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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“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)