Prince Valiant - Cultural References

Cultural References

• Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood satirized the strip with Prince Violent in Mad #13 (July 1954).
• Prince Valiant once used the guise of a demon, and that costume was an inspiration to Jack Kirby for his character, Etrigan the Demon. The same panel also inspired the Italian creative team EsseGesse on their comic series Kinowa.
• Bugs Bunny parodied the strip in Prince Violent (renamed Prince Varmint for television) with Bugs defending a castle against Viking raider Yosemite Sam.
• In the Academy Award-winning short Knighty Knight Bugs, King Arthur sends court jester Bugs to recover the Singing Sword from the Black Knight, portrayed as Yosemite Sam in black armor.
• Dave Sim did a weekly Prince Valiant parody, Silverspoon, in The Buyer's Guide to Comic Fandom. The strip employed Foster's illustrations with captions format. Sim's comic book series Cerebus the Aardvark contained a Prince Valiant parody with illustrations/captions.
• A 1985 issue of Mad had a recurring section, "The Nasty File", billed as, "Snippets that were considered too insulting to publish!" One such "file" was on Phil Donahue, noting that he had his hair done by the same famous hairdresser who "beautified Prince Valiant, Pete Rose and Lassie".
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the main character, Eddie Valiant, used a singing sword against Judge Doom. However, the sword was drawn as Frank Sinatra singing "Witchcraft", a wordplay of the name of the sword.
• In Beetlejuice, Lydia (Winona Ryder) tells Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) that her stepmother (Catherine O'Hara), who is shown in a semi-drugged stupor, is "sleeping with Prince Valium."
• In Space Balls, actor Jim J. Bullock is Prince Valium, the consistently-sleepy suitor of Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) who Vespa leaves at the altar.
• In the Defenders of the Earth episode "Terror in Time," Valiant appeared as a guest.
• There is a street sharing the character's name; a Prince Valiant Court exists in Franklin, Tennessee (USA).
• The "Valiant", the second episode in the first series of the BBC's Merlin, features a Knight Valiant who dishonourably uses an enchanted shield and dies in a duel with Arthur during the tournament finale.
• Richard Marcinko in his autobiographical work Rogue Warrior notes one of his men was given the call sign "Prince Valiant", or PV for short as he had a hairstyle like the comic's protagonist.