"New Orleans was the first city to offer indoor absinthe faucets, and indeed has always played a cosmopolitan and libertine ragtime beneath America's generally dull Sousa march of rural piety... a haven for vampires, video-poker enthusiasts, and sub-sea level drinkers of all ages."
— John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise
New Orleans, Louisiana, as seen in the media. One of the most culturally distinct cities in America, it is unique due to its Southern sensibilities, French roots, and Vice City status, and writers go crazy over it.
Apparently, New Orleans is always surrounded by swamps and alligators. The swamps, of course, are always a mere two-minute jog from the French Quarter (which tends to comprise the entire city): a convenient change of scenery for the protagonist chasing a bad guy. Said chase scene will inevitably run into a Mardi Gras parade, because It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans, usually accompanied by the Second Line march
(a.k.a. That Mardi Gras song that everybody knows but hardly anybody can name). Somehow, the city's entire black population—which is always significantly smaller than in real life—is either a voodoo priest or related to one, and you can always expect a reference to the city's famous cooking, and I gerr-on-tee at least one local will have a Creole accent thicker than gumbo.
Anne Rice of The Vampire Chronicles fame later helped popularize the Southern Gothic version of New Orleans, in which the town is full of zombies, voodoo priestesses, ghosts, vampires, mausoleums, and creepy but elegantly gothic antebellum architecture. It has quickly become a standard trope about New Orleans by itself.
Most depictions of New Orleans depict the "Big Easy" as it existed before Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed it in 2005. For a few years afterwards, Katrina became a specter in any works based in the city, bringing its volatile weather and high crime rates to the forefront. Disney sought to bring the original Big Easy image back to popularity with The Princess and the Frog, which incorporates all of the elements mentioned in the previous paragraph (except for the vampires).
Useful Note: Locals don't call it "The Big Easy"; they just call it New Orleans. Which may or may not sound like "N'awlins" depending on who you're speaking to. Native New Orleanian pronunciation guide: Orleans has three syllables and no "R." Elsewhere in the south it varies. Important: New Orleans doesn't rhyme with "evergreens." Another nickname is "The Crescent City" note .
There's also a film called The Big Easy which is, of course, a neo-noir thriller set during the eternal Heat Wave that softens people up in New Orleans and motivates them to get out on the streets.
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People Born In New Orleans
Examples
Anime & Manga
- A stunningly accurate recreation of New Orleans shows up in Aldnoah.Zero's Episode 1 when Count Selnakis's Landing Castle crashes into the city, and again in Episode 18 when the Deucalion leads a major operation to assassinate Selnakis and retake the city. As a matter of fact, the show's official website includes a map◊ of the battle that corresponds to the actual New Orleans in excruciating detail: you can actually tell where Inaho is in relation to the real life streets. This is more accurate than most American movies get.
Audio Plays
- Below Board is set in New Orleans, albeit an Alternate History version of it, although it hasn't gotten to dealing with any stereotypes of the city yet.
Comic Books
- The fourth Blacksad album is set here.
- Alley-Kat-Abra of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! hails from its Earth-C counterpart, "Mew Orleans." While Its Always Mardi Gras In Mew Orleans shows up (the visiting Zoo Crew, looking for Alley, run into Mew Orleans' Mardi Gras parade), the other tropes are largely unused (aside from Alley's interest in the occult).
- Hellstorm: Son of Satan: The 2008 Daimon Hellstrom miniseries is based in New Orleans and occasionally talks about the city's post-Katrina efforts, but the series makes almost no use of the setting's usual relationship with the supernatural (the villains were the Egyptian gods, of all things).
- Marvel's resident voodoo expert, Jericho Drumm (formerly Brother Voodoo, now Doctor Voodoo), has always been based in New Orleans.
- A 2008 issue of Justice Society of America featured the team helping local superhero Amazing Man rebuild in Katrina's wake.
- Monica Rambeau, AKA Spectrum/"the Captain Marvel everyone forgets about," is from Louisiana. She served as a harbor cop with the New Orleans Police Department before becoming a superhero.
- Valiant Comics Shadowman features a hero from New Orleans, and shades of voodoo as well.
- When Marvel started its own Wizarding School with 2020's Strange Academy, the school was placed in New Orleans. Partly because Dr. Voodoo (see above) was running it and partly because the pan-dimensional student body wouldn't arouse much alarm (or even get noticed) on the streets of the Crescent City.
