In the movie Swordfish (2001) (SPOILERS) there is a road escape scene with a bus and it’s picked up by a freight helicopter to confuse the police.
The make of the bus is Flyer which most of the population would never realize.
In the movie Zathura, which is space themed. There is one shot of the street in the beginning of the movie and there’s a Mercury Comet in the foreground and a Mitsubishi Eclipse in the background. Even the car in the background was chosen because of its name.
In Sam Raimi’s movies he always has one of his Oldsmobile Delta 88s either used or in the background. There’s only a couple of his movies that doesn’t have one and it’s even in A Simple Plan parked in the dark in front of a house.
These are all car related. Any other good ones in any subject?
I heard, could be apocryphal, that HAL was supposed to be a play on words* on IBM.
*Whatever the fuck that word is that describes an acronym with letters that…oh well you know what the fuck I mean…:mad:
My favorite is in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which takes place in a global warming world. In a scene that takes place in a forest in the middle of the US, a Screaming Piha can be heard calling in the background. This is a bird that is found today only in tropical forest in Amazonia.
In the Charlie’s Angels movie (2000), the Angels figure out where Bosley is being held captive because they hear a Pygmy Nuthatch in the background. (They say it’s found in only one small area in California when it is actually found across much of the western US.) The bird they actually show is a tropical Troupial. I’m sure this must have been done as a joke.
In From Russia with Love, the wall of the building in which an enemy agent is hiding is covered with an advert for the Bob Hope movie Call Me Bwana. Bond snipes the bad guy as he’s crawling out a window coinciding with Anita Ekberg’s mouth.
Both movies were Danjaq/EON productions. Call Me Bwana had opened just a short time before From Russia with Love.
George Lucas’s first film was the SF pic THX-1138 with Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence. The alphanumeric designation shows up in other Lucas movies, e.g., ***American Graffiti *** (as a license plate) and Star Wars in the detention center (cell 1138)).
According to IMDB, THX-1138 (849-1138) was apparently Lucas’s phone number in San Francisco.
Cary Grant responds to a threat by saying, “The last person to tell me that was Archie Leach, just before he blew his brains Out.” Archie Leach was Grant’s real name.
Grant later refers to someone as “Mock Turtle,” the name of the part he played in Paramount’s Alice in Wonderland.
Grant describes someone as looking like the movie actor Ralph Bellamy. Bellamy played the character.
In * Bringing Up Baby, *there were a couple of gay references that few caught. First was the use of the word “gay”: caught wearing Katherine Hepburn’s robe, he say “I just went gay all of a sudden.” Lesser noticed is his line “I’m just waiting for a bus on 42nd Street.” 42nd Street was a gay cruising area in NYC in the 20s; if challenged by a cop, they’d claim to be waiting for a bus.
In SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL, folks note that the character Tony Curtis is playing sure looks like that guy who was in SOME LIKE IT HOT, which is unremarkable.
The gag comes in when people specify “Jack Lemmon”.
That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes when I was a kid.
A guy goes to the barber and asks for a Tony Curtis haircut. He’s not paying attention and next thing he knows the barber is cutting a swathe through his hair with the clippers.
“Hey, I asked for a Tony Curtis, don’t you know who that is?”
“Sure,” the barber replies, “I loved him in ‘The King and I.’”
R2D2 is also buolt into the details on the Mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unlike the Raiders gag (which really isn’t that visible onscreen), you can actually get a glimpse of the R2D2 figure in one shot. It’s upside-down
Actually, it’s even earlier than his first commercial film – Lucas made **Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB ** as a student film in 1967
The number shows up in a lot of places besides Lucas’ films. Here;'s a list of its uses, some of them pretty obscure (like “1138” read out in German over a loudspeaker in Raiders of the Lost Ark) – THX 1138 (1971) - Connections - IMDb
One place I noticed it was while waiting in line at the Star Tours ride at Disneyworld – a voice on the speaker asks the owner of the vehicle with license number THX 1138 to move the vehicle.
There are plenty of movie “in-jokes”, but the one that most closely resembles what I think the OP is looking for – not-immediately-obvious puns and the like in the film, rather than references to other movies or other roles – occurs in John Sayles’ movie Brother from Another Planet, which concerns an alien who, aside from weird feet and an inability to speak, resembles an ordinary black human being. He’s being pursued by “bounty hunters”, and it plays like a science fiction version of Slave Catchers trying to hunt down an escaped slave. This is really brought home, I think, by the vary last scene, which shows him getting away by riding a subway train in New York City. It didn’t hit me until later that a NYC Subway is an Underground Railway.
A couple more Indiana Jones cross-references to Star Wars:
At the beginning of Temple of Doom, look for the name of the nightclub Willie sings at. When they jump out the window and into the car, you can read it quite clearly in neon: “Club Obi-Wan”.
This one’s harder to make out: in The Last Crusade, listen to the piano tune playing in the background as Indy meets Donovan, the long scene where they look at the rubbing of the tombstone and Indy is told that his father is missing. If you listen closely, you can make out that the piano is playing the Imperial March.
This is kind of a combo TV and movie inside joke: In one episode of the show Last Man Standing starring Tim Allen, the middle daughter says (paraphrased), “It’s kind of like when I watch the movie with the toys and hear my father’s voice.” Obviously referring to Tim Allen voicing the character Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies.
There are a few other things like that in that show.
Big Giant Head (voiced by William Shatner) explained his tardiness for a briefing by complaining that the vessel he was traveling on had been delayed by a strange creature on the wing that only he could see. Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) said “The same thing happened to ME!”
And it did;first to Shatner in the original The Twilight Zone, and then to Lithgow in the movie version.
Alvy says “I’m standing out here with the cast of The Godfather”; Two of the three people standing with him were in The Godfather- Diane Keaton, and Richard Petrocelli.
