Tweedledum and Tweedledee - Other References in Popular Culture

Other References in Popular Culture

• In Lil Wayne's 2012 album, Dedication 4 he made a reference to Tweedledum and Tweedledee in his song, 'Same Damn Tune' the following line: "Got two bitches off twitter, tweedledee and tweedledum" was used in this context.
• In DC Comics, two long-time Batman villains call themselves Tweedledum and Tweedledee, because they are cousins who happen to be identical and very similar to the original versions. Their true names, appropriately, are Deever and Dumfree Tweed. They occasionally appear as henchmen of the Joker, but just as often operate solo. They first appeared in Detective Comics #74. They also had a cameo in Grant Morrison's and David McKean's graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.
• Rudyard Kipling references Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee at the beginning of the short story "Her Majesty's Servants", from The Jungle Book (1894).
• In a 1921 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the writer James Joyce uses the twins "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" to characterize Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and their conflict.
• In the film Alice in Wonderland (1999), they appear right after Alice's encounter with the talking flowers, which also were originally only in Through the Looking-Glass.
• In Joe Versus the Volcano (1990, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) the twin sloops owned by industrialist Samuel Graynamore are named the Tweedledee and the Tweedledum. The Tweedledee sinks before the film takes place. The Tweedledum is struck by a sinister lighting bolt and sinks during the film.
• In the SyFy TV miniseries Alice (2009), the twins are called Dr. Dee and Dr. Dum, and are a cross between mad scientists and torturers who use illusions to extract information from their victims.
• In the anime and manga series Kiddy Grade, Tweedledum (a teenage boy) and Tweedledee (a teenage girl) are twin members of a special, trade policy enforcer group named "ES" consisting of agents with various superpowers.
• During the 2000 United States presidential election, candidate Ralph Nader pointed out that George W. Bush and Al Gore were not very different in their corporate policies, and called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
• Helen Keller, the first deaf/blind recipient of a Bachelor of Arts degree and a prolific writer and left-wing activist, said this of democracy in the US: "Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
• Leading up to the United Kingdom general election, 2010, Tory leader David Cameron compared coalition-building British party leaders to "Tweedledum talking to Tweedledee, who is talking to Tweedledem."
• "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" features as the opening song on Bob Dylan's 2001 album Love and Theft.
• In the satirical BBC Radio 4 show The News at Bedtime, the main characters are John Tweedledum and Jim Tweedledee, played by Jack Dee and Peter Capaldi.
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee appear in the West End's Shrek the Musical, playing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.