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The deliberate recreation of one work of fiction within the context of another.
Usually this is done for comedic effect, but occasionally it is serious. Sometimes it's both. An Homage is an extended sequence, significantly more than a simple Shout Out, but does not actually constitute a Cross Over even when (as in the case of several 1980s/90s Brady Bunch Homages) some of the original stars recreate their roles. (The memory of "A Very Brady Episode" of Day By Day, where an obviously pregnant Maureen McCormick reprised her role as "Marcia", comes to the writer's mind.)
Sometimes — especially when the Homage is blatant, or is part of a comedy series — it's All Just A Dream. But sometimes it's a weird or haunting reflection of the original series that is a native part of the "reality" of the show in which it is found.
If a series is doing anything deliberately evocative of its own past then it is an Internal Homage.
See also: Actor Allusion, Homage Shot, Post Modernism, Shout Out, Trapped In TV Land, Whole Plot Reference.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
Films
- The fight scene between Nemesis and Alice near the end of Resident Evil: Apocalypse plays out almost exactly like the fight between Kirk and the Gorn in the Star Trek episode "The Arena". Both are fights that are forced on participants that don't want to fight each other. Both contain one combatant who's human, and another who's not human. Both contain a combatant who's fast and agile against one's that's large and strong. Both are a person fighting someone in a rubber suit. The part where Nemesis breaks off a pipe is almost an exact homage to when the Gorn breaks off a limb of a tree. It also ends nearly exactly the same, with the large, muscular one impaled through the chest (with a pipe rather than the diamonds in Star Trek), but refusing to finish him despite urgings from the whoever forced the fight. The homage ends when rather than complimenting the human on the virtues of mercy, the fight's forcer instead chides the human for being weak.
- Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey had an homage to this fight as well, lampshaded by having the episode playing on a TV in the background earlier in the film. In the battle with their evil robot doubles, they (briefly) fight for their lives on Kirks Rock, where the Gorn fight was filmed.
- The nuclear testing scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an homage to the first draft of the Back to the Future script, in which Marty McFly manages to power the time machine, not with a bolt of lightning but with the radiation from an atomic blast. The entire fake town, complete with mannequins and a television playing the Howdy Doody Show, is ripped straight from the BttF script. Oh, and the time machine? Was originally, not a car, but a refrigerator.
- The now-iconic "rolling boulder" sequence at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark was, according to George Lucas, an homage to a similar scene in the Carl Barks comic book The Seven Cities of Cibola.
- Similar to the WKRP example below, Polly Perkin's phoned-in report on the invasion of New York by robots in Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow bears a striking resemblance to the Hindenberg coverage and actually includes lines lifted directly a similar scene from Orson Welles' radio version of War Of The Worlds. Just to add a little extra fillip, the robots emit a sound effect stolen from the Martians of the 1953 War Of The Worlds film.
- Doomsday is almost made of homages. The lead villain, Sol, has the same haircut as Wez from Mad Max 2, and leads a road gang to match. The director describes the hero's Eyepatch Of Power as a Snake Plissken homage. The cannibal gang includes a random Baseball Fury. They also use a bus which pursues the heroes in a neat recreation of the attack of the Turnbull ACs from the same film.
- The pod race from The Phantom Menace has quite a lot in common with the race in Pinchcliff Grand Prix.
- Mars Attacks!. The flying saucers are modeled after the saucers in "Earth vs. The Flying Saucers" and the War Room was made to look like the War Room in Dr Strangelove. The aliens land in Parrumph, Nevada. That's an homage to Art Bell, who for many years broadcast Coast to Coast AM out of that city.
- Almost Famous contains two examples. The first is a scene where the band members think their airplane is going to crash — it's a played-for-laughs homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd. The poignant second example involves a musician passing out after he receives a shock from his microphone — this references Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, who actually did die in very similar circumstances.
- Play It Again, Sam is Woody Allen's homage to Casablanca.
