Stock Shout-Outs

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A Shout-Out that pops up in a lot of places. An oddly specific Shout Out.

Apparently multiple authors independently noticed the same detail and decided to reference it in their own story. The fact that so many authors possess such a thorough knowledge of the original story goes to show just how influential the subject of the Shout-Out is.

Stock Shout Outs differ from Stock Parodies in two ways: They aren't played for laughs (beyond the inherent in-joke-esque nature of the common reference point) and they're usually blink-and-you'll-miss-it short.

Some are so famous that they've become tropes themselves.

The Other Wiki also has more information.

Subtropes: If an example fits into one of these subtropes, it should be on that page, not here.

• Classic Cheat Codes
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare
• Stock Screams
• Standard Snippets
• Alice Allusions

Examples of Stock Shout-Outs include:

Film

• 1138: George Lucas' student film, later made a full motion picture, THX 1138.
  • Even referenced in the Disney Theme Parks in Star Tours
• "Hello, Clarice" from The Silence of the Lambs. If used, it's often lampshaded as well ("Who is Clarice?").
• The "One of Us" chant from Freaks
• "I'll get you, my pretty! And Your Little Dog, Too!", from The Wizard of Oz
• The Metropolis Tower, from Metropolis
• 2001: A Space Odyssey:
  • The Monolith
  • Also Sprach Zarathustra
  • "Open the pod-bay doors, HAL." Often paired with:
  • "I'm afraid I can't do that." or the misquote, "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
• "Klaatu Barada Nikto!" From The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• The "I'm the king of the world!" stance from Titanic
• "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and "The horror... the horror..." from Apocalypse Now
  • Though "The horror...the horror..." is actually a Shout-Out to Heart of Darkness.
    • Apocalypse Now is Heart of Darkness in Vietnam.
• "Be afraid. Be very afraid." From the 1986 remake of The Fly.
• Planet of the Apes:
  • The Statue of Liberty half-buried or submerged
  • The line "You maniacs! You blew it up!"
• "I'll be back." From the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, including but not limited to the Terminator series.
• "Feed Me!" Or "Feed me, Seymour!", delivered in a Large Ham fashion, usually in a voice as deep as the speaker can manage; from Little Shop of Horrors
• "I'm walkin' here!", from Midnight Cowboy
• "Oh Captain, My Captain!", along with standing on a desk—from Dead Poets Society, and therefore often used with Save Our Students plots.
• "See you next Wednesday": to director John Landis' Creator Thumbprint.
  • This one was actually inverted once. See here. JMS, creator of Babylon 5, used the phrase in reference to the series being aired on Wednesdays and would have changed it if he knew it could be seen as a John Landis reference.
• "Tannhauser Gate", usually as a space battle in Science Fiction. From Blade Runner. Spelling may vary. Or the whole speech may be used:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. [pause] Time to die.

• "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" from Taxi Driver
• The first rule of Stock Shout-Outs to Fight Club is: You do not talk about Stock Shout-Outs to Fight Club.

Literature

• 23: Used as a reference to its appearance in the Principia Discordia, conspiracy theories (there was even a movie about that), or maybe just to A Tale of Two Cities.
• "He who controls the X" from Dune
• "Preciousssssss" or "my Precioussssss". The Lord of the Rings
• Room 101 from, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Catch-22, from the novel of the same name.
• "Nevermore." Edgar Allan Poe‍'‍s "The Raven". Expect it wherever or whenever anything corvid-related appears - but defied by Discworld‍'‍s Quoth the Raven, who calls it "the N-word".

Live-Action TV

• 4 8 15 16 23 42: The Lost numbers, which notably include two numbers listed separately on this page.
• "Be seeing you!" with a particular hand-to-eye gesture: The Prisoner
• "That's the second-[adjective]-est [noun] I've ever seen!" from Get Smart
• "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." from the Hulk.

Music

• The phrase Welcome to the Jungle pops out everywhere.
• Pirate Jenny, from the song by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

• 666: The Number of the Beast, from The Book of Revelation in The Bible. In Western works, it almost always signifies that supernatural evil is involved. In Eastern works, it's just a cool number with connections to other people's religion and can show up anywhere for any reason.

Radio

• 42: Most famous as the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though it occurs over and over again in Lewis Carroll's works.
• "It's a bird! It's a plane!" from The Adventures of Superman. Also, "This looks like a job for..."

Theatre

• The Major-General Song, from The Pirates of Penzance; also a favorite stock parody
• "STELLLLLLLLLLLAAAA!!!!!!" A Streetcar Named Desire

Video Games

• "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", from Colossal Cave.

Western Animation

• "You Meddling Kids!" or the whole line, "I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for [you/these/those] meddling kids" from Scooby Doo.
• The children dancing during A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Real Life

• A113: A reference to the California Institute for the Arts, specifically the classroom for first-year graphic design. This one is common in Pixar films (witness "special order A113" in WALL-E), but Cal Arts grad and Pixar stalwart Brad Bird also included references in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
• "Oh, the Humanity!" and/or the iconic "burning dirigible" image from the Hindenburg disaster.