There are probably tons of books that reference other books – Shakespeare, the Bible, etc.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember while reading “Rosemary’s Baby” that Ira Levin made good use of setting the book in what felt like the real world. There were references to TV shows (Dr. Kildare), celebrities, Cap’n Crunch…
In an interview with Levin, he said he did that to keep a “real feel” to the book…bringing in bits of reality, including the Pope’s visit. I love the reference to Drat! The Cat, a Broadway show by Ira Levin.
Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass both reference popular culture of the day. Martin Gardner’s three “Annotated Alice” books are great reads on the subject.
Shakespeare himself made pop culture references, of a sort. There’s probably a lot of examples, but one I remember is As You Like It:
The second line is quote from Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander, which was published only a year or two before As You Like It was probably written.
The great Ernie Kovacs also used a lot of pop allusions in his shows (1950-1962) and I believe that he could also convincingly be credited as the inventor of the commercial parody, the blackout gag, and the music video (that is, a short film shot just for the music, not a stage-like dance or as part of a larger story). The world lost so much when he crashed in his unsafe-at-any-speed Corvair…
My copy of the published script for Monkey Business has the interesting note that at one point Groucho was supposed to go off on a long speech parodying somebody or other’s works (Can’t ecall who, and I haven’t got the book here). Groucho axed it, saying “the butcher in Peopria won’t get it”. So evidently there aren’t quite as many “in” references in the films as there might be – they were sensitive to losing time and pacing to a long gag that wouldn’t play out-of-town.
Cyrano de Bergerac. In the first scene, after Cyrano wins the swordfight while he’s composing a poem, there’s the following:
I don’t get it.
Doh…
There is an episode of “the Honeymooners” in which Ralph Kramden & Ed Norton discuss “that new television show called the Honeymooners.” Ed states that everyone he knows thinks that “that Art Carney guy steals the show every week.” Ralph is apoplectic of course, insisting that “Jackie Gleason is the only reason folks bother to tune in.” After quarreling for a few minutes, they ask the nearby concierge (they’re in a hotel lobby at the time) which actor is funnier - Jackie Gleason or Art Carney? The Concierge’s answer - “I wouldn’t know. I watch the Perry Como Show.”
Well it certainly beats the Seinfeld ‘show within a show’ by four decades.
The Cyrano one? D’Artagnan’s a character, a fine swordsman himself, from a few novels by Dumas, notably The Three Musketeers.
Were you planning on offering your own opinion in this thread? Did you open it up to discuss a particular show or movie?
I think Andrew was joking.
More examples:
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain names a crashed riverboat the Walter Scott, a reference to popular author Sir Walter Scott. Also, Tom’s plan to rescue Jim in the book is a parody of Scott’s books.
Going way back, many of Aristophanes’s comedies had references to contemporary events in Athens; The Clouds includes Socrates as a character and target of parody.
No, I wasn’t joking, I haven’t read Three Musketeers.
And no, I had no particular in mind, except that I just thought of how interesting it is to see movies in which people talk about transient pop cultural things like what’s on television or commercials or celeb gossip, seeing as most movies don’t do that (it was pointed out in a thread about film conventions) b/c it’s unrelated to the plot, too time-specific, and too whatever.
I took a college course on the Old Testament, and in it the professor played us a song, explaining all the references we wouldn’t get from thirty years ago but pointing out that some are timeless. I really like the idea of the references that we don’t get but those audiences did, so they are cryptic and obscure to us and so we have to read about them and what the hell the makers were talking about when they made it. It’s fun.
A pprevious SDMB thread described the many pop culture references in old Warners Brothers cartoons. Some were as packed with pop culture references as episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy today. Thing is, they were all references to 1940s and early 1950s pop culture, and are now mostly unrecognizable. Well, maybe except by Eve.
A typical example:
Such a reference to us would be like seeing a post oin a message board in 2060 asking about the meaning of a pitcher filled with red liquid bursting through a wall on an old Family Guy episode.
Buster Keaton’s short One Week was billed as being “A third as passionate as Three Weeks,” a romantic film of a few years earlier.
Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek refers to his older film The Great McGinty by casting the leads of the latter in bit parts; Morgan’s Creek is evidently a town in the state that elected McGinty governor in the first movie. Also, there’s a reference to the Dionne quintuplets at the end.
In Saboteur, Hitchcock showed the saboteur looking at the wreck of an ocean liner and smiling. The ship was The Normandie; it was destroyed in a fire, and audiences of the time understood the reference. (The fire was not of suspicious origin, BTW, but the scene implied it was.)