Referenced By / Bambi

Actually, nobody. It was his mother who got shot.

Bambi is a 1942 Disney movie, which has been parodied and referenced almost to death in popular culture, usually with references to cute deer and the death of the titular character's mother.

Anime and Manga

• In episode 7 of Beastars, Haru decides to allow Louis to stay at her place for two days. While she is treating Louis' wounds after shedding his antlers. Haru calls Louis "a cute little Bamb" while trying to disinfect his head.

Comic Books

• The Incredible Hulk: Depending on the Writer, Hulk is quite fond of deer. He even calls them Bambi! One memorable issue had him stumble upon some hunters killing a doe with its fawn nearby, and he reacted pretty much exactly how you'd expect him to.
  Hulk: Men killed Bambi's mother!

Comic Strips

• Mother Goose and Grimm: Bambi is among the Disney characters whose head is mounted on the wall in this strip◊.
• Pearls Before Swine did a shout out to this movie while the main characters are engaging in a game of chess.

Film - Animated

• A Goofy Movie: A Bambi doll is seen in one scene.
• The Rescuers: Recycled Animation of Bambi and his mother grazing in a field can be seen during the "Someone's Waiting For You" sequence. Some of the birds seen in that film make an appearance as well.
• In The Rugrats Movie, there's a scene in the forest with cute woodland creatures resembling those from the movie, who get scared away by the runaway Reptar wagon.
• In The Simpsons Movie, when Homer gets romantic with Marge in Alaska, a bunch of forest animals help them get out of their clothes including a buck and a fawn who resemble Bambi and his father, while chanting similar to the birds chanting from the film plays, the buck then covers the fawns eyes as they engage in intercourse.
• The Sword in the Stone: The deer that Kay plans to shoot with his arrow is re-used Stock Footage of Bambi's mother from Bambi. It was re-used again in The Jungle Book and the opening of Beauty and the Beast. The bird footage was re-used in The Fox and the Hound.
• In Turning Red, while running back home from school in her red panda form, Mei briefly stops by the Daisy Mart to ogle Devon, and starts thumping her foot like Thumper.

Film - Live Action

• In Diamonds Are Forever, two women are named Bambi and Thumper, who are keeping the real Willard Whyte prisoner in his house.
• In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-Wee has a rug that has Bambi and Thumper on it.
• Qui A Tue Bambi refers to Bambi too.
• The Mother. Zoe is shocked when her mother shoots dead a stag in front of her, and refuses to eat the bowl of meat she later places on the dinner table.
  Zoe: Not eating Bambi's mom.
  The Mother: That isn't venison. The deer has to hang for the meat to tenderize. Besides, that was a stag, so... it would be Bambi's dad.
  Zoe: What is this, then?
  The Mother: Rabbit. Thumper.
  Zoe: I'm not eating a rabbit either.
• The Return Of The Secaucus Seven refers to a term called Bambicide.
• The Sandlot makes a direct reference to Bambi. " That wimpy deer?"
• Scream 4 has Robbie asking Kirby what her favourite scary movie is. She sarcastically replies "Bambi".
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • Roger mentions his uncle Thumper.
  • In the final scene, Bambi appears among other cartoon characters.

Literature

• In one installment of Dear Dumb Diary, Jamie's mom tells her that her father cried when they saw Bambi together. To save him some face, she cried by imagining her favourite shoes getting ruined.
• In Where The Drowned Girls Go, Regan notes that the mangy, limping deer she meets in the woods will never be cast as the lead in a live-action Bambi remake.

