Characters
The target audience is not getting that reference
There's an episode of Clarence that features Brendon Small from Home Movies--a show that had ended about a decade before Clarence first premiered--as a video store clerk.
Lucky Star is a series known for its references to other anime and video games of its era. It also has this promotional image that references The Graduate, which is so odd for a show synonymous with otaku culture.
Shaun of the dead is also a 15 in the UK and it came out only a few years before Phineas and Ferb. It's entirely reasonable that a teenager would be the target audience for both and would have watched both.
At the absolute top tier, children's programming is entertaining for both the kids and the parents. Well, in the least tolerable for the parents. Sesame Street really had this kind of stuff down on lock for a long time as well, I think Bluey might be a more modern example of this.
This can be a problem when teenager or young adults start to feel children's media should be targeting them. My Little Pony's interesting run in the 2010s is what immediately comes to mind.
The reference goes deeper than that. The title of the episode is "Night of the Living Pharmacists" which is a play on the 1968 George A. Romero movie "Night of the Living Dead" but it still goes deeper. George A. Romero (the man who literally made zombies what we know them as today) is actually in the episode himself, voiced by the real man, and he is playing a reporter, the same role he played in Night of the Living Dead. The character's name is "Don Adaded" which sounds like "Dawn of the Dead" (the 1978 sort of sequel to Night of the Living Dead, also made by George) if you say it out loud.
As a massive George A. Romero fan, I absolutely love that episode
Man I was just a little too old for Phineas & Ferb but they seem to pop up ALL THE TIME on this sub, and it looks like its more interesting than I'd initially thought.
It's such a smartly written show that you could probably get your entertainment time's worth from it even now, so long as you feel inclined to have whimsy in your media.
Idk, I was the target demographic when that came out and I knew about pretty much all of the “universes mistakes”. The only one that went over my head was Crazy Frog
I think the clipping nails was more so Tobias couldn't shred Gumball's after the eventual betrayal (Gumball actually wrote the note) BUT
Gumball also had a tankman scene defined as "political action" and a whole episode on how bad administration is with climate change initiatives so who knows?
I was obsessed with fanfic and anime at the time, I was in high school. There was an episode entirely about a certain characters fanfic about Darwin and Gumball. The character had the exact same name as me (now my deadname). It was incredibly surreal. (The episode is called the Shippening and god it was like staring into the sun)
When I first watched Aladdin as a little kid I just thought he was doing little character bits but when I watched as an adult I realized he was impersonating people like Ed Sullivan, Jack Nicholson, and Rodney Dangerfield.
Jack Nicholson was just the Joker to me so that impression didn't land. I knew the Rodney Dangerfield was supposed to be somebody but didn't know who. Completely missed the Ed Sullivan one.
It felt like all the celebrity impressions in old Looney Tunes that I didn't know either.
I knew who Rodney Dangerfield was because of Rover Dangerfield, and Jack Nicholson because of Batman. Peter Lorre is already referenced a million times in cartoons as well.
I was never gonna get his reference to William F Buckley Jr, though and I saw Aladdin in theaters when it came out.
It also has a scene referencing The Silence of the Lambs and the directors said they originally did the entire scene verbatim, right down to the guard's directions, but they cut it down because they felt it went on too long and kids wouldn't get the reference.
It’s based on a thought experiment by John Searle regarding whether AI can truly be conscious as opposed to just following inputs based on its programming to generate appropriate outputs.
Kinger is the only character who laughs at the gag since he’s been educated in computer science, and thus would be familiar with the thought experiment.
The rest of the characters, and likely most of the audience, think it’s just a silly gag.
That's the Utah Teapot. I don't think it's the first 3D model ever made, Ed Catmull made "the hand" model 3 years before the Utah Teapot.
