the Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty quickly became a popular icon, featured in scores of posters, pictures, motion pictures, and books. A 1911 O. Henry story relates a fanciful conversation between "Mrs. Liberty" and another statue;[39] it figured in 1918 Liberty Loan posters. During the 1940s and 1950s, pulp Science Fiction magazines featured Lady Liberty surrounded by ruins or by the sediments of the ages.

It has been in dozens of motion pictures. It is a setting in the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock movie Saboteur, which featured a climactic confrontation at the statue. Half submerged in the sand, the Statue provided the apocalyptic revelation at the end of 1968's Planet of the Apes. The statue became a character in the 1989 film, Ghostbusters II, in which it comes to life and helps defeat the evil villain, and was the setting for the climax of the first X-Men film. It can also be seen lying broken on the ground in the movie Independence Day, after the first wave of attacks by the extra-terrestrial biological beings from outer space. In the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, the statue gets frozen, and in the 2008 movie Cloverfield, it is decapitated by a giant monster; its head lands in a Manhattan street. In the film, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the sister statue in Paris provides a clue.

It was the subject of a 1978 University of Wisconsin-Madison prank in which Lady Liberty appeared to be standing submerged in a frozen-over local lake.[40] It has appeared on New York and New Jersey license plates, is used as a logo for the NHL's New York Rangers and the WNBA's New York Liberty, and it was the subject of magician David Copperfield's largest vanishing act.[41]

The statue is often used as a comparative measurement (usually referring to height rather than length) in books and documentaries.