Live-Action TV

• Are You Being Served? In the episode "Our Figures Are Slipping", Mrs. Lucas asks Mrs. Brahms whether she would like to watch this film?
• The Brittas Empire: The password to get into Brittas' computer system in http://etc is "Bambi". Brittas later notes that he never got over the scene where Bambi lost his mother.
• Friends: In "TOW Chandler Can't Cry", Joey asks Chandler if he didn't cry when Bambi's mom died.
  Chandler: Yes, it was very sad when they stopped drawing the deer.
• Glee: In "The Rhodes Not Taken", a drunk Kurt meets Emma in the hall and says, "Oh Bambi... I cried so hard when those hunters shot your mommy..."
• Les Guignols de l'Info: During the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Bambi was among the many animated movie characters that Laurent Weil (Canal+'s movie journalist) was able to get an interview with.
• Married... with Children: Peg says to Al that she "let it slip out that you still cry at the end of Bambi."
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: During the review Joel says Bambi, humans are basically good when two deers appear on screen.
• Saturday Night Live: One sketch spoofs The New '10s' Live-Action Adaptations of Disney movies, with a fake action-packed trailer for a film in which a grown-up Bambi (Dwayne Johnson) seeks vengeance for his mother's killing, with help from Thumper (Taran Killam as Vin Diesel), Flower (Jay Pharoah as Chris Tucker), and Faline (Cecily Strong as Michelle Rodriguez).
• Sesame Street: In Elmo Saves Christmas, Oscar calls Lightning the Reindeer "Bambi Face".
• Stranger Things: Jonathan reveals to Nancy that at the age of 10 his father made him kill a rabbit. He then cried for a week because he was a fan of Thumper.
• Supernatural. When the Winchester brothers mention how Bobby used to take them hunting as children, Bobby gripes that they never could shoot a single deer.
  Dean: You're talking about Bambi, man.
  Bobby: You don't shoot Bambi, jackass. You shoot Bambi's mother.
• That '70s Show: In the episode "Hunting", Hyde spots a deer and says: "He's the king of the forest. Just like... Bambi's dad".
• The Young Ones: One episode is called Bambi, which is apparently the nickname of the then-host of University Challenge, Bamber Gascoigne. The series further insinuates that Bamber "Bambi" Gascoigne in fact is Bambi the deer, after several questionable life and career choices and extensive plastic surgery. Neil gets teary eyed when thinking about the scene where Bambi and his mother are lost in the snow.

MMORPGs

• The second expansion of World of Warcraft features Bambina, Mother of Bambina, Flora, and Thudder. Occasionally an NPC will shoot the mother and cheer, at which point Bambina takes several levels in badass and slaughters the NPC mercilessly. Players can watch this unfold repeatedly.

Music

• The song "Bambi" from Prince's Prince is about a lesbian, Bambi, whom he tries to convert to having sex with him instead.
• The Sex Pistols once recorded a single called Who Killed Bambi?.

Spoken Works

• Hanna-Barbera Records released a 33RPM (long-play) Flintstones phonograph record back in 1965 with Jean Vander Pyl (as the voice of Wilma) reading the story of Bambi.

Video Games

• Friend Owl appears as an enemy in the SNES and Sega Genesis versions of the The Jungle Book Licensed Game.

Web Comics

• In Bobwhite, Lewis starts to tell about the hunting trip that was his worst Christmas ever, and Ivy accurately predicts that Lewis shot an animal and felt terrible about it afterwards. (When Lewis shoots a deer, his dad even says it's "just like Bambi's mom!") As it turns out, Lewis has a near-supernatural ability to shoot animals without even trying.

Web Video

• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • In his "Top 11 Saddest Moments" video, scenes from various movies from the Disney Animated Canon are placed in the #1 spot, including the iconic scene from Bambi where his mother is shot and killed.
  • In his review of The Disney Afternoon, when the Critic gets to reviewing TaleSpin, he compares the idea of using characters from The Jungle Book in an urban-like setting to that of using the cast of Bambi in a film noir, and shows a film poster for Buck City.
  • In "War of the Commercials", when the Critic reviews commercials for the Mickey Mouse Talking Phone, he imagines what other characters Disney could have used. One of them is Bambi, leading to this line;
  Critic (as Bambi): Hello, this is Bambi. My mother and I are... (gunshot) Mother!

