It's A Wonderful Life - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

It's a Wonderful Life has been popularized in modern cultural references in many of the mainstream media. Due to the proliferation of these references, only a few examples will suffice to illustrate the film's impact.

• The Sesame Street Muppets characters Bert and Ernie share their names with the cop and the taxicab driver in the film. Longtime Muppets writer and puppeteer Jerry Juhl said he believed there was no connection and that this was a coincidence. The episode Elmo Saves Christmas (1996), which featured a clip from the film, pokes fun at the persistent reports of a connection, having them look at each other in disbelief as George calls Bert and Ernie by name.
• In a direct reference to the film, The Simpsons episode "The PTA Disbands" places a caricature of James Stewart's character in a local bank, who paraphrases the infamous bank run scene, which promptly starts a brawl.
• Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History takes its main title from the film. The book proposes that the evolution of life, rewound and replayed multiple times, would yield a different world each time, just as life without George Bailey is Pottersville, not Bedford Falls.
• Billy Peltzer's home town of Kingston Falls in the movie Gremlins (1984) is laid out to look like Bedford Falls. Clips from It's A Wonderful Life also appear within the film.
• The Killers' single "Boots" (2010) is a "Christmas" release in benefit of the RED foundation and directly relates to It's a Wonderful Life, using scenes from the movie in the companion video.
• In "It's a Hopeful Life", the Christmas 2011 episode of Raising Hope, Jimmy dreams how life for his family would have been had his daughter Hope not been born, including separation for his parents, prostitution for Sabrina and accidental death for Maw Maw, the "Clarence" of this story. The episode's climax has Jimmy running down the main street, shouting "Merry Christmas, movie house!" In an odd coincidence, this is the second time Cloris Leachman has played the angel, having previously starred as Clara in the 1977 TV remake It Happened One Christmas.