- Suicide Squad: New Orleans is the closest city to Belle Reeve prison where the Squad is based. For a time, Captain boomerang was allowed to live in an apartment in the French Quarter when not on missions.
- Swamp Thing is based on the Louisiana swamps and the films are based on there too.
- For some, Gambit of the X-Men is nothing more than a collection of various stereotypes about thieves and Cajuns all rolled into one that has only recently been given any major Character Development. He was raised by your run-of-the-mill Cajun thieves' guild after being kidnapped at birth, and their leader was advised by a black Catholic voodoo priestess type! He has a Cajun accent so hardcore that even the writers of the X-Men books can't help but parody it now and then! Every time Gambit has a few issues in New Orleans, he WILL have scenes in either the swamps and/or the French Quarter and some mention of gumbo or jambalaya WILL be made, I gerr-on-tee it. One time he took the X-Men with him where they were seen enjoying Mardi Gras. His first appearance was set during Mardi Gras, too.
Films — Animated
- Disney's The Princess and the Frog takes place in New Orleans during The Roaring '20s. As mentioned above, it incorporates almost every cliche related to the stereotypical version of the city including the prevalence of Voodoo minus the large number of black people seen throughout the movie including the film's protagonist Tiana.
- Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island has the gang from Mysteries, Inc. going to New Orleans, and running into, you guessed it, zombies. They go back later on in an episode of the 2002 series, this time running into ghosts (of two soldiers from the Civil War).
Films — Live-Action
- Angel Heart manages to work in Mardi Gras, Voodoo, a Hardboiled Detective AND the Devil. a regular spicy gumbo!
- The eponymous locale of The Big Easy is depicted as sexy, dangerous, atmospheric, and populated mainly by wiseguys (Mafiosi) and Cajuns — even though the Cajuns are traditionally farming people of rural South Louisiana. New Orleans' native Creoles are a different ethnic group entirely.
- The 1939 version of The Cat and the Canary moves the West mansion into Louisiana bayou.
- The Cincinnati Kid is set in '30s New Orleans.
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (film only: the short story is set in Baltimore), though the portrayal is far from stereotypical.
- John Woo's first Hollywood movie, Hard Target (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme) takes place in New Orleans.
- Haunted Mansion (2023): Much like its source material, the film is set in New Orleans, with a shot of Bourbon Street at the end of the main trailer.
- Heavens Prisoners is about organized crime in and around New Orleans.
- Hotel!, the 1967 film based on Arthur Hailey's novel of the same name, is set in New Orleans.
- Invisible Avenger is set in, and was shot on location in, New Orleans.
- The second half of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is set in New Orleans.
- Judas Kiss is a crime thriller set in New Orleans. It avoids most of the cliches, but the humid heat is a constant presence, and the above ground graveyards make a brief appearance.
- The beginning and end of Last Holiday starring Queen Latifah both take place in a pre-Katrina New Orleans. The movie mostly subverts this trope as it shows New Orleans as it really looks on any given day, even with the street car shots. The one stereotype used is that Georgia, the main character, is a great cook who has aspirations of owning a restaurant. Disney must have been inspired.
- Live and Let Die: Most of the action in the movie is split between New Orleans and the fictional Caribbean island of San Monique, with a smaller part in New York City.
- Project Power revolves around a drug that grants temporary superpowers being distributed on the streets of New Orleans.
- Son of Dracula is set around here. Main villain even hides in the swamps.
- The Clint Eastwood neo-noir movie Tightrope is set in New Orleans, though it's mainly for aesthetic reasons. The film was going to be set in California, but Eastwood didn't want it to be confused with a Dirty Harry movie, and wanted a different location.
- Undercover Blues has a married pair of spies on vacation in a version of New Orleans that fits this trope to a T. Of course, their vacation doesn't last long, leading to all the exciting action and chase scene possibilities that Hollywood New Orleans offers.
- Largely averted when Wolverine heads here in X-Men Origins: Wolverine to find Gambit who, surprisingly, is toned down a lot from his comic persona.
Literature
- Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January is set in New Orleans, right after the transfer to American control of the city. Averts the lack of black residents part of the trope, as the protagonist is mixed-race and the first book especially, "A Free Man of Color", goes deep into the complexities of racial relations and politics of the time.
