I can’t remember what these are properly called (except that they can be considered a subset of easter eggs), but I’m thinking of things like:
-The scene in Toy Story 2 where Zurg says “No Buzz, I am your father”, which is a deliberate and very faithful tribute to a scene from one of the Star Wars movies. (there are others in TS2, I know)
Does anyone have any good examples of this? (excluding those that occur in movies where the whole thing is a parody of another movie or genre, such as the collected works of Leslie Nielsen).
This sort of thing is so common nowadays that you can come up with hundreds of examples, especially in animated films. Just off the top of my head:
Monsters, Inc. rips off an entire sequence from Chuck Jones’s Feed the Kitty. (The one where the girl gets onto the conveyor belt). I think this actually crosses over the line from reference to plagiarism.
Shrek – the flying, fighting princess is a reference to The Matrix
What’s Up Doc? – the final two lines refer to Ryan O’Neal’s most famous role.
The attack on the Deathstar in Star Wars owes a lot to The Dam Busters.
In The Lion King, Jeremy Irons repeats a line from his role in Reversal of Fortune.
The attack in the snow in Mulan is staged to look a lot like the battle of Lake Peipus in Sergei Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevsky.
My favorite “tribute” scene is in Twilight Zone…The Movie. In the Van Johnson section (the first one) his character finds himself being bounced around through historical wars, and he ends up in a river in Vietnam. A group of American soldiers is slogging its way through, obviously lost. One of the men says “I told you guys we shouldn’t have fragged Niedermeyer!” It’s a reference to the end of Animal House (like this segment of TZ-tM, directed by John Landis), where the “Where are they now” boxes tell us that ROTC Niedermeyer was “shot in Vietnam by his own troops”.
The final fight between Neo and Agent Smith in “Matrix Revolutions” is a tribute to the final rain-soaked fight scene in the 1999 Korean film “Nowhere to Hide”.
An even better one from Toy Story 2 was the dino toy chasing after the group in the Barbie car, with a shot of him in the side mirror, straight out of Jurassic Park.
Coming to America includes a scene where Eddie Murphy’s character hands a large amount of cash to a couple of bums on a park bench. These bums are then revealed to be Randolph and Mortimer, the two brothers from Trading Places who were deprived of their millions by a completely separate Eddie Murphy character (with a little help from his friends).
Great scene. Jeff Goldblum also references this scene in Independence Day. When he and Will Smith are zipping along in the alien craft, he glances behind and says,“Must go faster. Must go faster!”, which is a repeat of his line in the scene mentioned above.
I also rented the new Looney tunes movie over the weekend, which was chock-full of references. I want to watch it again, just to try and catch as many as I can. ('s really the only reason to watch it in the first place.)
If you’re going to count that, then let’s go back the a much earlier version: In Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, the state’s governor and his political advisor are McGinty and Boss from Sturges’s The Great McGinty.
And in The Alphabet Murders, Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot runs into Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple – both Agatha Christie creations.
In Animal Crackers, Groucho makes reference to the play Strange Interlude, where the character talked directly to the audience (“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude”). (“Animal Crackers” originally played on Broadway, where the audience understood the joke.)
In His Girl Friday, Cary Grant makes reference to both his real name (Archie Leach) and one of his film roles (Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland).
I believe Hellzapoppin’ shows the image of a sled and one of the characters says, “Orson Welles must have been here.”
And how about self-reference: in Caprice, Doris Day goes into a movie theater, which is showing Caprice, starring Doris Day.
Though the movie is something of a parody, most viewers these days don’t realize some of the scenes in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run are lifted directly from I Am a Fugutive from a Chain Gang, notably when the prisoner tries to break Allen’s shackles with a sledgehammer.
The title O Brother, Where art Thou? is a reference to a fictional film script in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels.
Pirates of the Caribbean. In the scene where Jack and Will hide and walk under a row boat to escape off the island is lifted directly from The Crimson Pirate.
Homage, as Joe Queenan says, is french for stealing somebody elses idea. ( or something like that.)
Also from Monsters, Inc., the scene of the monsters walking towards their doorways in slo-mo was an homage to the oft-homaged scene from The Right Stuff, of the astronauts walking towards their capsule.
Star Wars is full of these: aside from the already cited Dam Busters, the medal ceremony at the end was from Triumph of the Will. Other parts of the movie (the droids in particular) come from Kurasawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Oh, and the romance scenes in Attack of the Clones were apparently lifted directly from the MST3K classic Sidehackers, except with less competent acting, and with a couple of space-cows added for effect.
In Virtuosity there’s a scene where SID 6.7 is walking along the street after escaping his virtual world. The angle of his shoes walking toward the camera as well as the Bee Gee’s “Staying Alive” pay homage to Saturday Night Fever.
In X-Men, Ray Park (Toad) strikes a karate pose identical to the one he did as Darth Maul.
I know you said we couldn’t include spoofs, but my favorite scene along these lines was in Hot Shots: Part Deux! where Charlie Sheen’s boat passes another boat that has Martin Sheen in character as Capt. Willard from Apocalypse Now. They both point at one another and at the same time say “I loved you in Wall Street!”
One of the concluding scenes of De Palma’s The Untouchables mirrored the “Odessa Steps” sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, including the old runaway baby carriage trick.
I had the rather odd experience of watching, completely by chance, two movies in the same night that both included deliberate homages to the long “Copacabana” shot in Goodfellas. The first was Boogie Nights, the second Swingers.
Just thought of another one: In Blade, there’s a scene at the end where Wesley Snipes clearly thinks he has kicked Stephen Dorff’s ass, but Stephen Dorff gets back up again (b/c he was by then La Magra). Snipes mouths “What the fuck?” in slow motion - an homage to the same scene in Kentucky Fried Movie.