Literature
Live Action TV
- The Brady Bunch episode from the last season of The X Files. ("Sunshine Days", broadcast 5/12/02.) (Not to mention any number of other Brady Bunch episodes on sitcoms in the 1980s and 1990s.)
- In the episode "Visitors From Down The Street" of Crusade (the short-lived sequel to Babylon 5), the Excalibur discovers a world of English-speaking aliens with a UFO/conspiracy culture/mythology similar to that of late 20th-Century Earth — only humans are cast in the role of the saucerfolk! But it's the appearance of alien versions of Mulder and Scully (and Cancer Man) — and the conspiracies around them — that turns the episode into a clever homage to and satire of The X Files.
- The episode "Meltdown" of The Pretender is a homage to the film Reservoir Dogs, albeit with a more network-TV-friendly level of mayhem and an ending featuring The Cavalry.
- A season one episode of Eight Simple Rules has dad Paul (played by John Ritter) dreaming his daughters and the boy both are pining for are in an episode of Threes Company.
- One episode of Two Point Four Children consists largely of an homage to The Prisoner set in Portmeirion, Wales, complete with appropriate costumes and giant bouncing ball.
- "Countdown to Destruction", the season finale of Power Rangers In Space, contains a poignant homage to the "I Am Spartacus" scene of Spartacus, which may have earned the episode its fan-nickname of "Crisis of Infinite Rangers".
- The very next episode, that being the premiere of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, pays homage to a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Blue Danube playing.
- The Time Force premiere demonstrates the new suits' space-time abilities by having the Rangers Matrix-ically duck under bullets.
- Of course, this show's been around long enough that by now it can make cultural references to itself:
- SPD homages Time Force with occasional use of Bullet Time and sending 'destroyed' monsters to containment. Even one Ranger's battle cry was a homeage to Time Force, matching the title of the TF premiere. Also, one brand of Mecha Mooks carries swords identical to those of the Time Force Rangers. Theories abound about how the organization in Power Rangers SPD evolves into the one in Time Force over the years.
- Mystic Force and Overdrive each contain a Sealed Evil In A Can who says something akin to season one's famed "After ten thousand years, I'm free!" upon emerging. The evil in Mystic Force isn't connected (probably), but Overdrive's is.
- Or they could be both referencing the opening credits of the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, in which original sealed evil Rita Repulsa says the line.
- The "Connecticut" house set of Whos The Boss was made to strongly resemble the Connecticut house in the last season of I Love Lucy, with only those changes that might have reasonably been made to a real house between 1959 and the mid-1980s.
- Scrubs addressed the constant comparisons between Dr. Gregory House of House and Dr. Cox by actually having an episode where Dr. Cox hurt his leg and had to walk with a cane while he was faced with three bizarre mysteries in the hospital. And one of those mysteries was even the same as the clinic case in the very first House episode! Also, the 100th episode "My Way Home" was riddled with references to The Wizard of Oz. There was also an episode that homaged the standard sitcom format, titled "My life in Four Cameras".
- Countdown With Keith Olbermann: Signs off with "Good night and good luck", in openly stated homage to Edward R. Murrow
 .
- The ending to the Doctor Who episode "Doomsday" is a homage to the ending of His Dark Materials trilogy. The setting is the same (beach) and the issue is also the same (two lovers about to be separated forever across different dimensions).
- Fame! did a whole-episode homage to The Wizard Of Oz, partly inspired by the fact that it filmed on the same soundstage where the 1939 movie was shot. (According to the cast, a last remaining fragment of the original yellow brick road was enshrined in the stage, and was shown to them with almost religious reverence.)
- Les Nesman's broadcast of the "turkey bombing incident" on WKRP In Cincinnati was a line by line homage to the famous "Martian Attack" sequence from Orson Welle's broadcast of War Of The Worlds (which was itself inspired by the Real Life Hindenburg broadcast) right down to the abrupt cutoff.
