Waterloo in Popular Culture - Films and Television

Films and Television

• A 1913 film of The Battle of Waterloo made by British and Colonial Films and directed by Charles Weston has been described as "the first British epic film".

• Waterloo was a 1970 Italian-Russian film, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. It was the story of the preliminary events and the battle, and is remembered for its lavish battle scenes.

• The book Sharpe's Waterloo (see Books above) was adapted for television by the ITV and starred Sean Bean as Sharpe.

• The Doctor Who series features two stories in spin-off media set around the Battle of Waterloo; in World Game, the Second Doctor poses as Napoleon to carry messages across the French lines to warn the British and their allies when time-travellers attempt to change the battle for their own amusement, and in The Curse of Davros the Sixth Doctor has to prevent his old enemy Davros from helping the French to win the battle, convincing Napoleon to accept defeat to save humanity from being conquered by the Daleks.

• Waterloops is a fictitious water park visited by Napoleon in the film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

• The Battle of Waterloo is referenced during an episode of The O.C. in "The Safe Harbor".

• In Blackadder: Back & Forth, Lord Blackadder travels back in time and accidentally kills Wellington before the battle of Waterloo; when he returns to the future England is full of French culture, so he time-travels once again to ensure that the Duke lives.

• In the movie Jaws, Captain Quint, while recounting his experience as a seaman aboard the USS Indianapolis, likens the sailors' grouped formations to avoid sharks as "something you would see in a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo."

• The battle is mentioned in the 2004 film The Alamo, where it is compared to the Battle of San Jacinto, the final battle of the Texas Revolution.

• The 2005 Discovery Channel series Battleground: The Art of War featured one episode on the Battle of Waterloo.

• In the James Bond film The Living Daylights, Bond (played by Timothy Dalton) kills the villain Brad Whitaker with an explosive that knocks a bust of the Duke of Wellington onto him. Bond then says of Whitaker, "He met his Waterloo".

• There is a TV show shown on BBC1 called Waterloo Road

• In an episode of Dad's Army entitled "A Soldier's Farewell", Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) dreams that he is Napoleon during and after the Battle of Waterloo.

• During the Denver Broncos' loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2008 at Arrowhead Stadium, where Denver's coach Mike Shanahan is 3-11, Dan Dierdorf made the comment, "If Mike Shanahan was Napoleon, then this is his Waterloo."

• In Swedish television series Bert from 1994, the episode "Det viktiga är inte att kämpa väl utan att vinna" features Torleif's little sister wrongly referring to the battle as "Waterloo var ju 1812, Gud vad dum du är Torleif!" ("Waterloo was 1812, Oh My God how stupid you are, Torleif!") when their family plays a quiz.