Fans of Neon Genesis Evangelion can generally sing along with "Fly Me to the Moon" without knowing the original artist, or even one of the dozens of famous American artists who covered it in the four decades before NGE came out.
Comedy
''A Night at the Opera'' has ruined Il trovatore for many people. Just try to hear the Anvil Chorus without thinking of Chico and Harpo after you've seen it...
Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain has unfortunately become known as either the theme music for a comic nemesis, or that scene in Fantasia that scarred generations of children.
The opening was used in the Maxell "Break The Sound Barrier" ad.
"Countin' the Beat" by the Swingers is known to a generation of Australians as the Kmart theme song.
Many talk shows cause this, from Rush Limbaugh with "My City Was Gone" by Pretenders, to Rachel Maddow with "Stealing the Stock" from the Oceans Twelve soundtrack.
The song called "The Merry Go Round Broke Down" created by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin is better remembered as the music for the Looney Tunes theme song, Daffy Duck sings a more complete version of the song with different lyrics in "Daffy and Egghead".
Additionally, Eddie Cantor's "Merrily We Roll Along" is better remembered as the Merrie Melodies theme.
Everyone's heard of "Smoke on the Water", but a lot fewer people know Deep Purple. Similarly, find anyone who would recognize any part of the song other than the famous intro. It'll be a lot harder.
A lot of people forgot or don't realize that the Joker was based on Conrad Veidt's◊ character in the 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs.
Donald Duck (& Co.). The Disneyverse is simply filled with retold classics, movie and music references and the like, providing lots of kids their first contact with greek myths, Shakespeare's plays, classical history, etc.
Film
The 1925 Russian film Bronenosets Potyomkin, usually called Battleship Potemkin in English-language sources, is generally considered hugely influential on later cinema. There is a particular scene set on some stairs leading down to the harbour in Odessa which has been imitated several times, including in The Untouchables and one of the Naked Gun films. It is reasonable to assume that, in modern times at least, more people who are not cineasts will have seen these homages/parodies than have seen the original film.
Another example that might be more familiar to younger audiences is the scene in Revenge of the Sith where post-Face Heel Turn Anakin/Vader marches at the head of a stormtrooper column into the Jedi Temple.
By now, a notable percentage of the people who reference Citizen Kane as a cinema classic and could recognize the opening scene from any one second of footage have actually never seen the film and wouldn't be able to identify any other line, shot or sequence from the whole movie (okay, maybe one).
Considering It's Been Done several times over, most people are bound to recognize the majority of the movie, they just won't realize it's Citizen Kane.
The Simpsons might be the biggest perpetrator, as one of the writers said you could probably recreate the plot of the movie using clips from the show.
People these days seem to think that "Klaatu Barada Nikto" is that funny nonsense line from Sam Raimi's horror comedy Army of Darkness (1992) (aka The Evil Dead 3). Actually, it's from the black-and white sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still 1951 (1951), where the sentence is used to stop Gort, the powerful invincible robot of the alien Klaatu, from destroying the Earth as punishment for the humans killing his peaceful master.
Of course, there isn't anyone in the entire world who thinks AoD spawned that line, because the line Ash is intended to repeat there is Klaatu VERATA Nicto. Saying Klaatu Barada Nikto would just confuse an Evil Dead fan.
Same goes for Ridley Scott's dystopian cyberpunk movie Blade Runner (1982), tangentially based on Philip K. Dick's bizarre novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968). Forget William Gibson's famous cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984). Forget The Matrix (1999) with its Hong-Kong martial art style. Forget Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun RPG. Forget all the movies about clones and androids on the run. They wouldn't have been there without Blade Runner. And Japanese anime cyberpunk series like Ghost in the Shell SAC might never have penetrated into the Western geek consciousness without the blending of Western and Asian culture in Blade Runner.
Gibson, at least, is up front about this. He has said that he walked out of Blade Runner in tears, because there was his world, already on screen, when the novel was still in the writing phase. He was almost overjoyed when it tanked.
The reimagined Battlestar Galactica is also heavily inspired by Blade Runner. In fact, the reason Edward James Olmos signed on for what was originally supposed to be a minor one-off miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel is because it reminded him of Blade Runner. And, really, he would know.
Both Gibson and Scott were heavily inspired by the work of French graphic artist Moebius, specifically The Long Tomorrow and The Incal (the later written by Alejandro Jodorowsky), with their noirish plots and dense, impossibly high metropoflis cris-crossed with flying cars and bridges. Moebius' depiction of a future that was as dirty and lived in as the real world was also a huge influence on Star Wars. His scenes are often directly homaged as well, particularly the famous opening shot of The Incal. Moebius contributed directly to the design of Alien, so even people who don't know his name recognize his influence.
