The Raven in Popular Culture - Other

Other

• Lord Buckley recorded a "hipsemantic" version of "The Raven" in 1956 ("It was a real drugged midnight... dreary.").
• Computer scientist Guy L. Steele, Jr. wrote a parody entitled "The HACTRN" about a hacker haunted by a phantom process.
• The Raven Society, founded in 1904, is the University of Virginia's most prestigious honor society, combining requirements of high-level scholarship, service, leadership, and "promise of further advancement in the intellectual field." New members must supply a parody of the poem for initiation, which takes place in the room where Poe lived when studying at the University, now under the curatorship of the Society. The Society also maintains several other Poe sites, including the grave marker of his mother Eliza Poe in Richmond, Virginia.
• Professional wrestler Raven (Scott Levy) takes his stage name from the title of the poem, and often quotes from the poem in interviews, ending with "...Quoth the Raven...Nevermore..."
• The comic strip Shoe ran a strip in which a large, strange, black bird was sitting at Roz's bar, uttering random words starting with "never-" or ending in "-more" (e.g., "Livermore!"; "Nevertheless!"), when one of the regular characters announced that the raven was bombed.
• Poe lived in Baltimore for a considerable time and is buried there. Residents of the city elected to honor Poe by naming their National Football League team the Baltimore Ravens after the poem. Furthermore, the three mascots for the team are three ravens, appropriately named "Edgar", "Allan" and "Poe." For many years, pre-game introductions of the Ravens' starting lineup would be preceded by a stanza from the poem, usually one which ended with the word "Nevermore," referring to the opposing team's putative inability to score when facing the powerful Raven defense. In 2000, when the Ravens were on their way to winning their first Super Bowl primarily on the strength of that record-setting defense, Chris Berman of ESPN's NFL PrimeTime would often punctuate highlights of the team's results that day by saying, "Quoth the Ravens, Never score!". Another example is the all-haiku 2008 NFL season preview of ESPN.com columnist Gregg Easterbrook (who often calls the team the "Nevermores" in his column), which reads: "Awk! No offense. Awk! / Quoth the raven: "No offense." / Bal-a-mer Ravens".
• In another PC game, Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships, if you find pieces of paper in the bottles while sailing, they will be automatically pieced together to form a passage from "The Raven", the one just before the raven appears. Certain letters in red will tell you to go to and dive to one of the sunken ships where the sharks are, and, using the metal detector from Johnny Rolle, you will find an Easter egg. This is also a reference of the next game, Warnings at Waverly Academy, as Corine mentions that she is a Poe fan, as well as Leela having the missing Poe book, "The Black Cat and Other Stories", which includes "The Raven" and other works, as well as the pendulum challenge, a reference of "The Pit and The Pendulum, which is also in Leela's book.
• RavenCon, an annual science fiction convention in Richmond, Virginia, was named in honor of Poe, who grew up in Richmond.
• In the video game mod Defense of the Ancients, a hero is named Nevermore, after the word the raven sequentially spoke. Nevermore the Shadow Fiend is a demon who collects and traps the souls of his enemies and his ultimate ability Requiem of Souls, releases the souls collected into an area to damage his enemies in a line. In stand-alone sequel Dota 2, his description is reminiscent of the poem; his background story says Nevermore has the soul of a poet, as well as warriors, criminals, slaves, and priests.
• In the game League of Legends, the champion Swain uses ravens for his attacks. He carries a raven on his shoulder that attacks his enemies. He can turn himself into a giant raven surrounded by smaller ones for a short time. He also has a spell called Nevermove which immobilizes his enemies.
• The original version of Epcot's Journey Into Imagination included an open book with the shadow of the Raven in the Tales of Terror sequence.
• A Penny Arcade comic parodies the poem by making the raven say "Jersey Shore" as a comment on the ad supported Amazon Kindle.
• The webcomic xkcd parodies the poem by playing on the term "rapping", showing the first stanza followed by a picture of popular rapper Eminem
• A parody of the poem appears upon the poker forum operated by Two_Plus_Two_Publishing in the Bing Bland Blaow thread. The parody was subsequently made into a Youtube video.
• In the universe of Warhammer 40.000, Corvus Corax, the primarch of the Raven Guard legion of the Space Marines, says "Never more" as his last words before he goes into the Eye of Terror and never returns.
• A style of parody on messageboards involves mimicking the style of the poem to some degree, with the line "quoth the raven 'never more' replaced by "quoth the server, '404'", referencing a commonly seen http error code