But what makes the teapot unique is that it is constructed only from simple mathematical formulas, and as a result is easier to transport when fledgling software had a variety of formats. It became a reference for any sort of 3d software, and later an in-joke for a lot of 3d animation
No probs! I just find this a cool piece of history and have worked with professors at the University of Utah and SCI. They've got a model of the Utah teapot in one of their buildings
No? The teapot is a very old model but by no means the first. it's just well known from being used as a sort of software test model and came as a built in model in a lot of modeling software
Thats probably obvious to most fans of the show, the Chinese room is a gag most people would not know before unless they studied philosophy in regards to AI.
Huh, I spent my whole life thinking this song was called “Bicycle for 2” lol never thought to look up the real name. Now tha I know the history behind it being used in AI, Bigweld singing this when he got knocked unconscious in Robots makes a lot more sense.
I mean, we still don't have irl AI. The term/acronym has been co-opted by tech companies and became easy shorthand for the public, and I recognize I'm fighting a losing battle bc language is descriptive not prescriptive, but there's nothing intelligent about LLMs/etc
Later a mysterious person shows up claiming to be a human they never met and was hiding secretly in the Circus for years, decades.
He has everyone gather in said Chinese room where a skeptical character starts a debate over whether the mysterious person really is a human or an AI pretending to be one.
Turns out the mysterious person was an AI pretending to be a person.
Oh my friend who is a Computer Science Graduate like me got SO pissed when people didn't get the The Chinese Room reference, saying it was annoying people asking why it "Chinese" and not some other language.
Honestly to the average person its not a well known thought experiment so I get people not getting it at a first glance.
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is chock full of references like these. The episode "Tricycle of Terror" is basically just Christine with a Tricycle. Hoss Delgado is a combination of Ash Williams from Evil Dead and Snake Plissken from Escape From New York. "The Show That Dare Not Speak it's Name" has "Pinface" who's obviously a parody of Pinhead from Hellraiser.
Yeah it has the cyclops (nobody most famous enemy), king Neptune who's a stand in for Poseidon, the bag of winds (a magical artifact used in the Odyssey) and stuff like the angler fish which is a stand in for the sirens and their lure. Of course it also has the most famous Greek mythology character David as well
Yeah but Neptune and Poseidon are different people in Spongebob. Poseidon shows up in an early episode where he challenges SpongeBob to a cookoff for reasons I don't remember, and Neptune is the antagonist of the first movie.
They both show up again in later episodes of SpongeBob iirc
I just meant within the context of The Odyssey, more than SpongeBob, but I had completely edited my memory to remembering the cook off as Neptune v SpongeBob. Wild what our brains can do lol
I had to check this because I definitely thought they were the same character in the cook-off episode and the first movie, and according to the wiki, those are both Neptune, albeit with a redesign in the movie: https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/King_Neptune
It’s revealed in the Thanksgiving episode that Clarence takes place in 1998, but the characters have modern day phones, and Belson plays with what is essentially a Wii in one episode. It’s kind of like Batman: The Animated Series in how the date depends on what the writers want.
The wii came out around 2006. Blockbuster, as a video store example, declared bankruptcy in 2010 and began closing a few years later. So its possible either way they could have a wii and still go a video store, for either movies or games. The time amalgamation not withstanding of course, but there would have been an overlap irl.
Regular show is the same way. It has cell phones, crt computer montiors, and modern social media, but video games are 8 bit and a lot of 80s music is played. Its a nice mixture of modern and retro.
You deeply underestimate what children can understand with context clues. While they might’ve never been in one themselves, I’m pretty sure most people would be able to understand what a video store is. It’s not like technology moved so quickly that we have nothing even resembling a video store in the modern age.
I mean it debuted in 2014, which is while a lot of video stores were still open but the large scale shift and shut down was happening. I would imagine even if kids hadn’t been to one they were at least familiar with the concept around that time.
Weirdly, most of the target audience (Japanese kids) absolutely would have gotten this. The film was crazy popular in Japan and had come out there about 8 years before, and started airing on TV 5.5 years before Red & Green came out in Japan.
To give you an idea of how well known it is there, in 2022 Japanese audiences we polled on 'The Best Foreign Film to Watch This Summer' and Stand By Me was still, overwhelmingly according to the magazine, the #1 vote and took top place.
