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 oftenly 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
  • "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 "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!"

Live-Action TV

• 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.
• 23: Used in a similar way, as a reference to its appearance in conspiracy theories. (There even was a whole movie just about that...)or maybe just to A Tale of Two Cities.
• 4 8 15 16 23 42: The Lost numbers, which notably include two numbers listed separately above.
• "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

Video Games

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

Uncategorized

• 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.
• "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
• "He who controls the X" from Dune
• "I'm walkin' here!", from Midnight Cowboy
• The Major-General Song, from The Pirates of Penzance; also a favorite stock parody
• "Nevermore." Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". Expect it wherever or whenever anything corvid-related appears.
• "Oh Captain, My Captain!", along with standing on a desk—from Dead Poets Society, and therefore often used with Save Our Students plots.
• "Preciousssssss" or "my Precioussssss". Lord of the Rings
• "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.

• "STELLLLLLLLLLLAAAA!!!!!!" A Streetcar Named Desire
• Room 101 from, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" from Taxi Driver
• Catch-22, from the novel of the same name.
• "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.
• "It's a bird! It's a plane!" from Superman. Also, "This looks like a job for..."
• "I'll be back." From the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, including but not limited to the Terminator series.
• The children dancing during A Charlie Brown Christmas.