Referenced By / Three Billy Goats Gruff

Films - Animated

• Toy Story 4: The names of Bo Peep's sheep are revealed to be Billy, Goat, and Gruff.

Films - Live Action

• In The Troll Hunter, Hans ties three increasingly large billy goats to the top of a bridge as bait for a troll.

Literature

• In The Dresden Files, the Gruffs are Satyr-like beings that are the Summer Court's, more specifically Titania's, elite wetworks assets, and nearly always operate in teams of three. Their primary duty is killing trolls and in the Dresdenverse, trolls are tough, even by the standards of the supernatural. The Gruffs are not only powerful, but also intelligent, pragmatic and fearless, to the point where they are more than happy to use firearms and explosives when the situation calls for it. And there's a confirmed total of nine of them, and it's reasonable to assume that there are actually more.
  • It's worth noting that the Gruffs, as per the tale, get progressively bigger, up to the second eldest "Tiny" Gruff, who's twelve feet tall and has knuckles the size of cantaloupes. Eldest Gruff, the most powerful by a landslide and a half, is five feet tall and capable of destroying Fallen angels and killing Senior Council members in fair combat.
  • One of the earliest works (it's in the first collection of short stories) does in fact involve a troll hiding under a bridge.
• Discworld's trolls have a longstanding rivalry with goats.
  • In Lords and Ladies, the Bursar unwisely makes a point of telling the Lancre bridge troll (acting as customs officer) that they didn't have any billy goats with them. Modest hilarity ensues.
  • In Monstrous Regiment, a bridge troll will charge you 10000 gold more if you have billy goats with you.
  • In the short story "Troll Bridge", Mica the troll has no knowledge of any billy goats, and doesn't know why his wife keeps bringing them up.
• "Troll Bridge", a short story by Neil Gaiman, is a variation in which, instead of a succession of goats, there is a single human who twice manages to persuade the troll that if it lets him go, there will be more of him to eat next time he crosses the bridge. The third encounter, of course, goes rather differently.
• Used, very appropriately, in John Barth's Giles Goat Boy. The protagonist, who has been raised from childhood among a herd of goats, is visited by an old lady who reads him the story as an opening gambit in her attempts to reacculturate him to humanity.
• The story is actually the inspiration behind Stephen King's novel It. There are two scenes that stand out in this regard, Georgie was Bill's baby brother who was killed when he came across IT in a storm drain, causing Bill to start looking for Georgie's killer. This parallels the relationship between the eldest goat and the youngest goat, as the eldest goat was the protector of his siblings. The death of Adrian Mellon is a more blatant example, as he is killed by IT after being thrown off of a bridge.

Live-Action TV

• Birds of a Feather: When Sharon is winding up Tracey in "Shift":
  Tracey: The point is the cloth lives in the sink tidy, and the floor cloth lives under the sink, alright?
  Sharon: And the wicked troll lives under the rickety old bridge, and he wants to eat the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

MMORPG

• Mountain goats in Rift drop an item called "Goat Gruff".

Video Games

• King's Quest I, where you have to lead a billy goat along to a Troll guarding a bridge.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: An Easter Egg to be found is that one of the bridges in the game has a dead troll under it, with a rather pathetic note on its corpse, referencing this story.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim also has its own Easter Egg on the tale here.
• In Simon the Sorcerer, you can find a troll blocking a bridge with a picket line while engaged in negotiations with the goats, who happen to be his employers.
• In The Wolf Among Us, the "Trip Trap" bar was named after the fairy tale and it belongs to a troll named Holly, who inherited it from her mother. The lore reveals that the bar was lost in a bet and the mountain trolls were the ones who gave it the name "Trip Trap".
• One of the regions in Ni no Kuni is called Billy Goat's Bluff, as part of the in-universe theme of locations having names that reference fairy tales.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (1993) has its own version with the Warners as the goats in "Take My Siblings Please".
• An episode of Thomas & Friends is titled "Three Steam Engines Gruff". In this episode, Thomas, Percy, and Toby believe a troll to be living under a bridge, only to find out that it's really Farmer McColl's lost cow.