- The Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "School Hard" is a homage to the original Die Hard, complete with Buffy sneaking around in the ceiling.
- The Stargate Atlantis episode "Vegas" is a homage to CSI.
- We also gets a chestbuster scene (with an iratus bug) in episode "Doppelganger", with the characters mentioning the movie Alien by name.
Music
- Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown:" "I once was lost but never was found."
- A reference to "Amazing Grace": "I once was lost and then was found."
- Not to mention the use of John Lennon's "working class hero."
- Barenaked Ladies' "Tonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel": "Slow Motion Walter the fire engine guy"
- A use of a common mondegreen for "Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky"
- Veruca Salt's "Volcano Girls:" "Well, here's another clue if you please...the seether's Louise"
- A parody/homage to the Beatles "Well, here's another clue for you all...the walrus was Paul"
- Jimmy Eat World's "A Praise Chorus" contains the following verse, each line of which is a line from another song:
''(Crimson and clover Over and over)
Our house in the middle of our street,
Why did we ever meet?
Kick start my rock 'n' roll fantasy.
Don't don't don't let's start,
Why did we ever part?
Kick start my rock 'n' roll heart!''
- Sugar Ray's "Fly" has the line "Twenty-five years old, my mother, God rest her soul." This is a direct reference to a line from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again, Naturally", in which the mother's age was 65.
- Motion City Soundtrack's "L.G. Fuad" takes lyrics from "Forget Me" by the Promise Ring, then lampshades it:
I want to thank you for being a part of my
Forget-me-nots and marigolds
And other things that don't get old
Is it legal to do this? I surely don't know
It's the only way I have learned to express myself
Through other people's descriptions of life
- Kid Rock's All Summer Long. The refrain ends with "singing Sweet Home Alabama all summer long" followed by the well-known guitar scores from the famous Lynyrd Skynyrd song.
Tabletop Games
- This troper was surprised to realize on seeing it that his foxwoman character's backstory was an unintentional homage to Leo Janáček's opera "The Cunning Little Vixen".
- The Necrons in Warhammer 40000 started as a clear and blatant homage to the Terminator films: mysterious robotic skeletons, who carried on trying to kill you even if reduced to crawling torsos with no legs, and a special rule called "I'll Be Back". Later changes departed from this, focusing more on their image as impossibly ancient servants of even more impossibly ancient monsters. Essentially now a bunch of Ancient Evil Determinators with a lot of Implacable Man and Omnicidal Maniac along with rather too much scalpel imagery, they maintain the robo-skeleton and "I'll Be Back".
- In what may be a twisted homage to the original Terminator's flesh gradually getting messed up to reveal the robotic endoskeleton, Necron Flayed Ones start as machines that then drape themselves in the flayed corpses of their victims. This is supposedly a reference to the Aztec deity Xipe Totec, but strikes this troper as too good to be true.
- Oddly the same retcons that removed most of the Necrons' Terminator imagery turned them into something of a cross between the Cybermen and Daleks of Doctor Who fame.
Video Games
- The opening cinematic for the Company of Heroes campaign looks a lot like the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan... which it then subverts by having the boat full of men first seen by the player get mowed down, including the sergeant-type character who's the only one to have spoken so far in the game. Every WWII game produced after Saving Private Ryan does this. Call of Duty, Commandos, Medal of Honor, in fact the Frontline\Allied Assault games are essentially the game of the film, replete with a Tom Hanks soundalike commanding officer. Not surprising when the man behind the games is Steven Spielberg.
- The (true) end cutscene of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is, in essence, a shortened recreation of the ending of the first Star Wars movie, from the heroes' near-escape of the enemy's hideout to said hideout's dithered explosion to the later awards ceremony wherein the heroes receive medals to the male lead getting a kiss from the female lead.
