Here are two examples of very obscure or elaborate Easter Eggs:
In the South Park Episode Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics, there is a very 70s guy who keeps appearing saying “Fighting the Frizzies at 11.” This is a reference to a particular bootleg of the Star Wars Holiday Special that was passed around that was complete with commercials. Several of the ad breaks during the show had a News tease where a guy would say the Frizzies line.
In an episode of My Name is Earl, a character died. The main characters thought he was friendless but learned he had a very active online life. In one of the scenes they read a post he had made on the (now defunct) Television Without Pity boards. Months before the episode aired (probably while they were filming it) the creators took the time to create an account on the boards and make the actual post that was read on air. I always thought that wa spretty great.
Any other examples? They could be either really obscure or really intricate.
The first video game Easter egg was impressive. It was programmed by Warren Robinett for the Atari 2600 and was tricky to trigger. Robinett not only built a damn good adventure game in 4k of memory, but included this fairly elaborate Easter egg.
Can anyone tell me the rest of the MS Office/Excel Easter Egg?
This was in the early 2000’s, maybe Office 2003? You’d enter some data, and the spreadsheet would open up into a “first person arcade action” game. You’d walk up a stairway, the walls of which were engraved with the names of the developers.
Then you’d turn around, and navigate over a V-shaped walkway.
My source said, “This is where it gets weird.”
But…I could never successfully cross the walkway. What was the weird bit?
The TV show Community had an Easter egg that took three seasons to complete. Beetlejuice is mentioned once in the first season, then again in the second season and for a third time in the third season and he appeared right on schedule.
Which, I believe, wasn’t planned ahead. One of the writers realized they’d said it twice and wrote in the joke. I don’t know whether that’s more or less impressive.
**Arrested Development **was filled with these. They include referring to George Michaels cousin --“Maeby” and the seal/arm references for Buster (scroll down).
Back in the 90s, when they were first running the Energizer bunny ads, there was this one wherew the bunny interrupted an ad for Olga Montero and her magic harp. Note the toll-free number at the end of the ad. If you called it, you’d hear an ad for the CD --interrupted by the bunny.
Excel 95 had this almost exactly. But the walls you mentioned weren’t engraved. The names were scrolling. The other room across the walkway was just another room, with pictures of the developers on one wall and the names scrolling on another. Here’s a collage of screen shots I put together (cross your eyes to view 3D). The other room image is in the lower left corner, rotated right 90 degrees to fit.
rowrrbazzle: Aye! That’s the stuff! The bottom pair of pics shows the “V” (or “Z”) shaped bridge you have to cross. That was the part I could never accomplish, so I don’t know what was beyond the bridge. Did you ever get that far? What happens next?
(What an absurd thing to wonder about for all these years! I should have just brought in an accomplished gamer with a good steady hand and asked them to navigate the bridge!)
(Yay, a Pogo fan! Dog my cats, and gosh a mickle dickle pickle!)
You haven’t spent much time in Cafe Society then. There’s been approximately eleventy-umpteen threads/posts about it and people saying “I don’t get it”.
What’s there is just another room, with pictures of the developers on the walls and the names scrolling on another. If you entered it and turned left, you’d see what’s in the lower left of the collage under the word “Displays” (with an arrow labeled “detail”). To view correctly, rotate the panel 90 degrees counterclockwise (or rotate your head the other way ).
When I chose it I had no idea it was from Pogo, and the place I found it had no reference to Pogo. I just liked it. I apologize for the confusion.
Well, if at all possible, I recommend, most jovially, that you seek to encounter Pogo! Amazon has copies of “Equal Time for Pogo” for around $3.00 (plus shipping.) This is a look at the 1968 Presidential campaign, with a digression at the end into some of the most rollicking slapstick humor ever – some of the best stuff Kelly ever came up with.
Like many of us here on the Straight Dope, I like to fight ignorance, and became interested in following not only the Master himself, but examining the fanciful weirdness of Chariots of the Gods? author Erich Von Daniken, and reading up on the smashing “urban legends” titles of Jan Harold Brunvand - books like The Mexican Pet, The Choking Doberman, and The Vanishing Hitchhiker.
In the 1998 movie Urban Legend, Robert Englund - Mr. Creepy Freddy Krueger himself - plays urban folklore professor William Wexler, who is very much like the real life Brunvand.
There are two scenes in the movie - one in the library, and one in Professor Wexler’s office - where you can see Brunvand’s books!
Don’t know if this counts as an Easter Egg, but. . .
For those who haven’t seen it, Inspector Lewis is a British mystery series set in Oxford, so obviously most of the walk-on characters are played by British (or local) actors. In one episode, one of the main characters is a visiting American academic who delivers a controversial lecture at the college of criminology. The criminology professor is played by American actor David Soul.
The video game Jedi Knight has a couple of appearances from Max of Sam & Max fame. One where there’s a retracting platform that you’re supposed to jump across quickly to end the level. If you instead hug the wall it’s retracting into, you fall into an alcove and see that Max’s face is textured across the end of the platform. I guess the devs figured nobody would end up there.
There’s another where you can follow an NPC into a locked room and find Max as an NPC. I think there was even a way to get him to follow you outside the room and shoot at stormtroopers.
I’ll take your word for it. The twenty times I have seen it posted before is usually someone thinking that they’re a genius for seeing it and full of wonder about how clever the writers were to get that past the “censors” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
We were proud of this one: MacOffice 2004 hid Asteroids as an Easter Egg. Launch Microsoft Office Notifications, hold down CTRL+OPT+CMD and click “About Office Notifications”, then you’d seer the Asteroids icon in the window, click it and play away
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