Big Rock Candy Mountain - Other Uses

Other Uses

• In 1943, Wallace Stegner published an autobiographical novel titled The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He published a further autobiographical work in 1992 entitled Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, a reference to a line in the song.
• In 1945, George Orwell parodied this phrase in the book Animal Farm with an animal version of heaven named Sugarcandy Mountain.
• A 1963 animated cartoon, Hobo's Holiday, features the adult lyrics which appear on screen with a bouncing ball.
• The song is also discussed in depth in the book The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman, and performed by Jonathan Coulton in the audiobook.
• In the 1970s, Big Rock Candy Mountain was made into an environmental fairytale, published on an LP intended for children with the namesake and addition songs. It is the story of a goose, a crawdad, a family of rats, a whangdoodle, and two hobos who journey to the fabled mountain in search of a home. There they find Pollution Pete, Cement Sam, and a construction crew damming the rivers, cutting down forests, and turning the mountain into suburbia. The animals steal shovels, paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint, and use them to scare away the crew so that the mountain can be returned to its pristine state.
• In the Cormac McCarthy novel All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole comments on how much the Mexican Tavern keeper loves America by saying "He made that Country sound like the Big Rock Candy Mountains."
• In Glen Cook's 1982 novel Shadowline, first in the Starfishers trilogy, a planet named the Big Rock Candy Mountain is the location for several scenes of the story.
• The children-friendly version of the song was also used in the Rankin Bass stop-motion video "The Easter Bunny is comin' to town".
• In 1990, Jane Wiedlin recorded a song with the same title on her album Tangled.
• The theme song to the TV series The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack draws heavy inspiration from this song. In fact, some of the lines in the theme song are lines from this song with a few words changed to include more references to candy (for example, "little streams of alcohol come'a tricklin' down the rocks" became "sody pop come tricklin' down the rocks.", or even more starkly "come with me, we'll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains" became "come with me, we'll go and see a place called Candied Island") Episodes of the series often tell the story of an adventure Flapjack and Captain K'nuckles have while searching for the legendary Candied Island. In many ways, the series itself could be a huge allusion to the song, as K'nuckles tells incredibly tall tales about lands much like the one in the song to convince Flapjack to go adventuring, and both characters appear to live poor, hobo-like lives.
• In Mur Lafferty's Heaven audiobook series, the Big Rock Candy Mountain is portrayed as the hobo afterlife.
• Grammy-winning artist Bruce Hornsby used the song as an intro to his song Candy Mountain Run at the Biltmore show in Asheville, NC on July 25, 2009 - and possibly in other venues on other dates.
• The song "Candy Mountain Cave", from the popular video "Charlie the Unicorn", parodies this song.
• In 1978, country singer Mel Tillis released the single "Ain't No California." Contained in the song are the lyrics, "Ain't no Big Rock Candy Mountain."
• In his 2004 album, The Nifty Mervous Thrifty, Muck Sticky made a cover of this song.