- World of Warcraft is full of homages, the most notable being pretty much the entire Un'Goro Crater zone, featuring:
- Linken, main NPC of a long chain of quests inspired by Legend Of Zelda themes
- Larion and Muigin, using hammers to deal with a pest of plants, a clear Homage to Super Mario Bros
- Apes that often drop barrels for no real reason other than a Homage to Donkey Kong's origin
- The entire zone is full of references to "Lost World" type movies, including the Warcraft equivalents of Tyranosaurs, Pterodons and Dimetrodons.
- The zone is also full of references to Land Of The Lost, including NPCs with names similar to those on the show (the major travel hub run by Williden Marshal), the aforementioned dinosaurs, and red, green, yellow and blue crystals littering the landscape.
- Final Fantasy IX is full of explicit references and other various thematic connections to earlier games in the series.
- The story from Bomberman Hero was an obvious homage to Star Wars.
- The Katina mission from Star Fox 64 was an obvious homage to the movie Independence Day.
- Time Splitters is shock full of this. In Time Splitters 2 the level Siberia is an homage to Golden Eye 007. The level is set at a dam in Siberia, 1990. One might add that Free Radical are made up of the core team of Golden Eye and Time Splitters is regarded as the Spiritual Successor to that game. But it doesn't stop there. Neo Tokyo is set in a rainy Tokyo 2019, that is a copy of the style in Blade Runner (also set in 2019). The Machine Wars levels in Future Perfect are based of the Terminator franchise.
- Champions Online (and presumably the Tabletop Game it's based on) is a Homage to Silver Age superhero comics, bordering on Affectionate Parody in its lighter moments.
- Disgaea3 has, among others, a magichange skill of the Reaper monsters class which is identical to Starlight Breaker
- Madworld is an obvious homage to Sin City and the ultra-violent black-and-white "exploitation" comics of the 80s which influenced it.
- Sister game House Of The Dead: Overkill is similarly an homage to "grindhouse" exploitation films.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- The Powerpuff Girls does this a few times. The episode "Boogie Frights" contains an extended sequence based on the Death Star run in the original Star Wars. The episode "I See a Funny Cartoon in Your Future" was done in the style of Rocky and Bullwinkle. "Meet the Beat-Alls" pays homage to several Beatles films (in particular Yellow Submarine and Let It Be) as well as the older Beatles cartoons.
- An episode of Dexter's Laboratory was done as an episode of Wacky Races, complete with an opening sequence based on that of Wacky Races, and a narrator who was a sound-alike for the late Dave Willock, the narrator on the original show. Another episode was done as Speed Racer. Yet another was done is the style of The Pink Panther cartoon series, complete with silent characters, jazz music, and Dee Dee doing the panther's unique walk.
- Family Guy is absolutely
filled with built on these.
- The Simpsons also has several, from time to time, albeit mostly during the couch gags and/or the non-continuity "Treehouse of Horror" episodes. During one DVD commentary, the song Homer sings to the tune of The Flintstones is described as an "homage", to which the reply by writer Mike Reiss is "Yes, homage: French for theft."
- Near the end of one episode, a captured cat burglar tells the townspeople that he buried a large amount of money under a giant T. Cue the Its A Mad Mad Mad Mad World homage — complete with appropriate music.
- One episode of Tiny Toon Adventures featured a parody of the film Voyage of the Kon-Tiki, complete with a "making-of documentary" parody to fill out the second half of the episode.
- Codename: Kids Next Door has done several of these. Some of them, especially any homages to Star Wars (in "Snowing" and "Elections"), are so close to the originals that they verge on copyright infringement. There's also one (A.R.C.H.I.V.E.) that's an homage to The Animatrix of all things.
- Incidentally, it was once posted on their blog that they had to scrap a homage to "The Lorax" for being too close to the original.
- The recent Johnny Test episode "Johnny Dukey Doo" is, as you can probably tell, a spoof of your typical Scooby Doo episode, right down to the Laugh Track and "if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" line. This is lampshaded several times, when Johnny remarks that "he's seen this somewhere before".
