Pinky and the Brain had some episodes that strongly referenced other works. Two that come to mind are:
The Third Mouse, a parody of the movie The Third Man. (I like that the PatB animators did the episode in black & white.)
Brain’s Song, which is a parody of the TV movie Brian’s Song about the death of football player Brian Piccolo.
Both episodes are enjoyable if you’re not familiar with the referenced works, but of course better when you are.
Growing up in the '70s. MASH comes to mind.
Yeah, of course.
I always thought those were hookers mack had murdered.
Rocky and Bullwinkle were a trove of now-obscure cultural references on a par with Police Squad! (In Color). The Kerwood Derby - a hat that made its wearer the smartest person in the world - was a parody of the name Durward Kirby: a ubiquitous but anodyne announcer/spokesperson/game show host of that era. When Kirby threatened to sue the show for defamation, creator Jay Ward begged him to do so, saying that the show needed publicity and NBC wouldn’t spend any money to promote it.
Small one:
In the Clarke novel “Imperial Earth”, the visitor from Titan, who has never lived on earth, and will never return, is watching the sunset. He describes it going down, the colors changing, and then “a flash of green and it was gone”. As a kid in Wisconsin, I’d never seen the sunset over the ocean and of course didn’t know how rare the green flash is.
Of course, the character didn’t appreciate it, either! Just another day on Earth.
“Green Flash” is in the title of any number of books, stories and movies. Which makes it very difficult to find any particular “Green Flash” story. (I’ve got an idea that Margret Atwood wrote one of them, which I’ve not be able to identify)
DC Comics has definitely run out of ideas.
Whenever I hear that title, I think of how fitting the nickname is for a murderer. Punchy and threatening.
In the original German, it’s Mackie Messer, which means the same thing but sounds like a brand of household appliances.
Bobby Darin’s name check of Lotte Lenya is significant. She was married to the composer Kurt Weill and sang the song (far better than Darin did) in its original production. She’s best known today as Ross Klebb in From Russia with Love.
Careful- too much talk of Mack Messer can lead to this unusual thread
[pedantry]Creedence’s version was a cover of the older original written by Huddie Ledbetter, aka “Leadbelly”.
More pedantry. Leadbelly didn’t write The Midnight Special. It’s a folk song, and like most folk songs, no one knows where it came from. Some of the lyrics first appeared in print in 1905, when Leadbelly may have been seven years old (no one knows for sure when he was born).
I hate it when somebody sees my pedantry, and raises. 
I just knew someone was going to nitpick my calling The Midnight Special a CCR song. I knew it didn’t originate with them, but that is likely the version most folks are familiar with (and probably the first version I remember).
Well, of course it is. Just because someone else recorded a different version first doesn’t mean CCR didn’t record , play and make a hit of a song.
It’s no good, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough.
Just like the, old man in, that book by Nabokov.
Yeah, when you start relating to Humbert Humbert, you’ve got problems.
Frankly, Joan, it’s a bit of a tangle.
Reviving an old thread because I just learned about a reference I had been missing all these years.
In Queen’s video for “I Want To Break Free”, the members of the band appear dressed up as women.
What I hadn’t known until just this week (when it was discussed in a British YouTube video) was that they were not just playing random women; they were specifically dressed up as characters from the British tv series Coronation Street.
I think I’m probably not the only American who missed this reference.
Hmm. Not certain they are parodying any specific characters, I watched Coronation Street during this era and they don’t look familiar to me. No Hilda Ogden or Bet Lynch or Deidre Barlow amongst them. At best a Minnie Caldwell. Probably they were in a general sense parodying the gloomy dour soaps of the UK (while the US all had wealthy glamorous characters in their soaps).
