Lipizzan - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Lipizzans have starred or played supporting roles in many movies, TV shows and books.

The 1940 film Florian stars two Lipizzan stallions. It was based on a 1934 novel written by Felix Salten. The wife of the film's producer owned the only Lipizzans in the US at the time that the movie was made. The rescue during World War II of the Lipizzan stallions is depicted in the 1963 Walt Disney movie Miracle of the White Stallions. The movie was the only live-action, relatively realistic film set against a World War II backdrop that Disney has ever produced. In the feature film Crimson Tide, a discussion between the two main characters over whether Lipizzans came from Spain or Portugal, and whether they are born white or black, is used to represent the film's suppressed racial conflict and the dividing of the world between two main powers during the Cold War.

Television programs featuring the Lipizzans include The White Horses, a 1965 children's television series co-produced by RTV Ljubljana (now RTV Slovenija) of Yugoslavia and BR-TV of Germany, re-broadcast in the United Kingdom. It followed the adventures of a teenage girl who visits a farm where Lipizzan horses are raised. Another show was the Nickelodeon cartoon show The Angry Beavers, where in one episode one of the main characters (actually a beaver) dreams of being a Lipizzan stallion at the Spanish Riding School.

Many fiction books mention Lipizzans. In the 2004 novel The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson, Lipizzan horses and the Spanish Riding School are key elements of both the plot and the setting. Lipizzans and the Spanish Riding School also play a crucial role in Mary Stewart's 1965 novel Airs Above the Ground and Marguerite Henry's 1964 children's novel White Stallion of Lipizza.

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