In Popular Culture
- The character "Helen Lawson" in Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls is based on Ethel Merman.
- The British Psychobilly band The Meteors recorded an instrumental called "Return Of The Ethel Merman" for their 1986 album Sewertime Blues.
- Merman is mentioned a lot in the musical series Forbidden Broadway making fun of the wireless microphones and soft singing used in The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical).
- In the early 1990s, the television program Sesame Street created a parody character called "Miss Ethel Mermaid" (voiced and puppeteered by Louise Gold) she sang "I Get A Kick Out Of U" (a parody of Merman singing "I Get A Kick Out Of You"). The character would reappear in an episode of Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures which is shown as a segment on the American version of Sesame Street.
- In the film The Producers (2005), the actor playing the part of Adolf Hitler, Roger de Bris, sings the lyric "I'm the German Ethel Merman, don'tcha know."
- Merman's final on-screen appearance was in the film Airplane! (1980), where she has a cameo as shell-shocked soldier "Lt. Hurwitz", who believes he is Ethel Merman. She briefly sings her classic "Everything's Coming Up Roses".
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
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“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
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