Illuminati in Popular Culture - Television and Film

Television and Film

• In the 1986 comedy film The Whoopee Boys, the 'Bavarian Illuminati' is a group of men who learn how to charm their way into a high-society lifestyle.
• In Simon West's 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a group of high-society villains call themselves Illuminati, developing a plan to rule the world. Along with Lara Croft's father, they claim that the Illuminati have existed for four millennia for this purpose.
• That Mitchell and Webb Look featured a sketch about an evil secret society called the Inebriati, who advocated drinking one and a half glasses of wine to achieve inner peace.
• In several episodes of the Walt Disney animated series Gargoyles, one of the major antagonists of the series, David Xanatos, was revealed to be a member of the Illuminati. Other individuals revealed to be Illuminati members in the Gargoyles series were former FBI agent Martin Hacker, NYPD detective Matt Bluestone, and Quarrymen founder John Castaway. The Gargoyles version of the Illuminati Society in the storyline is said to have been founded some eleven centuries before the Bavarian "real-world" original by "Peredur fab Ragnal", a son of Gawain who took the Welsh language version of Percival's name in the SLG comic continuation of the TV series. The original Percival is still alive at the end of the 20th century, with Gawain's centuries-old son Peredur leading the organization.
• The History Channel series Brad Meltzer's Decoded featured Illuminati author Mark Dice, who met with the show's investigators to discuss the Illuminati and their operations today.
• The protagonist group in the film G-Saviour from Gundam franchise is called "Illuminati", a secret society loosely based on Illuminati.
• In one episode of Justice League Unlimited, The Question, a conspiracy theorist, exclaims several theories under torture, one of them being that Illuminati mystics forged the Magic Bullet to 'stop us from learning the truth'.
• In several episodes of the modern television show "Bones", the cannibalistic serial killer referred to as "The Gormogon" is revealed to act and behave under the doctrines of the Illuminati.
• The Illuminati is parodied in an episode of American Dad called "Black Mystery Month", in which the "Illuminuti" is a secret organization involving the origin of peanut butter. They are also parodied in The Cleveland Show where hip-hop celebrities form an organization called the hip-hop Illuminati.
• The Temple of the Four Orders, featured in Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes of 2009, is another interpretation of the Illuminati, described by Sherlock as the group of men who secretly control the British Empire. Their key belief is that the sphinx holds the key to ultimate power, and as such this society is geared around the practice of witchcraft and other rituals to achieve their ends. The film's antagonist, Lord Blackwood, uses the society to achieve his goal of world domination, claiming that "magic will lead the way" into an age where people right across the world bow down to the Order out of fear for their magic, including the recently war-shattered United States of America. In actual fact, Blackwood uses innovative scientific designs, including an early chemical weapon based around gaseous cyanide and radio wave transmission, a paralytic that activates with the reaction between copper and water and an extremely flammable liquid that ignites with a single spark from a dud round in a revolver. This allows him to keep up the facade of being a very powerful magician.