Editor Ira is back today for a pop culture deep dive about America’s most roastable president.

For those of us born in the post-Watergate era, Richard Nixon has always been a punchline. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s as both a prodigious consumer of ’70s pop culture and a kid fascinated by domestic politics, I probably took for granted Nixon’s status as a classic American embarrassment. He turned up as a snake-whacker on “The Simpsons,” was regularly pilloried in “Mad Magazine,” and still horrified ’90s kids in “Doonesbury.” He got dissed by musicians ranging from Neil Young to The Honey Drippers to James Taylor. As late as 1999, satirical Nixon nostalgia was still strong enough to open a wide-release feature film.

As this week marks the 49th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s order for Nixon to surrender all materials pertinent to the Watergate investigation, I’ve been thinking about the man’s pop cultural legacy. Not to downplay Nixon’s many crimes and disgraces, but I think part of the reason he’s remained such an enduring punching bag is that he had the misfortune of running afoul of public opinion during a unique period in mass media.

By the early ’70s, the American television, film, music, publishing, and arts communities had a wider reach than ever before. For the first time in history, multiple forms of national media were easily consumable in virtually every pocket of the country. Figure in the influx of young, war-weary, fiercely anti-Nixon writers and artists in every corner of those industries and you had the recipe for an avalanche of Nixonsploitation that still reverberates to this day. There are far too many examples of bizarre and fascinating Nixonian artworks for me to go into detail here, so I’ll just focus on three of my favorite curiosities.

Let’s start out in the world of cinema, where takes on Nixon ran rampant for a couple of decades both in the mainstream and the underground. Scattershot satire was the default, and few satires were more scattershot than 1973’s “The Werewolf of Washington.” The basic premise finds presidential press secretary Dean Stockwell contracting a werewolf bite and going on periodic lycanthropic rampages while trying to navigate the demands of an increasingly disjointed White House.

“A werewolf loose in a barely fictionalized Nixon administration” could easily be the capsule description for my favorite movie, but this one fails in a way that many other would-be Nixon takedowns do. It establishes a very basic satirical premise — “What if it’s the politicians who are the REAL monsters?” — and tries to flesh it out with easy references that are more about recognition than wit. A mad scientist is named “Dr. Kiss,” and we’re supposed to fill in the “-inger.” The president is an obsessive bowler who is too self-absorbed to realize that he’s employing a wolfman. That’s about as clever as it gets. Writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg came up with the great idea of Nixon plus werewolves, but neglected to follow through with anything remotely interesting. While I’m glad that a werewolf/Watergate mashup exists, I sure wish its satire had any bite.

Now on to the realm of comic books. Folks who gripe about the modern-day comics scene being too “woke” will be glad to know that back in the ’70s the folks at Marvel had the president’s back, pitting him against an insidious left-wing threat known as… um… Captain America. So yeah, turns out Nixon couldn’t catch a break even against fiction’s squarest defender of the American Way.

A 1974 story written by legendary pot-stirrer Steve Englehart finds Captain America unraveling a conspiracy known as the Secret Empire, in which the country is controlled by a Deep State cabal of power brokers that goes all the way to the top. The president is a Nixon caricature who presides over the “Committee to Regain America’s Principles,” an obvious play on Nixon’s real-life “Committee to Re-Elect the President.” (Spell out both acronyms and decide which is less flattering.) At least real-world Nixon avoided the fate of his Marvel counterpart, who takes his own life to avoid arrest and leaves a body double to resign in his stead. When you come at the Captain, you’d best not miss.

And finally, let’s turn to music, where my favorite piece of Nixonsploitation comes not from the rich troves of 1970s post-hippie and proto-punk protest songs, but from the 1990s. The Dick Nixons were a garage punk band based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana who built their act around a truly novel hook: they performed in character as rabid fans of Richard Nixon, whose only goal was getting him back in the Oval Office.

The Dick Nixons’ sole album, 1992’s “Paint the White House Black,”* found a small audience thanks partly to an endorsement from novelty rock icon Mojo Nixon (no relation, to the president or the band). It’s a rowdy collection of tongue-in-cheek anthems with titles like “Do the Dick Nixon,” “Patriot Song,” and “Tricky Dick was a Rock-N-Rolla” (a song that happened to be the soundtrack to my first kiss and is thus probably a key element in my origin story). Was it a weird choice for a ’90s bayou-punk band with a homemade drum kit and a singer who sounded like a more energetic Bobcat Goldthwait to base their identity on a disgraced president from 20 years earlier? It sure was, but I love the hell out of that album both for its bizarreness and as an illustration of the unparalleled staying power of Richard Nixon as our most eternally roastable president.

*Apologies for linking to myself, but I seem to be the only person on the internet who has ever written at length about this album.