Iron-eating microbes are steadily breaking down the actual sunken ship, but the pieces already culled from the wreck's 13-mile debris field are "spectacular, " said John Joslyn, the owner of a pair of Titanic theme museums in Missouri and Tennessee who helped to fund the first salvaging expedition in 1987.

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If the underlying theme of all Titanic dramatizations has been class, the engine driving the plot has nearly always been romance.

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Saturday evening also saw an anticipated 700 million people watch state television's annual TV gala, a variety performance show in which Celine Dion sang her theme tune from the movie Titanic.

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Fifteen years ago, the movie's class-war theme -- the swells in their tuxedoes lounging amid the Titanic's creamy classical splendor, versus the lugs in steerage, led by Leonardo DiCaprio's penniless rapscallion bohemian Jack -- seemed a fairly standard old-movie trope.

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