[4] The cartoon was directed by William Hurtz, and was originally intended to be part of a feature based on Thurber's work, to be called Men, Women and Dogs.

The original cast for this portion of the stage production was as follows: The fable was animated again as part of the My World and Welcome to It episode "The Night the 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.

Dr. Richard Lenski, leader of the E. coli long-term evolution experiment, made an allusion to the story in a widely disseminated response[8] 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 Sloths", a song by Red Krayola, has been described as "a peculiar rewrite of a James Thurber short story (The Unicorn in the Garden)".

[9] 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".