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In popular culture

Because it resembles a modern comic strip or movie storyboard, is widely recognised, and is so distinctive in its artistic style, the Bayeux Tapestry has frequently been used or reimagined in a variety of different popular culture contexts. George Wingfield Digby wrote in 1957:

It was designed to tell a story to a largely illiterate public; it is like a strip cartoon, racy, emphatic, colourful, with a good deal of blood and thunder and some ribaldry.

It has been cited by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics as an example of early sequential-narrative art; and Bryan Talbot, a British comic book artist, has called it "the first known British comic strip ".

It has inspired many modern political and other cartoons, including:

The tapestry has inspired modern embroideries, most notably and directly:

Other embroideries more loosely inspired by it include the Hastings Embroidery (1966), the New World Tapestry (1980–2000), the Quaker Tapestry (1981–89), the Great Tapestry of Scotland (2013), the Scottish Diaspora Tapestry (2014–15), Magna Carta (An Embroidery) (2014–15), and (in this case a woven tapestry with embroidered details) the Game of Thrones Tapestry (2017–19).

A number of films have used sections of the tapestry in their opening credits or closing titles, including Disney 's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Anthony Mann's El Cid, Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Frank Cassenti's La Chanson de Roland, Kevin Reynolds' Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Richard Fleischer's The Vikings.

The design and embroidery of the tapestry form one of the narrative strands of Marta Morazzoni 's 1988 novella The Invention of Truth.

The tapestry is referred to in Tony Kushner 's play Angels in America. The apocryphal account of Queen Matilda's creation of the tapestry is used, perhaps in order to demonstrate that Louis, one of the main characters, holds himself to mythological standards.

In 2022 the French documentary Mysteries of the Bayeux Tapestry was broadcast by BBC Four. It was written by Jonas Rosales, directed by Alexis de Favitski and produced by Antoine Bamas. The documentary covered investigations carried out on the tapestry by the Laboratoire d'Archéologie Moléculaire et Structurale (LAMS) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, which used a hyperspectral camera, measuring 215 different colours, to analyse the pigments which produced the original colours for the dyes, extracted from madder, weld and indigo.

At the behest of series showrunner Ryan Condal, the opening credits of the second season of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon (2024) were redesigned with an animated sequence in embroidery that was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry.