D&D is Everywhere III

Last month, I drew readers' attention to an episode of the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon in which the titular characters play a fantasy RPG. For this entry, I'm going to reference a couple of related things, only one of which has any direct connection to Dungeons & Dragons.

Let's get the non-D&D reference out of the way: Crognard the Barbarian. Despite his name – which is just one letter removed from "grognard" – this show-within-a-show is quite obviously a reference not anything related to D&D but rather to the 1980 Ruby-Spears cartoon, Thundarr the Barbarian (with a dash of the 1983 Filmation cartoon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and perhaps even the 1967 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, The Herculoids). 

That's interesting, to be sure, but what's more relevant to the topic of this particular post is the dread dragon Wigglepuss, against whom Crognard faces off in the final episode of this fictional series. Take a look.

That's obviously Tiamat, as imagined by Dungeons & Dragons, whether from the original Monster Manual or from the D&D cartoon (produced by Marvel Productions in 1983). What I immediately notice is that Wigglepuss is not just any five-headed dragon but rather a five-headed dragon of all the right colors – red, blue, black, green, and white (though the colors of the non-red heads are reversed from those of the cartoon). Regardless, I was tickled to see this; it's another example of the ways, large and small, that Dungeons & Dragons continues to exert an influence outside of the field of RPGs.