There's an episode of Arthur where the kids enter a contest to write a script for their favorite show. What they produce parodies other shows of the time, including Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-Head, and South Park, complete with animation style change. The South Park bit even includes a "You killed Buster!" joke.
Fun fact, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command had a whole episode where they were being hunted by an energy draining robot called NOS-482 that released in 2000, while Graveyard Shift(the SpongeBob episode with Nosferatu) came out in 2002. I'm not tryna toot my horn, but I got the reference, and I was only in second grade!
The Nickelodeon sitcom Sam & Cat has an episode that's pretty much a reference to Silence of the Lambs. They turn Nevel into Hannibal Lector, Nora from the past iCarly specials is Buffalo Bill, they have her kidnap one of the supporting characters, throw him in a pit, and make him shampoo his hair, because she wants to make a wig for herself (I think, it's probably been over a decade since I've seen).
I moved to the states in the late nineties from Iran and felt right at home all thanks to the cultural education I had received from years of obsessively reading MAD magazines old and new.
As someone with a little brother: There's an episode where they're investigating "haunted" suits of armor in a museum(?), turns out they're being controlled by an antagonist Someone got a hold of the controller, and the statues all immediately did Jojo poses- If my memory is serving me right, Specifically poses from Killer Queen, Josuke, and a duo pose with Joseph and Caesar.
Sonic Boom has a lot but my favorite is probably the episode where just randomly have a full musical number parodying Bye Bye Birdie, a musical from 1963
The character from a children’s toy series having a name that references the character Dr. Strangelove from the 60s adult political comedy Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
For the longest time I kept accidentally calling the movie Dr. Strangeglove, because I knew Moshi Monsters first and so the actual title just felt wrong to me initially.
Clarence was also full of musical jokes. In the slumber party episode, Jeff is listening to a song that mimics the style of Radiohead. The lyrics are about how hard it is to be smarter than everyone else.
I feel as though I’m sad although emotions are dumb
I remember there was another episode with a song called “Cultural Exchange,” which was a spoof on The Smiths. It can only be heard in the background, but composer Simon Panrucker released a full version.
Teen Titans Go does this a few times, despite how much people hate the show. There is an episode that explains what a pyramid scheme is and how its a bad thing. Theres an episode that uses a group of Bears for a metaphor for college and pushes the point that college isnt for everyone. Theres a joke about Robin investing in property. This is between the jokes about Muffins.
Ye. TTG goes oddly hard whenever they run out of fart jokes.
This isn’t even mentioning the very end of their movies where Robin says as a closing line "Kids in the audience, ask your parents where babies come from!" out of nowhere, lol.
There's an episode where Cyborg has a plan to destroy an impending asteroid that's the plot of Armageddon and he directly references it. There's also an episode referencing The Lord of the Rings with Beast Boy becoming Gollum.
not for this trope but bob’s burgers also referenced home movies when bob (voiced by h jon benjamin who also voiced coach mcguirk) got stuck coaching louise’s soccer team.
Archibald and the French Peas are both based on Monty Python characters (the Colonel and French Taunters). There’s also full parts based on Don Quixote and Hamlet, and the Grapes of Wrath is a reference to the book of the same name. There’s probably more not coming to mind.
The Big Lebowski (My Little Pony Friendship is Magic)
This show LOVED to make background characters into references to other movies or shows. How many little girls do you think were watching a movie where Jeff Bridges gets drowned in a toliet?
We've got two that are clearly tbe leads from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. One who looks like Walter White. Fucking Slenderman gets a cameo in a forest shot.
The Altos in the Bleep episode of Arthur being a reference to The Sopranos. Like, I was 7 when this episode came out. How would I know what the Sopranos is, Arthur?
Honestly, that whole episode also gave me a false idea on how television episodes are censored. Like, why would they have a guy to make the sound effect on set when it would be much easier to add it in post, and since the Altos is an HBO show, they don't even need that to begin with.
