Listening to a song from 1912 - If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews - and I recognize a few specific individuals from the names listed, but many others that I think are referring to actual people are completely outside my frame of reference. This is something that happens with older media - especially when it was meant to be ephemeral. It comes up a lot in Looney Tunes, as well. “We don’t need no stinkin’” was something else I’d heard a few times, but didn’t know the source for before Google came along.
So what are some songs or shows where there were references to contemporary people or events that you either only later figured out were references or that you are sure are references to something, but you have no idea of the source material?
Several of the older (pre-80s) references in We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel escaped my understanding at first. I was born in 1973. When the song came out, I wasn’t aware that Richard Nixon had been vice-president before, had no understanding of the Bay of Pigs, and many others.
This is performance related. I was a huge fan of the Beatles films and concert footage as a kid and John Lennon’s Igor impression always cracked me up. Turns out it wasn’t an Igor impression. Several of Lennon’s school mates suffered from rickets due to malnourishment during the war and Lennon mercilessly ridiculed them in the schoolyard. Apparently, he was well into his 20s or beyond before he (if ever) outgrew his love of mocking the disabled.
I only learned the other day (from reading a biography) that the Smiths’ song “Oscillate Wildly” was a shout-out to Oscar Wilde, which seems obvious in retrospect.
I listened to a lot of Tom Lehrer in the early 1980s when I was a teen - but I needed to figure out some of the references. In the spoken introduction to the song about Senator Murphy (which references Ronald Reagan as a politician, too), there’s a mention of Massachusetts having three Senators. I forget who I asked, but this is a reference to RFK - who was the Senator from New York, but obviously associated with Massachusetts.
I thought Channing Tatum was an interesting choice to play Gambit in Deadpool vs. Wolverine and it wasn’t until later that I learned he was supposed to be in a Gambit movie that never found its way out of development hell.
Deadpool vs. Wolverine is full of other references that one may or may not get depending on how much you know about the entire history of the MCU and the Fox movies and the personal lives of the actors. For example, Deadpool apologizes to Jennifer Garner’s Elektra on hearing about the death of Daredevil. Elektra isn’t sad about it, which is a reference to Garner’s real-life split from Ben Affleck who played DD in previous films.
Reginald Bunthorne, from Patience, is Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde wasn’t rich: he made his living writing, and doing lecture tours of the USA. The charge, by the Marquess of Queensberry, that he was immoral didn’t just attack his social standing, it was an attack on the stage character (the pure young man with the lily), by which he earned his living.
It’s not a big one, but in one of the Jack Benny-as-a-mouse cartoons, 1959’s The Mouse That Jack Built, which I probably saw when I was 9, he goes down into his vault, and the guard (who has apparently been on duty a while) asks is the War is over, and Benny says yes. And the guard asks “What are they going to do with the Kaiser?” The joke was like a fast plane overhead to me.
Te 1941 Looney Toons Hollywood Steps Out is basically a 7 minute caricature of then-current Hollywood personalities. If you don’t recognize the people being parodied, it’s about as funny as a visit to the dentist. Even now, I still don’t get much out if it. Even if I recognize the people, the things they are being parodied for are too obscure, too lost in history. Too insider for me.
There was a pun fest I read once, in about 1976, where animals were given punny names, like naming your donkey “Hotee”. There was one I never got: “a pair of egrets named Miss Otis”. Like 40 years later I finally her the song Miss Otis Regrets. Finally, I got it!
I was thinking about George Murphy just yesterday (instead of the Roman Empire, just for the variety). A Hollywood hoofer who danced with Shirley Temple IIRC, and was president of SAG before Reagan, then went on to the Senate. Like basketball star Bill Bradley, he “softened up” the American electorate to the idea of non-politicians reaching high office. To our current chagrin.
As a kid absorbed with Looney Tunes, the dog show cartoon lost me. I eventually placed the Doberman as a Phil Silvers Show reference, as well as the Victor Borge/Great Dane, but the basset hound “I’m the star of a TV show” would have to wait for the internet for resolution.
Back when VH1 had Pop-Up Video, I wished that Cartoon Network would follow suit with Pop-Up Classic Cartoons…you know, pop-up balloons that explained cultural references of the time. There were so many that, watching Looney Tunes as a kid, I didn’t know were references to something 1940s-50s audiences would have gotten in a heartbeat. References to “A” rationing cards and “Is this trip really necessary” due to wartime gas rationing, quotes from radio or vaudeville comedians (I had no idea whom Bugs was referring to when he called that store assistant “The Great Gildersneeze”), etc. Later audiences wouldn’t necessarily get these references, but they would have gotten a knowing laugh at the time.
Even Bugs’ signature move came from a classic film! Clark Gable chomped on a carrot in It Happened One Night, so the animators thought it would make Bugs look all the cooler if he did so when confronted by Elmer Fudd in “A Wild Hare”, his first real cartoon as the Bugs we know and love. It went over so well that now we associate rabbits with carrots, even though owners of pet rabbits know that they’re really not all that nutritious for their bunnies.
As is “Slick Hare”, my first exposure to Humphrey Bogart despite my dad’s favorite movie being Casablanca. There’s another scene in there where Ray Milland pays for his drink with a typewriter, and the bartender gives him a handful of miniature typewriters as change. This is a reference to a scene in the movie The Lost Weekend where Milland’s character, a writer on a drunken bender, tries to pawn his typewriter for booze. But as a kid, I thought this was a cash register, and this “Mr. Milland”, whoever HE was, was so rich he carried around a cash register instead of a wallet.
A 1960s Mad Magazine article (reprinted in Completely Mad) had a list of “handy phrases for visitors to Russia” - the joke being that the phonetically spelled Russian phrases were actually common phrases/titles/etc. in English. I understood them all except this one, which had me stumped for years:
Veel tsock-tsess spowrl hrockhun-tarr?
until I finally figured out the reference to Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
As an older person, I’m sometimes surprised at the references that younger folks miss - my son’s babysitter, a grown adult, didn’t recognize a Curious George character (a DJ named “Howlin’ Hal”) was a “Wolfman Jack” reference.
I don’t blame the babysitter - I’m over 40 and literally the only place I have ever been exposed to Wolfman Jack was Galactica 1980 (not exactly a stellar piece of fiction that one would seek out). DJs are much more ephemeral than movie or music stars (we don’t get often exposed to their old work on cable tv or terrestrial radio not aimed at oldies). And while I’ve heard of Wolfman Jack, he’s a “oh he used to be somebody” sort of person to me and while I logically know he was famous, it doesn’t feel concrete to me the way Marilyn Monroe or the Beatles might. Instead of thinking of the character as parody of a particular person, I’d more think of a parody of type (in much the same way as most of the 1940s pinups are indistinct to me). Sure, he’s newer, but like I said, I don’t feel like disc jockeys have the same longevity in mass culture.