- Ben Snow: "The Ripper of Storeyville" is set in the sprawling Red Light District of New Orleans, known as Storeyville, in 1901.
- A Confederacy of Dunces: The protagonist considers New Orleans the center of the world and is horrified of the thought of moving as far as Baton Rouge.
- Sherilyn Kenyon's The Dark Hunters series of romance novels is set almost entirely in New Orleans and environs, and fills the city with vampires, vampire hunters, gods, shapeshifters, demons, and other supernatural beings that manage somehow to remain an urban myth despite seemingly outnumbering the human population two to one. And dating a few of the wackier human natives to boot.
- In the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke, Robicheaux is a former homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department, who now lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, and works as a detective for the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office, although his cases often take him back New Orleans.
- Genua, a small city-state in Discworld is based upon New Orleans, again featuring a mix of Mardi Gras and zombies.
Nanny Ogg: They say if you can't have a good time in Genua, you're probably dead. You can probably have a bit of quiet fun even if you are dead, in Genua.
- Robert Asprin's fantasy novel Dragons Wild, depicts the life of regular residents of the French Quarter, which is where Asprin lived in real life. Oddly, while 9/11 is mentioned several times, there is no mention whatsoever of Katrina. Following Asprin's sudden death, whether the hurricane was going to happen "later" in a sequel, or he was engaging in a bit of wish fulfillment may never be known.
- The second book was going to deal with Katrina. Long story short, dragons fighting each other directly tends to have an effect much like Highlander Immortals killing one another on sacred ground.
- The second book in the series has been published posthumously; again no mention of Katrina, but with the action building clearly towards some variety of all-out dragon-on-dragon fight. Likely Katrina would have arrived sooner or later.
- The second book was going to deal with Katrina. Long story short, dragons fighting each other directly tends to have an effect much like Highlander Immortals killing one another on sacred ground.
- Andrew Fox, also a New Orleans native, wrote two vampire books set in New Orleans: Fat White Vampire Blues and Bride of the Fat White Vampire. Although he averts most of the stereotypes and gives a fairly accurate depiction of the city, it's still about vampires and how the city is secretly controlled by them. Of course, it's also a parody. In fact, in the first novel, The Big Bad and his crew have their HQ beneath Harrah's Casino in downtown New Orleans. The series has also been called a cross between Interview with the Vampire and A Confederacy of Dunces. Although, Jules Duchon is far more likable than Ignatious J. Riley.
- Dean Koontz's Frankenstein trilogy is set here. For some reason, the final book was delayed for years after Katrina, leading readers to expect monsters to attack amidst a city-wrecking hurricane. It didn't happen.
- Arthur Hailey's Hotel is set in New Orleans.
- Most of the Illuminated series takes place in New Orleans. While the city tends to attract demons, mages, and other varieties of the supernatural, the setting itself is faithful to the present, and the series averts almost every trope usually associated with the city.
- Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans native, also sets most (but not all) of the action of his novels there. In Lost Souls (1992) there's no less than seven vampires (albeit several are fairly minor characters) and a creepy voodoo shop ran by a guy obsessed with his dead brother.
- The setting for Percy Walker's The Moviegoer. Not that he likes it very much.
- Mark Kelly, from the first part of Princess of Wands, works in the New Orleans Police Department, with a few scenes in the city, and much of the rest of the segment out in the swamp areas in the vicinity.
- In Wild Cards, when the committee goes to New Orleans to help evacuate and strengthen the dikes before a hurricane, they come across a local ace whose power is to animate zombies.
- The book Zombie Queen by Donald Whittington takes place in the haunted, zombie version of New Orleans.
Live-Action TV
- American Horror Story: Coven, with a focus on the city's history of voodoo and serial killers.
- There was a '90s detective series titled The Big Easy.
- Bones had another post-Katrina example-Brennan was down identifying victims of the flood and gets tangled up in the grisly voodoo underworld.
- There was a '60s detective series called Bourbon Street Beat.
- Several episodes of Call of the Wildman have taken place in New Orleans, with Ernie 'Turtleman' Brown, Jr. helping to capture nuisance animals in the suburbs and the nearby bayous.
- Minor character Detective Will LaMontagne from Criminal Minds is from New Orleans and in "Jones", there were mentions of Mardi Gras and Hurricane Katrina that took Will's father's life.
