Big Bad Wolf - References in Other Media

References in Other Media

In the Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup, a sequence involves Harpo Marx activating a music box that plays "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", which he accompanies on the harp.

In the Frank Capra movie, It Happened One Night, Clark Gable sings the song to Claudette Colbert.

A James Patterson novel in the Alex Cross series is named "The Big Bad Wolf", though it only minimally references the Disney character.

Edward Albee's Tony award winning play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is an obvious play on words of the song title. It was turned into a film, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, with Taylor winning an Academy Award for her performance as Martha.

In the M. Night Shyamalan movie Lady in the Water a girl sings "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"

The 1966 hit song "Lil' Red Riding Hood" by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs takes the wolf's point of view.

In 1996 the German band Die Toten Hosen released an album called Opium fürs Volk that included a song named "Böser Wolf". It was translated in English and added the album Crash Landing (1999) under the name "Big Bad Wolf". The song relates the story of a young girl that is abused but does not say a thing because "the big bad wolf whispered in her ear that no-one else must know what happens here".

In 2005, the phrase "Bad Wolf" formed a story arc in the Doctor Who series and was eventually revealed to be the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler. The exact phrase "big bad wolf" was uttered in the episode The Unquiet Dead.

In 2011, house band Duck Sauce released a single titled "Big Bad Wolf" along with a music video, which went viral for its risqué content shortly after its release. The track itself bore little references to the titular character.

In 2012 The Guardian released an advertisement to promote their newspaper based on the story of the Three Little Pigs. In this advertisement the three pigs are exposed as fraudsters, attempting to commit insurance fraud, by blaming the wolf, who has asthma, for blowing down their houses.

In the TV series, Once Upon a Time, the Big Bad Wolf is actually a werewolf whose human form is none other than Red Riding Hood.

In the TV series Grimm, the Big Bad Wolf, known as Blutbad, was the first villain in the series, with main character Monroe being a 'reformed' Blutbad who relies on a strict regime to resist his urge to attack humans, serving as the main character's guide to the supernatural world he is abruptly dropped into.