Ghost in the Shell (1989) is actually tightly connected to Shirows earlier work Appleseed (1986), which revolves about artificial human servants possibly getting out of control.
There have been flying cars in movies at least from 1950s, if not earlier. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is probably the first to show similar scenery on the silver screen, though it still used planes with wings, but the massive megacity with flying vehicles was made the setting for a science fiction film in that moment.
And the flying cars in The Fifth Element were a homage to French Valerian comics, with Corben's taxi's design almost entirely lifted from a similar vehicle flown by a flamboyant cabbie S'traks in the crowded skies of industrial planet Rubanis. Mézières (the creator of Valerian) actually worked on the production design of The Fifth Element, along with Moebius, mentioned above as having inspired some of the works which in turn influenced The Fifth Element.
In Germany this may be known from commercials of a certain beer brand. (Seriously, they already used it for decades, and still use it... talk about Brand Recognition!) They even dared to remix it
Russians are mostly familiar with this theme through the game show What? Where? When?
As famous as the 1932 classic Freaks is, many more people are familiar with the parodies and allusions to its "One of us! One of us!" scene out of context. What's more, in these parodies, the phrase often comes off as threatening, the direct opposite of how it's played in the film (although the recipient sees it as such).
Speaking of Chiba, anyone who's seen the 1976 classic Karate Warriors knows that people had been merging slow motion captures seamlessly into jump cuts decades before 300 came around.
"Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" Despite being quoted (albeit, incorrectly) and parodied in pop culture for decades, most people have no idea this line is a reference to the Humphrey Bogart film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, often attributing its origins to Blazing Saddles instead. However, without the understanding that the line in the latter film is intended to be a parody of the former, the joke itself does not make sense. (The actual, original quote from the film goes, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!")
Some don't even attribute it to Blazing Saddles. It also pops up in UHF as "We don't need no stinkin' badgers!"
The line is only misquoted in regards to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It is correct in the Blazing Saddles context. So people are quoting Saddles but they may not understand where the joke comes from to begin with.
The new Star Trek movie has instantly recognizable characters, themes and objects — even for those who have never seen a Star Trek episode in their life.
Many people associate the line "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum." with Duke Nukem rather than with "Rowdy" Roddy Piper's character in They Live!.
The famous scene in Apocalypse Now where Colonel Kilgore says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning.", is actually a lot longer than people care to remember making it a cause of Beam Me Up, Scotty!.
There probably aren't that many people who, thanks to Fantasia, wouldn't think of dinosaurs when listening to "Rite Of Spring".
That song that everybody associates with clown cars and elephants? The one that goes doot-doot-doodle-doo-dah-doot-doot-doo-dah? Enter the Gladiators.
Hypothetical Roman announcer at the Coliseum: And now, in this corner, Brutus the Destroyer! (calliope music)
It's a pun. After all, the gladiators were the main attraction in the Roman circus.
Any time-lapse footage of city life is likely to be a reference to Koyaanisqatsi, either directly or indirectly.
You know how the canonical sound of lasers firing is a sort of "pew pew pew" effect? You can thank Ben Burtt, the audio designer for Star Wars, for that. The original sound effect was created by holding a microphone up to a taut wire while hitting the other end.
Mike Myers' line "You put the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble" is the one and only reason View From The Top has any kind of lasting pop cultural significance.
For that matter, the joke itself is swiped (perhaps unknowingly) from an episode of The Facts of Life.
The Dragonheart theme, it has been used everywhere.
Quentin Tarantino put a Shout Out to the French movie Band Of Outsiders when John Travolta and Uma Thurman's characters dance in Pulp Fiction - however, this has spawned other parodies and IMDb says "someone dances like Travolta" under movie connections.
Peter Lorre's voice is recognizable, even to those who have never seen any of his movies.
This article, referencing an utterly hilarious Muppet Showsketch, is all about how parodies of Ingmar Bergman films are immediately recognizable, even by people who have never watched any of his films.
The word "inception" means the beginning or creation of something. Ever since the film, it's more often used to describe something that's inside something else of the same nature.
Literature
The Bible is the grand-daddy of this trope, with sayings like "there's nothing new under the sun" and references to Pillars of Salt and the like existing in almost every medium, though very few people have actually read the Book in question (people who go to Church will have heard excerpts).
