Werewolf Cameos, Part I

Hello, hello and welcome!

This time I decided to write a slightly different post, not concentrating on a single piece of work, but featuring a few at a time. The reason for this is simple – sometimes werewolves appear in movies and video games for a moment as cameos to accentuate a point that the movie/video game is making. These appearances are hence too brief to be given separate articles. That is why I decided to start a series (hopefully) of posts with a few such werewolf cameos at once, so that the post itself isn’t the length of a tweet ;) That said, I hope you enjoy this mini-series that will be popping out every now and then as soon as I gather enough examples to include. The order in which I list these is completely random, by the way. And I think that posting them in threes will be just about right for now. Might be more, depending on the amount of material. As always - enjoy!

Despicable Me (2010)

A werewolf is briefly shown in 2010’s animated movie Despicable Me when the main character, Gru, succeeds in shrinking the moon in order to steal it. The werewolf is shown howling at the moon, but once the moon is shrunk and disappears from the sky, he quickly transforms back into a human, confused at what has happened.

The Last of Us (2013)

At the very start of the game, we control a young girl and navigate through her home as we witness the beginning of the fungal zombie apocalypse. If we inspect the interior of her room, on the wall next to the bed we will find a fictional werewolf movie poster. The movie is called “Dawn of the Wolf” and there are mentions of it later on in the game. It is referenced in a conversation between the two main characters, Ellie and Joel. Subsequently, if you inspect the walls of the hotel the main characters find themselves passing through or look at some poster frames out on the streets, there are also posters for "Dawn of the Wolf, Part II". Additionally, Joel describes it as a “dumb teen movie”, which, all in all, strongly suggests that the whole idea is Naughty Dog’s way of parodying Dawn of the Dead (because of the title) and the Twilight saga (because of its being a multi-part teenage movie hit featuring a woman in love with a supernatural being, in this case a werewolf).

But that's not all. Yet another werewolf cameo occurs in the DLC pack, "Left Behind", where Ellie and her friend visit a store which sells Halloween merchandise. On one of the shelves they find masks and the one Ellie puts on is based on the werewolf from An American Werewolf in London.

Big Bad Beetleborgs (1996-1998)

Ah yes, now this takes me back to my puppy days. In this American live-action television series, three kids obtain the power to transform into their favourite comic book heroes after they accidentally release a phantasm named Flubber during their visit at the supposedly haunted Hillhurst Mansion. It is then revealed that Hillhurst Mansion is home to a group of (classic Universal Studios) monsters that the children befriend (more or less, since the monsters still want to eat them, but are always outsmarted by them). One of these monsters is Wolfgang “Wolfie” Smith – a werewolf who acts more like a pet dog and is treated as such by the other residents of the mansion. He speaks in yelps, growls and barks, similarly to Scooby Doo, and can be understood only by another monster, Count Fangula, who acts as his translator.

And that is it for the first part of the Werewolf Cameos series. More will come in the future, of course. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and I will see you again soon!

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