- The '80s dramedy Franks Place was set in New Orleans.
- The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries episode ''Voodoo Doll' runs rampant with this trope. The brothers visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras and run afoul of a Voodoo Priest, complete with Voodoo Tarot Cards and ritual dancing in the middle of the nearby swamp.
- A post-Katrina example: Heroes had an entire sub-arc set in a New Orleans filled with poverty and related misfortunes.
- Indeed, there was even going to be a subplot involving Season 3 villain Knox Washington, returning from prison to take power in New Orleans. However, the Writer's Strike derailed all of Season 2; nearly all characters involved with this plot were written out, and Knox was shafted to Mook for Season 3 Big Bad Arthur Petrelli.
- In either another example of research failure, when Monica Dawson is introduced in Season 2, she mentions that she lives in a "county." Louisiana is the only state in the United States that's divided into parishes rather than counties. Although not many people outside of Louisiana would actually know this, and having to explain it would get tiresome pretty quickly.
- Impractical Jokers has an episode called "The Big Uneasy" that takes place in New Orleans.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): In Season 1, almost all of the Flashbacks (with the exception of the Ponchatoula hotel and the San Francisco gay bar) take place in New Orleans. In the early 20th century, it was a Vice City with brothels and gambling dens. Jackson Square is featured prominently, gumbo is served for dinner at the de Pointe du Lac mansion, Lestat de Lioncourt's townhouse is located in the French Quarter, there's a jazz funeral, a couple of scenes are set in the bayou, and of course, there is a Mardi Gras ball. It's an ideal place for a vampire, according to Lestat.
Lestat: The life of a vampire has its challenges and its rewards, but I think New Orléans, with its music, culture, cuisine, shipping yards, conventioneers, thrill-seeking tourists far-flung from their homes, the laissez-faire attitude of the local police force... (chuckles) Oh, yes, the perfect setting for a vampire home, a vampire romance.
- The short-lived FOX cop drama K-Ville dealt with two police officers trying to keep the peace in post-Katrina New Orleans, when a good chunk of the police force had left with the rest of the refugees. The show quickly became notorious for its inaccuracies, especially a mention of "gumbo parties" in the first episode. This was referenced in Treme, where a tourist asks about gumbo parties during Mardi Gras and is told "We don't call them that."
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Cloak & Dagger (2018) is set in the Big Easy as opposed to New York in the comics.
- The first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier happens in New Orleans with Sam Wilson, otherwise known as Falcon, dealing with his family's personal problems.
- Murder, She Wrote had several episodes set in New Orleans: "Murder to a Jazz Beat" (about the jazz scene, obviously); "The Perfect Foil" (Mardi Gras); "Judge Not" (jazz again); and "Big Easy Murder" (voodoo).
- Abby Sciuto from NCIS hails from New Orleans and points out in the third season opener that the jazz music occurs after the burial.
- And guess where the spinoff NCIS: New Orleans takes place.
- The Villalobos pit bull rescue featured in the Animal Planet series Pitbulls And Parolees moved to New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward from their original location near Los Angeles, California.
- Saturday Night Live has a sublimely ridiculous recurring sketch called "Maine Justice," a small-claims dispute courtroom reality show that ostensibly takes place in Maine — except everyone acts and talks in a ridiculously exaggerated Nawlins manner, leaving the defendant completely bewildered. By the end, they admit that they relocated after Katrina but are reluctant to give up their old ways.
- On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sisko's father runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans, featuring real non-replicated food.
- The HBO series Treme ("Tre-may") lampshades this trope constantly. The show takes place largely in the Treme, a specific part of New Orleans, and frequently ridicules this trope and the lopsided media attention certain sectors of New Orleans received just after Katrina.
- While True Blood is based in northern Louisiana outside Shreveport, the story goes to New Orleans on occasion, and the Vampire Authority is based there. The books even factored Hurricane Katrina into the storylines.
- The Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals primarily focuses on a New Orleans run by three factions: humans, vampires, and witches. The constant influx of tourists provides the vampires with a plentiful source of blood and most feed without killing since they do not want the tourists to stop coming. The witches draw enormous amounts of power from the city's graveyards where generations of witches are buried. The werewolves used to be a major faction in the city but a curse drove them into the swamps.
- Yancy Derringer is set in New Orleans in the period immediately following The American Civil War.
