Hatton's nameand facehave become recurring humorous motifs in popular culture. In season 6, episode 4 of the 1970s television series
The Rockford Files ("Only Rock-n-Roll Will Never Die, part 1"), Jim Rockford, exasperated at a friend who dismisses himself as unattractive, exclaims "You're no Rondo Hatton!" Hatton's physical likeness inspired the Lothar character in
Dave Stevens's 1980s
Rocketeer Adventure Magazine stories, and in
Disney's 1991 film version,
The Rocketeer, in which the character is played by actor
Tiny Ron in prosthetic make-up. The Scooby Doo cartoon series character The Creeper, who vaguely resembles Frankenstein's Monster, is likely based on Universal Studios' own "Creeper" from the 1946 film
The House of Horrors, who was portrayed by Rondo Hatton, with Scooby Doo's Creeper seemingly being a caricature of Rondo in terms of hand size and facial features. The
2000 AD comic book character
Judge Dredd, who is rarely seen without his helmet, used "face-changing technology" to make himself look like Hatton in issue 52 (February 18, 1978)the first time the character's face was shown unobscured. The name "Rondo Hatton" was also in a list of suspects obtained by Dredd during the case. As the artist
Brian Bolland revealed in an interview with
David Bishop: "The picture of Dredd's facethat was a 1940s actor called Rondo Hatton. I've only seen him in one film." Additionally, the character The Creep in the
Dark Horse Presents comic-book series strongly resembled Hatton. Hatton is regularly
name-checked in the novels of
Robert Rankin, often referred to as "the now-legendary Rondo Hatton" and credited as appearing in films that are either fictional, or in which he clearly had no part, such as the
Carry On films. Rankin's references to Hatton routinely occur in the form of "he had a Rondo Hatton" (hat on). Another namecheck occurs in Rafi Zabor's PEN/Faulkner-award-winning 1998 novel
The Bear Comes Home, where the name is used as a nickname for good-natured but unrefined minor character Tommy Talmo. In the 2004
Stephen King novel,
The Dark Tower VII, a character is described as looking "like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the 1930s, who suffered from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and psychopaths". In the 1991 movie
The Rocketeer, actor
Tiny Ron Taylor, playing Nazi henchman Lothar, is made up with prosthetics to look like Hatton. The episode of
Doctor Who entitled "
The Wedding of River Song" features
Mark Gatiss as a character whose appearance (achieved through prosthetics) is based on Hatton's, credited under the pseudonym Rondo Haxton for his performance. A documentary produced in 2017,
Rondo and Bob, and released in 2020, looks at the lives of Hatton and
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre art director
Robert A. Burns, a self-described expert on Hatton. The
Dark Horse comic
The Creep focuses on Oxel Karnhus, a private detective with acromegaly, who was modelled after Hatton and his "Creeper" character. The full story of Hatton's life is told in the Scott Gallinghouse book
Rondo Hatton: Beauty Within the Brute (BearManor Media, 2019), which also includes exhaustive production histories of his Universal horror films.
Rondo Hatton Awards; cultural references Since 2002, the
Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards have paid tribute to Hatton in name and likeness. The physical award is a representation of Hatton's face, based on the bust of "The Creeper", whom Hatton portrayed in the 1946
Universal Pictures film
House of Horrors. ==Filmography==