Minnie the Moocher

During a performance on the first season of American Idol, Tamyra Gray performed this song on "Big Band" night.

Hugh Laurie, in a 2006 interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, stated that his charity cover band, Band from TV, has the most popular recording of "Minnie the Moocher" available on the iTunes Store. Laurie also performs a part of the song in the first episode of the British comedy television series Jeeves and Wooster, playing the role of Bertie Wooster, duetting with Reginald Jeeves, played by Stephen Fry. The episode first aired in 1990, but it is unsure exactly when it was set, as the overall setting for this show is given as the 1920s and 1930s. A recording was later released on the Jeeves and Wooster soundtrack.

It features in the television show Carnivale.

On an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith performs the "hi-de-ho" chorus and even references Heidi Fleiss in the process.

Opera singer Grace Moore performed the song in the 1937 film When You're in Love, in a departure from her usual style.[12]

Although it is not heard, the song is mentioned by name in the 1991 Sylvester Stallone movie, Oscar.

In 1992, rapper Positive K made a song called "Minnie the Moocher" for his 1992 album, The Skills Dat Pay da Bills.

It is performed on screen with a video of Calloway at every New York Jets home game.

Calloway performed the song in the movie Rhythm and Blues Revue (1955), filmed at the Apollo Theater. Much later, in 1980 at age 73, Calloway performed the song in the movie The Blues Brothers. Calloway's character Curtis, a church janitor and the Blues Brothers' mentor, magically transforms the band into a 1930s swing band and sings "Minnie the Moocher" when the crowd becomes impatient at the beginning of the movie's climactic production number. According to director John Landis in the 1998 documentary The Stories Behind the Making of "The Blues Brothers", Calloway initially wanted to do a disco variation on his signature tune, having done the song in several styles in the past, but Landis insisted that the song be done faithful to the original big band version. Halfway through the song though, Calloway and the band would do a partial section of the song at a much faster pace, similar to Calloway's later performances.

In the 1979 film Escape to Athena, Stefanie Powers sings "Minnie the Moocher" for an audience of German officers in a POW camp.

The band Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo performed the song in the Richard Elfman film Forbidden Zone, with altered lyrics and titled "Squeezit the Moocher", after one of the movie's characters, Squeezit Henderson. Danny Elfman, playing a rather vaudevillian Satan, sings the song as his band (other members of Oingo Boingo at the time) respond to his calls. Oogie Boogie's song from The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Elfman composed the music for, is also similar to "Minnie the Moocher".

The popular refrain is performed by a funeral band in the 1999 film Double Jeopardy

The song is played multiple times in the early stages of the 2013 film Magic Magic starring Juno Temple.

The song was used in the Danish children's circus Cirkus Summarum with other lyrics. It is sung by Silja Okking with the audience repeating the nonsensical lyrics in the chorus.

In 1932, Calloway recorded the song for a Fleischer Studios Talkartoon short cartoon, also called Minnie the Moocher, starring Betty Boop and Bimbo, and released on March 11, 1932. Calloway and his band provide most of the short's score and themselves appear in a live-action introduction, playing "Prohibition Blues". The thirty-second live-action segment is the earliest-known film footage of Calloway. In the cartoon, Betty decides to run away from her parents after they insist in old-country broken English that she eat Hasenpfeffer despite her not wanting to (to the Harry Von Tilzer tune "They Always Pick on Me"), and Bimbo comes with her.

While walking away from home, Betty and Bimbo wind up in a spooky area and hide in a hollow tree. A spectral walrus—whose gyrations were rotoscoped from footage of Calloway dancing—appears to them, and begins to sing "Minnie the Moocher", with many fellow ghosts following along, during which they do scary things like place ghosts on electric chairs who still survive after the shock, and a cat feeding her kittens so much milk that they grow big immediately while the mother grows thin and dies. After singing the whole number, the ghosts chase Betty and Bimbo all the way back to Betty's home. While Betty is hiding under the covers of her bedsheets, her runaway note is torn up and the remaining letters read "Home Sweet Home". In 1933 another Betty Boop/Cab Calloway cartoon with "Minnie the Moocher" was The Old Man of the Mountain.

The 1933 Pooch the Pup cartoon She Done Him Right also features the song "Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day". It was sung by the nightclub singer whom Pooch is in love with.[13]

In "Blue Harvest", the kickoff episode of the sixth season of Family Guy, "Minnie the Moocher" is played while Han Solo (Peter Griffin) and Luke Skywalker (Chris Griffin) disguise themselves as stormtroopers to lead Obi-Wan Kenobi (Herbert), Chewbacca (Brian Griffin), C-3PO (Glenn Quagmire) and R2-D2 (Cleveland Brown) away from the Millennium Falcon to infiltrate the Death Star, coolly walking so as not to be noticed by the stormtrooper guards. This is a direct reference to the film The Blues Brothers, as Jake and Elwood Blues try to sneak past the police officers at their concert. When Stewie Griffin is writing a song to a love interest in the season 7 episode "Ocean's Three and a Half", Brian Griffin ridicules him for choosing an unoriginal formula for songwriting. When Stewie objects and asks for examples, Brian lists the song among many others as examples. Peter also sings the song in his car in the season 12 episode "Finders Keepers".