House Caught Fire", which first aired October 13, 1969. In the episode, William Windom as John Monroe tells the story to his daughter Lydia (Lisa Gerritsen) as his accompanying drawings come to life for the viewer. The episode was written and directed by series creator Melville Shavelson. The animation for the series was by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Also in 1969, a musical adaptation of "The Unicorn in the Garden", composed by Russell Smith, was performed by the Denver Lyric Opera in Denver. In a 1985 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Johnny mentions the story and tells sidekick Ed McMahon the plot. An audio adaptation of the story, read by Peter Ustinov, was released by Caedmon Audio in 1986 (). Allusions The 1950 film Harvey contains a scene depicting characters at a psychiatrist's office, where Veta is committed to the institution instead of Elwood. Dr. Richard Lenski, leader of the E. coli long-term evolution experiment, made an allusion to the story in a widely disseminated response to Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly (who expressed doubt Lenski found an evolutionary beneficial mutation in E. coli bacteria): "In other words, it's not that we claim to have glimpsed 'a unicorn in the garden' – we have a whole population of them living in my lab!" The ninth episode of the TV series Life on Mars has similarities with the story. The protagonist, Detective Inspector Sam Tyler tells a criminal that he, Tyler, is a time traveller from the future. When the criminal tells Tyler's colleagues of this, in an attempt to discredit him, Tyler denies being the source of the 'delusion' and the criminal is discredited instead. "The Sloths", a song by Red Krayola, has been described as "a peculiar rewrite of a James Thurber short story (The Unicorn in the Garden)". In the 1985 short fiction piece "Scrabble with God" by John M. Ford a newly created animal is described as "eating the rosebushes, like Thurber's unicorn". References External links Complete text of the story "The Unicorn in the Garden" in the Big Cartoon Database A Thurber Carnival at the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB) 1939 short stories American short stories Fantasy short stories Works by James Thurber Works originally published in The New Yorker Harper & Brothers books Fiction about unicorns Short stories adapted into films