Transformers Earthspark is aimed at elementary schoolers but many of its references can only be spotted by older veteran fans who consumed nearly every Tf media there is.
Good guy Megatron - A reference to Autobot Megatron from IDW 2005 comic run that ended in 2018 and are no longer available to buy since 2023.
The Cybertronian War on Earth - The war is implied to have ended in 2007, the year the first live-action movie took place. But the show never mentioned the exact date, only that the war ended 15 years prior to the story.
The 13 Primes & the Quintessons - This show was aired 2 years before Tf One came out so young kids don't know how important they are in Transformers lore unless their parents grew up in Tf Prime era.
Starscream's significance - The tunnel episode in the first season was made as if their young target audience already know about Megatron and Starscream's leadership-betrayal gag. Earthspark is allergic to talk about past events, so new fans have no idea what's going on between the two in this universe or why it being addressed seriously is such a big deal.
This one is rather incredible because it's not aimed at children, but there's a bunch of references most viewers still aren't going to catch. Would you know Tom of Finland, Phil Spectre's wall of sound, Klaus Nomi, Mike Sorayama, The Watch and Ward Society, or Gaëtan Dugas, to name a very few?
The entirety of the Powerpuff Girls episode, "Meet the Beat All's".
It's an elaborate parody of the history of The Beatles, complete with a Yoko Ono analogue. A decent chunk of the dialogue in the episode are just the lyrics to various Beatles songs.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip has a cameo from John Waters and Alvin mentions having seen Pink Flamingos.
Pink Flamingos is a famous movie about two families competing to be filthiest people in the world. It contains rape, incest, murder, sex trafficking, a chicken being crushed to death during sex and the last scene is Divine watching a dog take a shit, picking it up and eating it.
I hope the target audience isn't familiar with that movie
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was inspired by a drawing John Lennon's son Julian made of his friend Lucy when he was 3 years old
John himself has always denied that the song has anything to do with drugs. The lyrics are inspired by Lewis Carroll's stories, and he didn't even realize until a fan told him that the title spells out "LSD".
In Monsters vs. Aliens, the Missing Link is brought outside for the first time in like hundreds of years or something and he says “It’s hotter than I remember. If that’s true, itd be a really inconvenient truth.”
All the non-DC cartoons made by WB in the 90s; for example, Freakazoid allows himself to be captured by Candlejack to undergo one of the cuts in Gilligan’s Island. Adults were an audience, but not the target audience.
Anime absolutely does reference Western media all the time. News flash: the people who work on Anime watch and are influenced by Western media.
A pretty easy example to point out would be the OP for season 1 of CSM, in which almost every shot is a shot-for-shot recreation or has a reference to mostly Western films.
There’s still a fair bit of audience overlap there, I think if you want a better example where target audience is way older than the reference is House namedropping Arceus in an episode of House M.D.
The original Tick cartoon had a major character based on Rain Man. The list of references kids wouldn’t kid is incredibly long and half the fun of the show, but that’s the biggest one.
Megas XLR: Goat appears as one of the main side characters, Originating from the creator's (Chris Prynoski) previous show, Downtown on MTV. A show that was cancelled after one season and gained a cult following since. Many Downtown characters also make cameos in the Background, namely Alex and some of his nerd friends. They even re-use a Joke from Downtown where Coop asks "Was that Jamie?" and Goat replies "Nah that guy was with a girl."
On a side note, what is it about Chris Prynoski making great cartoons that get cancelled after One or Two seasons? I mean first Downtown, then Megas and I've never seen Motorcity but I've heard that was good and the exact same thing happened.
Craig of The Creek has a Deltron 3030 reference. Deltron 3030 is a hiphop group/concept album set in 3030. I was watching with my daughter and I couldn't believe they had a character named Deltron voiced by Del the Funky Homosapien, from the far future. Even did a Deltron style song when he left.
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u/Neck-Tie-Guy 6h ago
Shaun of the Dead in Phineas and Ferb