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings" is a funny case in that hardly anyone remembers where it comes from. The educated guess seems to be Fahrenheit 451, which doesn't use it. Heinrich Heine said it in his play, Almansor. He was commenting on the burning of the Qur'an during the Spanish Inquisition.
This, however, only applies to the English-speaking world. In Germany, the original German quotenote „Dies war ein Vorspiel nur, dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.“ - "That was but a prelude; there where you burn books, you'll burn humans as well in the end." is generally associated with the Nazi book burnings in 1933.
"April is the cruellest month." Quick - name which poet wrote that, and the name of the poem.note T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
How many people do you know who can recite any part of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" besides "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.' "
Oh, come on. Most people can at least give you "Once upon a midnight dreary". Getting past that...not so much. ("As I pondered, weak and weary/over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore")
Behind Shakespeare and the Bible, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is probably the biggest sufferer of this trope. The novel draws heavily on contemporary Gothic horror, feminist theories, and Paradise Lost. And yet when most people think of Frankenstein...
On that note, Frankenstein's monster's skin color is referred to as yellow (jaundiced) in the novel.
It's impossible to list all the comic books, novels, fantasy horror movies, roleplaying games, video games, fantasy/Sci-Fi art and music videos that feature blatant rip-offs, allusions, homages, parodies or additions to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos tales.
Most people nowadays likely associate Arkham Asylum with Batman.
Problem Sleuth and Homestuck both feature monsters that clearly resemble Lovecraft's elder gods. The author, Andrew Hussie, has outright stated that he's never read a word of Lovecraft, and based his monsters entirely on secondhand references to the Cthulhu mythos.
You've probably encountered the tropes the Horatio Hornblower series popularized long before you ever heard of the series itself.
And that obscure little work of fiction got a Shout Out in the episode "Smile Time" of Angel, with a purple stuffed thing that communicates via a horn on its face named Ratio. It's likely you didn't get the joke.
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls." You've heard that pithy phrase, usually said when someone else is in trouble, but who said it? How about "No man is an island" ? Well, they both came from the same paragraph of the the same essay, but missing the context.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
—Excerpted from Meditation XVII by John Donne (1623 - he was contemplating his own death at the time)
Most of Lewis Carroll's songs and rhymes in the Alice in Wonderland books were parodies of once-common Victorian standards which, with the exception of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and the possible exception of "The Spider and the Fly", are considered obscure trivia by most modern readers.
Most people know the phrase "water water everywhere but not a drop to drink", but hardly anybody knows that it came from Samuel Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner or that the original wording was "nor any drop to drink".
Used for a joke in the Confederation of Valor series. The Taykan species are basically Space Elves. Thanks to popcultural osmosis from humans, they're well aware of their physical similarity to classical elves and apparently find the comparison amusing: Torin Kerr once met a di'Taykan named Celeborn.
Of Mice And Men is clearly about a big guy named Lenny and a little guy named George, and absolutely nothing else, if all the references to those characters in various sources is any indication.
Pop culture even has a habit of obscuring itself. Adam Savage of MythBusters is frequently credited for the quote, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" Actually, the line originated from the 1985 So Bad, It's Good film The Dungeonmaster (Ragewar outside of the US).
Most people not familiar with Power Rangers will simply refer to characters as "The Red Ranger" and "The Pink Ranger" etc. What they don't realise is that, as of February 2013, there have been no less than 26 different Red Rangers, with many more off-screen, and a few more debatable ones.
While we're at it, most people, when they see Super Sentai for the first time will think it's a rip-off of Power Rangers. That's almost a complete inversion of the truth.
Music
Everything by John Philip Sousa has become used in commercials and TV shows without much understanding behind them. Most notably the The Washington Post March and The Stars & Stripes Forever.
However, The Liberty Bell March is automatically associated with Monty Python and their Flying Circus. No exceptions.
A large proportion of British people hearing In The Hall Of The Mountain King would be surprised to find out that it wasn't, in fact, written as the Alton Towers theme song.
Worse yet, one dance remix of "In The Hall of the Mountain King" has been miscredited on file-sharing services as a remix of the Inspector Gadget theme, despite there being only a very vague similarity between the two songs.
The song was, in reality, written by Norwegian componist Edvard Grieg, to a scene in Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt.
Similarly, the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is better known to many 8-bit-era gamers as "the title music to Jet Set Willy".
Play the Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" to anyone in the world, except Russians, and they are almost certain to identify it as video game music. Specifically, the Tetris theme.
The song "Anything Goes" actually does not come from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's an authentic show tune of the period (from a Cole Porter musical of the same name) and, by the way, normally sung in English.
For that matter, "Puttin' on the Ritz" was not originally performed by Fred Astaire he just sang it in Blue Skies.
