Beholder - Appearances in Other Media

Appearances in Other Media

The most widely respected UK fanzine in the 1980s was The Beholder.

The beholder has appeared in several films and television programs. Two beholders are seen briefly in the 2000 motion picture Dungeons & Dragons. The Dungeons & Dragons TV cartoon series featured a beholder in the 1983 episode Eye of the Beholder. A beholder also appears in the interactive movie Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure. The Futurama episode How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back features a beholder who guards the Central Bureaucracy. He is a Grade 11 bureaucrat who begs the Planet Express crew not to tell its supervisor that he was sleeping on the job. He has another cameo in Lethal Inspection, still working at the Central Bureaucracy.

Beholders appear in a number of Dungeons & Dragons computer and video games, most notably the Eye of the Beholder series. Beholders appear regularly throughout the RPG Baldur's Gate 2. All but one of these are hostile. The non-hostile individual is a Spectator, which the player has to persuade to be allowed to retrieve an item from a chest it is guarding.

Other video games have also included beholders. In the Tibia computer game, a beholder can serve as a magical creature. There are also Elder Beholders gazers and braindeaths (extremely old beholders whose brains have grown out into their eyes, rendering them blind). As of August 23, 2010, the name for the Beholder in Tibia was replaced with "bonelord". In the Xbox 360 game, Castle Crashers, it is possible to have a beholder as a pet. In Age of Wonders, the Azraks can train beholder units; in addition, beholders sometimes guard spaces such as caves, castles and prisons. In Westwood's Nox, beholders guard an underground temple. They can partially paralyze the hero, making him slow to walk, and can emit dangerous bolts of energy. In 2010 Cipsoft had to change beholder names to bonelords.

The roguelike game Angband includes a variety of different types of beholder, including the unique beholder "Omarax, the Eye Tyrant". A beholder also appears on a special level of the NetHack offshoot Slash'EM. The original NetHack game has "floating eyes", which appear somewhat beholder-like, but actually gained their inspiration from an entirely different Dungeons & Dragons species.

• The online comic Planescape Survival Guide features a beholder as one of the main characters.
• The original Japanese Famicom and MSX versions of Final Fantasy had creatures called beholders and eyes that looked like the traditional beholder. However, for the US release and later editions, the sprite was changed and the beholders were renamed.
• A beholder appears briefly in The Order of the Stick along with a mind flayer as a joking reference to the non-inclusion of "product identity" monsters in the Open Game License materials and SRD.
• Several kinds of beholder appear as aerial enemies in Drakengard and Drakengard 2.
• The beholder is also present as a unit type for the Dungeon in Heroes of Might and Magic III, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, and Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor. They are often referred to as Evil Eyes.
• The beholder appeared as a monster in the PlayStation 2 game RPG Maker 2.
• In the Rachel dungeon of the mmorpg Ragnarok Online, players can fight against monsters called beholders, and looking like them.
• In the Xbox 360 Arcade game Castle Crashers, a beholder is one of the animal orb familiars that the main characters can acquire.
• A spherical creature called a "tribal beholder" appears in the Xbox 360 and PC game Divinity II. It is simply a glowing sphere in the game.
• A beholder appears briefly several times in the webcomic Looking for Group. It is the eternal companion of the Kethenecian Archmage.
• A beholder is a character hired as security in episode 16 of Regular Show, Peeps which aired on January 17, 2011.
• The game Magicka features Beholder-like creatures called "watchers". The game itself points out the connection in the tutorial, where a Watcher named "Behold" must be defeated as the boss.
• The MMORPG Tibia featured beholders and elder beholders as common enemies. These were later renamed to bonelords.
• Beholders also make an appearance in a very popular mod for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. They are called "Beholden" and are featured in the "Midas Magic Spells of Aurum" mod, and have their own quest that allows them to become summoned creatures.
• The beholder appears in the game Age of Wonders 2 expansion pack, as a tigran unit.