My brain hurts.
Last weekend’s Family Guy was a parody of The Terminator. When the Terminator robot looks at Joe, his visual display thingy reads “Puddy from Seinfeld”, which of course was one of Patrick Warburton’s previous roles.
Yet another one from “Arrested Development”: Dr. Stein, played by Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson) gives Michael the results of his appendectomy:
“The operation went pretty smoothly. But once I got in there, the appendix wasn’t so inflamed. D’oh!”
I don’t know if this fits exactly, but towards the beginning of Ocean’s Eleven, when Rusty is teaching the tv actors how to play poker, Danny, who has crashed their session, is commenting on how it must be hard to go from tv to movies, which is exactly what he, George Clooney, did leaving ER to pursue a movie career.
//i\\
More Arrested Development: a woman scornfully refers to Michael as “Opie” and the narrator (Ron Howard) says she “has gone to far and best watch her mouth.”
Howard also has a line about not saying anything bad about Andy Griffith.
When Charlize Theron guest starred, it’s revealed she had plastic surgery. There’s a quick cut to a photo of her as Aileen Wuornos fom Monster
In an episode of L.A. Law, Dan Castellaneta plays a man who is suing his former employer for wrongful termination. His job was to put on a big foam rubber costume and walk around a theme park interacting with the guests. His costume was Homer Simpson. In the episode, he’s mostly very shy and quiet, and sounds nothing like Homer, until he puts the costume on and gets instantly into character.
I can think of a couple others that may not have been deliberate.
In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Wonka is greeting the kids who have won the tour, Mike Teevee is dressed in a cowboy outfit and pulls one of his guns on Wonka. Three years later in Blazing Saddles, Jim tells the story of how he gave up gunfighting when he was challenged by a six-year-old kid. Both were played by Gene Wilder.
There’s a scene in A Few Good Men where Tom Cruise is describing to the two other lawyers how he plans to question Col. Jessup, and he breaks into an impromptu impression of Jack Nicholson. One of those lawyers in Kevin Pollak, who used to do a pretty good Nicholson impression as a stand-up comic.
What I find weird about that is L.A. Law was so long ago; it’s such an 80s show, and yet it overlapped with The Simpsons, which is still on the air decades later.
Wow, good catch! I didn’t remember that line from Blazing Saddles.
I remembered the line but I didn’t remember Mike specifically pulling the gun on Wonka.
I always took that line to mean that Spock was descended from A.C. Doyle.
I think it’s purposefully ambiguous. I remember a 1970s article comparing Spock to Holmes in brains, intellectual dispassion and even appearance.
I’m thinking that was just a coincidence. The script was written and the scene when Bart met Jim was being filmed with Gig Young when he had to be hospitalized for alcohol withdrawal. Gene Wilder flew in and jumped into the scene the next day. It was not written with Gene Wilder in mind.
In an episode of Young Sheldon, Sheldon’s sister, Missy, makes a reference to Joey Lawrence. Sheldon says “Who’s that?”
Missy: He’s Blossom’s brother.
Sheldon: Who?
Missy: On TV. She wears these hats?
Sheldon: Never heard of her.
It’s more of a sly wink at the future than the past, since Young Sheldon is a prequel, but I think it fits the topic.
More off-topic, but still, a reference from YS to TBBT that jumps out at me now is when the Adult Sheldon voiceover says his son is named Leonard Cooper. Just as you start to “awwww” Adult S. says "I wanted to name him “Leonard Nimoy Cooper, but Amy wouldn’t let me,” and then Mayim Bialik has her only line so far in the show, “Be glad I let you name him Leonard.”
This got me thinking that early in their relationship, when Sheldon still found humans icky, he may have found unkempt Leonard Hofstadter uniquely tolerable because his name was Leonard. That may be why Leonard “passed all the tests” to roommate-hood. And why Sheldon allowed himself to rely on Leonard to the extent that he did.
As I mentioned in another thread, I’ve been watching old episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos on YouTube. In a February 1992 episode, the opening theme cuts away midway through to the Full House set. Jesse and Joey are revealed to be watching the show and remark that Danny resembles the host. At the time, Bob Saget both hosted AFHV and starred as Danny on Full House, but he got the latter gig first, so I guess technically it’s still a humorous allusion to a previous role.
Nothing in the OP says they must be deliberate allusions. I read somewhere that Cruise’s Nicholson impression was ad-libbed; so not an intentional reference to Pollak’s stand-up career, but it’s there nonetheless.
I don’t think it is possible to have a non-deliberate allusion. Kinda by definition:
al·lu·sion
/əˈlo͞oZHən/
noun
- an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference.
(My bold.)
(You made me look that up, so thank you for making me learn something a little better today.)
Noice.
An ad-lib by an actor that is not part of the script is not an allusion by the scriptwriter, who designed the story, and wrote the rest of it. Describing such an allusion as “non-deliberate” is maybe not quite the right descriptor, but I can see the need to distinguish between allusions placed intentionally by the writer, and arising from the deep structure of the script, and serving a larger purpose, as opposed to a joke by an actor, that the actor may not have imagined would make it into the final cut of the film, but some editor found it funny.
It could even be there under the objections of the writer.
On The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Susie (Alex Borstein) imitates a telephone-answering secretary by speaking in a high-pitched nasal voice…which sounds uncannily like Lois Griffin from Family Guy.
Some of the ones mentioned are just some viewers reading a bit to much into it like the Blazing Saddles one. No one was thinking about Willy Wonka when that was written and Mel Brooks was dead set against Gene Wilder playing the role. He wanted an old western actor and even approached John Wayne. No one planted a very thin Willy Wonka reference.
*Wayne read the script and loved it. He said he would be the first one on line to see it but it wasn’t right for his image.