There are tons of these. I don’t think we really could list all of them.
One that sticks in my head is an atrocious pun from one of Jack Chalker’s novels. His heroes are following someone, and their way is made easier because that person is traveling in an aircraft that is also doing a sort of crop-dusting, only it’s really putting down an insecticide, made of woad, and meant to kill ticks. Only this woad isn’t blue, like the stuff the ancient Britons daubed on themselves. It’s yellow. So all they have to do is…
[spoiler] Follow the Yellow Tick Woad
Not worth the setup, I know.
And you probably saw it coming a mile away.[/spoiler]
I also like that in the Disney movie Wreck-it Ralph the guards in the Sugar Rush video game are Oreo cookies, and as they maneuver they chant:
When I worked as a reenactor at a historic site, Company A would sometimes march off the parade field to “Yo-DE-oh, de-OH-do!” at the end of the day (after the tourists had left, of course).
Either that, or we would whistle the Hogan’s Heroes theme.
In gaming, “munchkin” became a slang word for “powergamer” (someone who focuses on optimizing their character’s statistical performance, with no interest in other aspects of the game). Steve Jackson Games borrowed that term for their very successful line of Munchkin games.
I’m not sure that’s an intentional reference to the movie/book; it’s just truncating his last name. The similarity to the Land of Oz is surely coincidental.
“Munchkin” is also used to describe an employee who ranks near the bottom of an organized hierarchy (usually combined with the adjective, “low-level”).
A two-fer, referencing the Wizard of Oz and the Monkees:
On an episode of Modern Family, Mitchell is throwing Cam a birthday party with a Wizard of Oz theme. As the various workers arrive, two men show up and say:
Probably the second most referenced movie these days, A Christmas Story, has the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion in the Christmas parade scene.
Picket Fences had the Dancing Bandit go into the school dressed as Dorothy, with henchmen as the other characters. The costumes had been shownin a previous episode.
