa (http://www1.onwe.co.za/titanic/compare.htm) have photographs and yearly observations on the ship's demise. You can buy Titanic deck plans for $8 at the Titanic Information Site (http://www.netins.net/showcase/js/titanic/today.shtml) - they even tell you how to "age" them; the site also has little sections on nearly everything you'd ever want to know, including one called, "Bodies," where you can learn how many corpses were recovered by other ships or left floating in the sea.

Another Titanic legend, of the band that played almost until the bitter end, has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it. Apparently, many people claimed to have heard "Nearer My God to Thee," as the ship was going down, while some say the band wasn't playing at all. Read all about it at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Carpathia/page3.htm.

Online, you can access passenger lists, photos of the decaying ship on the ocean floor (which is really freaky - it's just like looking at a rotting corpse. This can also be found at the Titanic Information Site), and charts of how many passengers survived, sorted by gender and class (http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm). Tour the upcoming virtual Titanic computer game, if you're into games that you will inevitably lose: "Oh, drat! I sunk the ship again! Those stupid icebergs always seem to pop up unexpectedly." (http://www.starshiptitanic.com/Pages/tour01.html)

There's even a Titanic Web Ring of devoted homepages (http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=titanicmovie&list), so you can just link from site to site in an endless circle.

The story of the Titanic goes on, documented not only on film, but by Web enthusiasts as well, from sea to shining sea.