12 Super-Nerdy Easter Eggs In TV And Movies

Nerds beget nerds, so it's completely unsurprising that these geeky shows contain subtle references to other nerdy shows. To celebrate this contagion of nerdery, here are twelve wonderful easter eggs in television and movies that you really need to know about.

1. Nobody loves Navi

A Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time parody appears in the Powerpuff Girls episode "Child Fearing." Mid-episode, the story cuts away to a game screen controlled by Townsville's mayor: Navi the fairy repeatedly shouts "HEY" while Link blunders around, unable to understand her directions. After slamming into walls and being crushed by bricks, Link kills Navi, forcing the mayor to restart the game.

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Cavemen

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If you look carefully at Robbie Sinclair's room in the '90s-era sitcom Dinosaurs, you'll notice a TMNT-inspired poster that reads "Teenage Mutant Ninja Cavemen." Which, by the way, is a brilliant superhero concept for an audience of suburban dinosaurs.

3. Ace Attorney, Haruhi Suzumiya

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The first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya included an homage to Capcom's Ace Attorney game series. While visiting an island villa, Haruhi and crew are confronted with a murder mystery. During the scene where the characters reveal their solution to the island's residents, their body movements mirror Phoenix Wright's and Miles Edgeworth's courtroom game sprites. Pictured above is Haruhi imitating Phoenix's iconic "OBJECTION!" pose. You can watch an amusing mashup of the sequence set to the Ace Attorney soundtrack here.

4. My Little Ponies pays homage to Star Wars

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The last scene of season 2, episode 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic recreated the iconic finale of Star Wars: A New Hope with the Mane Six. You can watch the footage here.

5. Club Obi Wan

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George Lucas frequently slipped Star Wars references into the Indiana Jones series. At the beginning of Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom, Indy visits the nightclub "Club Obi Wan," a homage to Obi Wan Kenobi.

6. The Polar Express had a flux capacitor

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Robert Zemeckis directed both Back to the Future and the adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's Polar Express, so it's not entirely surprising that the Delorean's flux capacitator makes an appearance in the train's cab. It briefly can be seen in the scene where Smokey and Steamer lose control of the train on the ice.

7. The Serenity still flies!

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The 2003 miniseries Battlestar Galactica shared a special effect company with Joss Whedon's prematurely-cancelled cult favorite, Firefly. This enabled the crew of The Serenity to keep flying through the skies of the Twelve Colonies! If you look carefully at the sky sixteen minutes into the Battlestar Galactica pilot, you can see The Serenity on the left-hand side of the screen. A relevant screenshot from Battlestar Galactica is pictured above, and an image of The Serenity, for comparison purposes, below.

8. Pac Man lives in the Tron grid

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In the scene following the memorable light cycle sequence in the original Tron movie there's a moment when Lieutenant Sark pauses to study the game grid. If you look carefully, you'll notice Pac-Man hanging out on the right side of the grid.

9. A delegation of E.T.s

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A delegation of aliens that resemble E.T. from Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial appear in the senate hearing scene in Star Wars: The Phantom Menance. George Lucas was returning a favor with this cameo, since Spielberg included a reference to Yoda in E.T.

10. Mystery Science Theater 3000 in Animaniacs

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The Animaniacs short "Potty Emergency" begins with a sequence of a space woman fleeing from a murderous alien. At one point, the woman opens a pair of windows to scream for help; the characters "MST3K" appear above this window. Moments later, the scene shifts to a movie theater. It turns out that the Warner siblings are watching a bad science fiction film, which is the basic premise of every episode of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

11. Ancient Egyptian droids

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In Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones descends into the Well of the Souls to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. If you look very carefully at the room, you'll see that CP30 and R2D2 from Star Wars appear as hieroglyphs on a column and as part of a mural on the wall.

12. Millenium Falcon in the Blade Runner skyline

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A model of Han Solo's ship, the Millenium Falcon, was used to create the skyline of a futuristic Los Angeles in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The dark sets make it hard to pick out the Millenium Falcon, which is outlined in green in the above images. George Lucas reciprocated by including police spinners from Blade Runner in The Phantom Menace. You can read more about the Star Wars/Blade Runner references here.