- In the first episode of ReBoot, Bob and Phong play a tennis-esque game using a floating disc and energy-paddles on their hands and feet. Then the camera angle becomes a view from above, and it's instantly obvious that the game is Pong.
- Another episode, "Number 7", was an homage to The Prisoner, complete with farcical trial scene, seesaw-camera-chair, and use of the phrases "Who is Number One?" and "Be seeing you".
- The third season also had an episode (written, appropriately enough, by D.C. Fontana) that was an homage not only to classic Star Trek (including a log entry, a tricorder, and original series sound effects) but also superhero teams such as the Legion of Superheroes; the death of their leader (who acted and spoke suspiciously like William Shatner overemoting) was due to having something dropped on him... and giving a version of Spock's final lines from The Wrath of Khan.
- In fact, the third season was full of these, including references to The Six Million Dollar Man, Braveheart, Xena, Mars Attacks...
- TV show doing a homage to a stage musical: Pinky and the Brain includes an episode parodying most of the memorable songs in the musical "Man of La Mancha". Distinct from Quantum Leap, which had an episode in which Sam was the principal actor in a production of the same musical.
- The South Park film, "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut", is structured with numerous homages to the structure and musical style of the musical Les Miserables. In fact, South Park does this a lot.
- "Starvin' Marvin" contains a rather obvious spoof of Braveheart before the big fight between the townsfolk and the mutant turkeys.
- "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery" is a spoof of a typical episode of Scooby Doo.
- The episode "Pip" is a slightly warped Whole Plot Reference to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
- The entire fight sequence from "Cripple Fight" is lifted — move for move — from the alley fight sequence in John Carpenter's They Live.
- The series Duck Dodgers does this regularly. One example involved a Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer lookalike Martian ship, featured a version of the Death Star trench run, and even has Marvin complaining about people getting themselves killed trying to recreate the scene. Later, just to make sure that no one missed the reference, the deceased Duck Dodger and Space Cadet appear at the end as glowing blue ghosts wearing Jedi robes.
- Another notable episode featured an uncannily spot-on parody of Samurai Jack.
- Another one is in the "Fudd" episode it ends with a huge Wizard Of Oz homage. The icing on the cake is that Duck Dodgers breaks the fourth wall and informs the audience "This is not copyright infringement, it's a tribute" when they dress up as the head Fudd's guards (who even do the Winkie chant from the 1939 movie).
- Animaniacs also did these. The hilarious Who's On Stage scene is a clear homage to the original Abbott and Costello sketch. Also, Rita and Runt's version of Les Miserables.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender:
- Season 1 episode "The Deserter" seems to be an homage to Apocalypse Now, what with the ex-elite soldier leading a guerilla resistance in the jungle and being spoken of in nigh-worshipful tones by his follower. It would probably be a little too much to expect the line "I love the smell of firebending in the morning," but other than that the resemblance is, if not uncanny, at least enough to make one think.
- Episode "The Great Divide": the Zhang leader's story is expressed in an animation style strikingly similar to Dead Leaves.
- Recess has a few homages to Hogans Heroes, one episode going so far as to take the pilot episode of Hogan's Heroes and adapt it to the playground. Similarly, TJ and Hogan both have a trademark hat and jacket and walk into the principal/warden's office with fairly regular ease and often never getting into trouble.
- Histeria! did a few theme songs parodying the intro sequences to other TV shows, including The Addams Family, The Simpsons, and I Spy. One episode also had a framing device featuring the characters in a Star Trek setting.
- In the Teen Titans episode "Revolution", British supervillain Mad Mod took over America and turned it into a Britain heavily inspired by the style of Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam. They even threw in the crushing foot!
- Mildly ironic, considering Gilliam is an American.
- The Transformers Animated episode Decepticon Air is an Homage to both Con Air and the first Die Hard movie, complete with Optimus using the explosives down the elevator shaft and the "air vent rant" scene.
- Several episodes of Code Lyoko contains direct Homages to various movies:
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