Music
- The Radiators (US) (who hail from New Orleans) have a number of songs about the legendarily disreputable elements of their home town, including:
- Their song "Life On Mars"note is about the "alien" life forms one encounters on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, especially late at night.
- "Cannibal Girls" is about the wild women of...New Orleans.
Radio
- Our Miss Brooks: In one episode, Mr. Boynton falsely claims to have learnt some French serving in the army during the war. A skeptical Miss Brooks counters that Mr. Boynton was stationed in the United States, and he knew it. Mr. Boynton insists that he was stationed in New Orleans, and spent a lot of time in the French Quarter.
Tabletop Games
- There is a Call of Cthulhu scenario "Dead Man Stomp" set in a horror version of New Orleans, in which a young trumpet player gets a trumpet cursed with voodoo that can raise the dead.
- Old World of Darkness, no doubt inspired by Anne Rice, has a book dedicated to New Orleans as a vampire-focused horror setting. It has a rather unintentionally comic section talking about New Orleans' extensive subway system (which is practically infeasible due to the city's notoriously unstable soil).
- The remake of this book for the New World of Darkness avoids this, thankfully. However, since it was written before Katrina hit, it describes New Orleans as it was before the hurricane came through. A sidebar describes how an impending city-destroying hurricane strike might be included in the plot. This may seem Harsher in Hindsight, but it had been common knowledge that the city was hideously vulnerable to a powerful hurricane years before Katrina hit.
Theatre
Theme Parks
- Disney Theme Parks seems to love the Big Easy:
- Disneyland features New Orleans Square which is home to two of the park's most famous attractions, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion.
- Disney World has two Big Easy-themed hotels: Port Orleans French Quarter (themed after New Orleans) and Port Orleans Riverside (themed after the rural plantations around New Orleans).
- Tokyo Disneyland features a New Orleans street in its Adventureland, home to (appropriately) their version of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Video Games
- The Adventures of Bayou Billy takes place in New Orleans, starting from the bayou to Bourbon Street, where the showdown with Godfather Gordon occurs.
- Assassin's Creed III: Liberation primarily takes place in New Orleans (aside from a few sequences set in Mexico). An unusual example of this trope since it focuses on the colonial history of the Big Easy when it was still a predominantly French-speaking city under the control of the Spanish after the Seven Years War. Like most depictions of New Orleans, there is a Bayou that exists outside of its boundaries which protagonist Aveline de Grandpré frequently visits to meet up with escaped slaves or work with smugglers Elise and Roussillon. Voodoo even plays a role in the story though much less frequent than other examples.
- The Mosquito Marsh world in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is very indulgent in its New Orleans influences across all three levels.
- The first level in the world, "Off Beat", takes place during a huge Mardi Gras parade with ghosts serving as most of the enemies, platforms wearing Mardi Gras masks, and big band music.
- "Home Cookin'" is a firefly-littered swamp at night with bats making up the majority of the enemies. It is also, quite fittingly, the first level the player can use Dingodile in.
- "Run It Bayou" and its timeline counterpart "No Dillo Dallying" combines elements of the above, with both city- and swamp-based sections featuring posters with "Off Beat"'s ghosts and the same enemies as "Home Cookin'".
- The fourth district of Criminal Case: Pacific Bay, Jazz Town, is heavily based on New Orleans, with its architecture resembling the one seen in the French Quartet, jazz musicians being everywhere, and the final case being set during the annual Jazz town Mardi Gras.
- Epic Mickey has the sub level Bog Easy, referring to the Haunted Mansion's location in New Orleans Square in Disneyland.
- Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. The whole game is set in Gabe's hometown, most of the stages of the game are in different parts of the city featuring New Orleans Stock Characters like the Sweaty Detective and the elderly Creole lady, beignets are a Plot Coupon, and voodoo factors heavily into the plot.
- Hitman: Blood Money had 47 prevent the assassination of a politician during Mardi Gras. Which the game portrays as occurring in late October.
- inFamous 2's intro takes place in a counterpart to New York City called Empire City (the main setting of the first game), but the main bulk of the game takes place in New Marais, which is clearly not in any way New Orleans!
- James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing had Bond visiting New Orleans, complete with Bourbon Street, mausoleums, the Bayou, and a mission where he must prevent the Big Bad from destroying the city's levees with nanomachines. Yes, it did come out before Katrina... why do you ask?