Western Animation

• Aladdin: The Series: In "In the Heat of the Fright", when the fire cats terrorize and begin burning a village, Genie watches Bambi so he can cry at the iconic scene where Bambi's mother is shot and killed, using his tears to rain on the fire cats and make them dissipate as well as put out the village fire.
• American Dad!: In "Don't Look a Smith Horse in the Mouth", Roger compares Stan trying to walk in his new horse body to Bambi's first steps.
• Animaniacs: Skippy and Slappy watch a movie called Bumbie which traumatizes Skippy. Writer, producer and voice actor Sherri Stoner had actually been traumatized by ''Bambi'' as a child.
• Bambi Meets Godzilla: Probably the most iconic appearance of Bambi in popular culture.
• The Critic has media mogul Duke Phillips introducing a new technology called "Phillipsvision" which will edit films known for having depressing content to make them more positive. Jay Sherman, who opposes this, convinces him that movies need to depict the wrongs of life as well as the right, and he specifically says that he wants Bambi's mother to die as an example.
• The Donald Duck short No Hunting has a cameo appearance by Bambi and his very much alive mother grazing by a river. When garbage begins rolling down the river, Bambi's mother says, "Man is in the forest. Let's dig out."
• Drawn Together turns Captain Hero loose on nature with semi-automatic weapons. Inevitably, Bambi shows up on the doorstep with his dead mother's body in his... er... arms and tearfully begs Captain Hero to stop. This display moves the housemates to drop their guard, whereupon Bambi lets loose a herd of vengeful deer on them. When the deer attack is routed, Bambi cries out "Come back! I killed my own MOTHER for this!"
• Earthworm Jim: In "Queen What's-Her-Name", after listening to Princess What's-Her-Name's backstory, Jim sobs uncontrollably, saying "It's the saddest story since Bambi!"
• In the Family Guy episode "Fore Father", a deer offers to adopt Chris as his son after Joe and Cleveland refused to do it when Peter asked. The deer resembles Bambi's father.
• Garfield and Friends: At the end of "Invasion of the Big Robots", Garfield escapes from an action-packed cartoon filled with giant robots, only to end up in a forest inhabited by cutsey animals, including a deer and a rabbit, who announce that they'll teach Garfield to be nice. Garfield then hurriedly tries to make his way back to the robot cartoon on the grounds that he finds it preferable to the saccharine cartoon he's in now.
• Mickey Mouse (2013):
  • Bambi and Thumper cameo on "Duck The Halls".
  • "April Showers" features in "Swimmin' Hole".
• Screwy Squirrel: In his debut cartoon, Screwy meets a cute squirrel talking about the fact that the next cartoon will be about all his cute forest friends, which is an obvious stab at Bambi. He beats him up, though.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Treehouse of Horror I", one of the gravestones in the cemetery reads "Bambi's Mum".
  • In "The Monkey Suit", lawyer Wallace Brady feeds a cute baby deer that looks suspiciously like Bambi and says evolution caused the forest fire to break out.
  • In "Rednecks and Broomsticks", Bambi and Thumper come out to skate on the ice and are then hit by the Simpsons' car.
  • In "Tales from the Public Domain", Marge lies to Lisa by saying that Joan of Arc's story had a happy ending and eating the page that says she was burned. Afterwards, she says it was "easier to chew than that Bambi video".
  • In "Treehouse of Horror XXXII", the opening segment is a spoof of the film titled "Barti".
• Robot Chicken:
  • In the sketch, "Dead Disney Moms" from the episode, "Robot Chicken Lots of Holidays But Don't Worry Christmas is Still There So Pull the Stick Out of Your Ass Fox News Special", various Disney characters visit their mothers' graves on Mother's Day. Bambi is one of them, and asks his mom if she's watching over him, like Mufasa did for Simba. The spirit of Bambi's Mom tells Bambi to kill himself, as the rampant deer population is a real problem, and deer are meaningless.
  • A sketch from "Spike Fraser in: Should I Happen to Back Into a Horse" features Bambi visiting the house of a man named David, and finding out that his mother is alive and married to him. David and Bambi's Mom are also revealed to have a half-deer, half-human son named Bambi II.
  • A sketch from "May Cause Internal Diarrhea" has Bambi's mother appear as one of the inhabitants of the Heaven for dead Disney parents.
• Near the beginning of the Thomas & Friends episode "Terence Breaks the Ice", a deer and a rabbit can be seen sliding on the icy pond Thomas stops near.
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • In the short "Duck in the Dark" (part of "Best O' Plucky Duck Day"), the deer and the rabbit in the Eddy Cougar horror movie that Plucky watches resemble Bambi and Thumper.
  • In the short "Venison, Anyone?" (part of "Mr. Popular's Rules of Cool"), Vinnie the Deer tells the viewers that he's going to have to be the one to deal with Montana Max, since Bambi's on vacation.

Real Life

• Around the Disney studio, whenever Walt Disney was approaching, the code used was "man is in the forest", which was a reference to this film.

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