Television
| Show | Episode | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Samurai Jack | "Jack and the Spartans" | A group of 300 warriors, similar in appearance to Spartans, defend a narrow gateway against a vast robot army. They have been in combat for five generations. At the end of the episode the King remarks the 300 and 1 (300 warriors and Jack) when retelling the tale on his death bed. |
| Xena: Warrior Princess | "One Against an Army" | Xena and Gabrielle have to defend the pass of Thermopylae from the invading Persian army. However, in this version of the story, Xena herself is up against 300 Persian soldiers, and not 300 Spartans against thousands of Persians. |
| Robot Chicken | Moesha Poppins | A highly stylized trailer for 1776 (film) that parodies the trailer for Three Hundred. Includes the line This! Is! AMERICA! Another Episode has Leonidas saying THIS IS SPARTA-like quotes in mundane situations, such as watching Two and a Half Men. |
| seaQuest DSV | "Spindrift" | After being shot during a rescue mission of his shipmate Lonnie Henderson, SeaQuest's chief of security Jim Brody's last dying words are "With your shield or on it", a reference to a saying attributed to mothers of Spartan men as they went to war. Captain Hudson later explains to Henderson that Brody meant his sacrifice for her, just like the Greeks at Thermopylae, was worth it. |
| Star Trek: Deep Space Nine | "What You Leave Behind" | Dr. Julian Bashir, who has a penchant for last stands, offers to take Ezri Dax on a date in a holosuite program depicting the Battle of Thermopylae. |
| South Park | "D-Yikes!" | In a parody of the aforementioned film 300, Mrs. Garrison goes to a "girl bar" which is being bought out by Persians. She is indignant about it, especially their tacky blue carpet and gold curtain rods. When the representative comes, she kicks him in the balls and starts a war. They go tell their boss, Xerxes, who sends many more Persians in a wave. The Lesbians are able to fend them off, and they retreat. Mrs. Garrison then gets Mexicans, disguised as Persians, to infiltrate the Persian club. They find out that Xerxes is a woman and they use that to get him to keep Les Bos a girl bar. Lesbos is an actual island in Greece. |
Read more about this topic: Sparta In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy.... In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)