- Laura Bow has the first game in the series, The Colonel's Bequest, take place in an old New Orleans mansion out in the swamps. It's portrayed as hard to reach, needing a swamp boat to get to, but it also includes a voodoo woman named Celie.
- The final chapter of Left 4 Dead 2 is set here. In fact, the whole point of the game before this point was trying to get to New Orleans, signaled as the only safe city in the CEDA materials that are seen in the hotel at Savannah.
- Mafia III is set in New Bordeaux, a fictionalized version of New Orleans, amidst the political and cultural turbulence of 1968 as the protagonist Lincoln Clay tries to overthrow The Mafia and replace it with his own multiethnic criminal organization. Given the time period, many people are still trying to act as though segregation hadn't yet ended, with the Southern Union (a thinly veiled Expy of The Klan) active in the city, talk show hosts railing against black people, and the rise of Clay's gang inflaming racial tensions between the city's white and black communities. Mardi Gras is only seen in the prologue, though the French Ward (the game's version of the French Quarter) is still portrayed as a tourist hotspot.
- Legend of the Crystal Skull is a post-Katrina example, although it references the storm only obliquely and doesn't show enough of the city to reveal any changes.
- Red Dead Redemption II has its own New Orleans analogue; Saint Denis, complete with an alligator-infested bayou just outside the city.
- Shadow Man: 2econd Coming features a New Orleans that consists of about four square blocks of the French Quarter surrounded by eerie swamplands.
- Tony Hawk's Underground 2 featured a New Orleans stage that takes place during a voodoo invasion at Mardi Gras.
Webcomics
- The Skin Horse storyline "Come Swing From My Branches" is set in New Orleans. Tip goes partying, while Sweetheart and Unity meet a Genius Loci of the bayou, and a voodoo priest who is really annoyed to be in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse, because that's not what voodoo's about at all.
Web Videos
- Atun Shei Films operates out of New Orleans (where he also used to work as a tour guide) and has made several videos on the history and culture of New Orleans, especially on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Western Animation
- Episode 12 of The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan displayed this trope, right down to the Mardi Gras celebration.
- Archer: "Pipeline Fever" has Archer and Lana briefly stop over in New Orleans before heading into the swamps to protect a gas pipeline from an ecoterrorist. Archer being Archer, he views the mission mainly as an excuse to get loaded on Hurricanes and struggle between the choice of shrimp po'boys and crab etouffee.
- An episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers took place in New Orleans and featured voodoo priestesses, debauchery on Bourbon Street and bayou people living in the swamp (which is interestingly a stone's throw away from the French Quarter).
- Fright Krewe is set in a version of New Orleans with a secret population of rougarous, vampires, demons, and voodoo spirits.
- Harley Quinn (2019): Harley, Ivy, and Nora's New Orleans itinerary involves getting passed-out drunk, getting some magical "assistance" from John Constantine, visiting the nearby swamp, and getting beignets. They come home the next episode draped in Mardi Gras beads.
- Bill Dauterive in King of the Hill turns out to be related to a very wealthy cajun family of semi-aristocrats living in a decaying mansion in the middle of a Louisiana swamp. Happily, the scenes actually in New Orleans are completely free of this trope.
- Although Dale is happy to reference the trope.
Dale: I've always wanted to eat fried dough in the most corrupt city on Earth!
- Although Dale is happy to reference the trope.
- The Simpsons
- Parodied in "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", where Chief Wiggum moves to New Orleans in "Chief Wiggum P.I." and is visited by the Simpsons. "Chief Wiggum, I can't wait to hear about all the exciting, sexy adventures you're sure to have against this colorful backdrop," Lisa lampshades. Also, so-called "New Orleans Native" Skinner doesn't even know it's Mardi Gras until he opens up a window and there's a massive float passing by.
- "A Streetcar Named Marge" has "Oh, Streetcar!", a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire that Marge stars in. Its title song describes New Orleans as the "home of pirates, drunks and whores," and "tacky, overpriced souvenir stores."
- The people of New Orleans did not take very kindly to this portrayal. What really hurt them was the lyrics were printed in the local newspaper before the episode aired. So as an apology, in the following episode, Bart wrote on the chalkboard several times, "I will not defame New Orleans".
