I think my favorite is from Peter Jackson’s remake of “King Kong.” In one of the scenes where they are in the ship going to Skull Island, you can see a crate in the background labeled “Sumatran Rat Monkey.” That was the name of the animal that started the chaos in a previosu feature of his called “Dead Alive.”
I laughed like a loon when I saw that the first time and no one else understood what I was laughing at.
John Cleese’s character in *A Fish Called Wanda *is Archie Leach.
It was the one where Homer was committed to an asylum. He met a fat bald white guy who believed he was Michael Jackson.
That would be the Stark Raving Dad episode, 3rd season ('91). Jackson played a mental patient sort of posing as Michael Jackson, kinda. He helps Bart write a birthday song for Lisa. The whole joke relies on his voice being recognizable.
He played a guy who was in a mental hospital for thinking he was Michael Jackson.
*Buster in a car grooving to the radio. Directly lifted from a commercial that Tony Hale did.
*In the episode called Family Ties, Michael searches for his long lost sister, but instead finds a consultant/prostitute. Played by Jason Bateman’s sister Justine.
*The possibly mentaly handicapped Rita sitting on a park bench that says “Wee Britain”, but covering up some of the letters so that it says “Wee Brain.”
*George Michael keeps trying to tell Michael about his love for Maeby. In the last episode, Michael asks how long this has been going on. “Oh, 53 weeks.” That’s the number of episodes that aired.
Since it’s been answered three times already, I’ll add that due to some sort of restrictions by his record company, Jackson could not sing in his guest appearance, so the character’s speaking voice is Jackson (credited as “John Jay Smith”), but his singing voice is a Michael Jackson impersonator. Jackson also wrote the song Happy Birthday Lisa for the show (although the official songwriting credit reads “W.A. Mozart”).
Last Friday’s Dollhouse episode featured environmental scientist Stephen Keplar trying to “hack” the Dollhouse’s security system from within. He’d accompanied former FBI agent Paul Ballard* into the secret facility. A fan with too much time captured the screens of the supposed security system & explains what he found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfIgY9dhw08
In short, Alan Tudyk (playing Keplar) was actually editing HTML code–traced to the Wolfram Library Archive. Of course, “Wolfram” rings all sorts of bells for Whedon fans. But that site is also linked to Wolfram Alpha–set to change paradigms, etc., etc.
Back in the Dollhouse, Keplar shortly revealed his true identify: Alpha, the rogue killer doll! (Even though I’d been spoiled, the reveal was damned scary. Tudyk has come a long way from funny, nerdy Wash.)
In the movie Mystery Men, the superhero Captain Amazing is talking with his publicist about how he hasn’t been getting as many news stories lately. His publicist tells him “I’m not a magician.” The publicist was played by Ricky Jay who is a professional magician.
In the TV series Roseanne, Sarah Chalke replaced Alicia Goranson in playing eldest daughter Becky. In the episode where the switch was made there was a scene where the family was watching Bewitched and talking about how that show switched actors for the part of Darrin. Chalke says she liked the new Darrin better.
Weird Al Yankovic was doing an introduction a parody video he did of Alanis Morissette’s video of “Ironic”. In his introduction Yankovic says that he was good friends with Morissette and they used to go to the movies together. This was a reference to Morissette’s first big hit “You Oughta Know” which had a line where Morissette said she used to go down on somebody in a theater.
During the 3rd season of Boston Legal, Denny Crane (William Shatner) is making his way into the courtroom through a throng of reporters. He generally utters a bunch of inanities as he walks through them and at one points says - “I used to be the captain of my own spaceship!”
The opening scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes place in a Shanghai nightclub called “Club Obi-Wan” (a nod to producer George Lucas and the other big series he was responsible for).
In Attack of the Clones, as Senator Amidala’s ship lands in a docking bay on Coruscant, you can see the Millenium Falcon (Han Solo’s ship in the original SW trilogy) parked off to one side.
At the very beginning of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” (the first ever non-Connery Bond movie) James Bond (played by George Lazenby), meets a gorgeous babe, but soon losers her when she is abducted by thugs and he is left on the beach after being roughed up a bit. He gets up, brushes himself off, and says to the camera, “This never happened to the other fellow!”
And when Goranson returned, characters kept asking her “Where the hell have you been?”
In the **Battlestar Galactica **mini-series, there’s an outside shot of Caprica. Briefly, a *Firefly *class ship flies by, put in by the folks who did the special effects who also did the effects for Firefly.
In Halloween H2O, Janet Leigh makes a cameo with her daughter Jamie. That short appearance made several injokes. Her diologue talks about feeling maternal toward jamies character. Also she is standing next to the car from the original Psycho and they work in the theme from Psycho into the score during that scene.
In an episode of NCIS where Ducky’s life was being threatened and the team goes on protective detail, Gibbs mentions that Ducky was quite handsome in his younger days. Kate asks what he looked like, Gibbs answers “Illya Kuryakin.”
Ducky is played by actor David McCallum who played Illya Kuryain in the 60s series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
And at least in the first movie, all of Mr. Cotton’s parrot’s lines come directly from the ride script: ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ ‘wind in the sails,’ etc.
The best are the accidental ones. Two examples:
In The Wizard of Oz, they got the wardrobe for the old charlatan character (I can’t remember his name) from thrift shops, to give it a more authentic look. One of the jackets turned out to have been previously owned by L. Frank Baum, author of the original book.
On Star Trek: Voyager, Robert Picardo, who played the holographic doctor, knew nothing about any of the previous Star Trek series. In one episode, he’s complaining about how nobody ever deactivates him when they’re done seeing him, and ad-libs the line “Damn it, I’m a doctor, not a light switch”, an unintentional callback to McCoy’s common line in the original “Damn it, I’m a doctor, not a <insert noun here>” (“bricklayer”, “miracle worker”, etc.).
Something I recently noticed watching James Cameron’s True Lies is that in the mall chase/ bathroom scene-- the large, muscle bound terrorist henchman who tries to assassinate Arnold Schwarzengger, and who ends up getting knocked out in the urinal, is dressed nearly identically to Schwarzenegger as the original Terminator. I don’t believe it was an accident to dress him in the Terminator “outfit”.
That reminds me. In the last season of The A Team, when they became secret agents working for Robert Vaughn, there was an episode that guest-starred David McCallum. It was called “The say uncle affair” (Episodes of The Man From UNCLE were usually named “The [something] affair”)