In case you were wondering it was originally performed by Harry Richman in the film of "Puttin' on the Ritz" (you would think the name was a dead give away).
Many people know the "Love Theme" from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture only from its use in innumerable TV shows (South Park, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and movies (Wayne's World, Clueless) to show that someone has fallen in Love at First Sight.
Oh! You mean the romantic kiss song from the first The Sims game?
Just try listening to "Hoedown" from Aaron Copland's Rodeo without thinking "Beef: It's What's For Dinner."
Or Emerson, Lake And Palmer.
The BBC's use of Booker T. & The MGs', "Soul Limbo". Also known as the Cricket music.
Fleetwood Mac's outro to "The Chain", otherwise known as the Formula One Racing music.
Singin' in the Rain did this to most of the songs in the movie, most notably the title tune which was a standard song to be sung by aspiring actors in film in the '20s, '30s and '40s.
Considering the film's producer, Arthur Freed, wrote or co-wrote MOST if not all of those songs for MGM in the post-sound era of film and commissioned the screenwriters to base a musical around that catalogue, it doesn't necessarily remove those songs from their original context.
Ke$ha's hit "Take it Off" is a pop version of "The Streets of Cairo" (the song usually associated with snake-charming in pop-culture)
Like the aforementioned Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, there are some other classic rock songs with their sound familiar to a lot of "uninitiated" people by exposure through radio, commercials etc. Tracks like Break On Through to the Other Side by The Doors, Jammin by Bob Marley, Born to Be Wild (from the soundtrack of the film Easy Rider) by Steppenwolf.
Know what the song "Spybreak!" sounds like? How about if I tell you it's the song that plays during the lobby shootout scene in The Matrix? If you already did, did you even know who the Propellerheads were before you did the research? Said movie came out two years after the song.
Many people seem to have found out about "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen from the Family Guy episode "I Dream of Jesus". Just take a look at this graph.
That small peak in 2004 coincides with the release of Battlefield Vietnam, which for a fair few gamers might be the thing they associate with the song.
Spanish speaking viewers however may have found out about the song earlier back when it was sometimes played during the credits of Ah, qué Kiko (a spinoff of El Chavo del ocho).
How many people under 25 or so can hear "The Final Countdown" without thinking of Arrested Development?
People from the Detroit Area have a different reaction to The Final Countdown, mostly identifying it as "The Pistons Intro Song."
Saints Row 2 fans will identify it as that awesome 80s song that will never, ever, ever, ever leave their head.
Utter the line "Right here, right now", and nearly anyone with associate it with Fat Boy Slim's song of that name, not the movie (Strange Days) it's sampled from.
Many Americans are undoubtedly familiar with "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." Considerably fewer might be aware of the fact that the tune is from a Pirates of Penzance ditty called "Come, Friends Who Plow the Sea."
The "Polovetsian Dances" from Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor tend to be more commonly associated with Kismet and a certain Pine-Sol commercial these days.
Zillions of certain musical lines, hooks, beats and intros have been sampled and covered so much that you would be surprised to know how old these songs are.
Newspaper Comics
Calvin And Hobbes: In the 10th Anniversary Collection, Bill Watterson admits that he's "not at all familiar with Film Noir or detective novels", so the stories featuring Calvin's Hard Boiled Detective alter ego Tracer Bullet are "just spoofs on the clichés of the genre."
An example so classic, jokes about it pre-date the concept of this trope: a wit from the 1960s noted this definition of a "longhair" (a person of culture): "he can hear the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger." The piece of music referred to is from the Rossini Opera William Tell. The dramatic fanfare and thundering string section from the overture was used as the theme music for The Lone Ranger radio drama and then in movies and on television.
On the subject of the Lone Ranger and William Tell, this commercial, which references not only The Lone Ranger but another TV ad of the day for Lark Cigarettes.
To those who were too young for The Lone Ranger but old enough to watch a certain incarnation of The Tex Avery Show, and are sadly unfamiliar with the origin of the piece, the tune could bring to mind a montage of zany animation.
"The Shadow knows". Yeah, great, what does that mean, exactly? The full line goes "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!". The Shadow is a psychic and fights crime by implanting the suggestion in a person's head that he's invisible, so he can eavesdrop a lot.
Theater
Various bits from the works of William Shakespeare have been quoted, parodied, imitated and plagiarized too many times to count. Particularly notable are cases in which Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is confused with the "Alas, poor Yorick" one, leading to an actor reciting the former while holding the prop skull that belongs in the latter. There's a fair amount of Beam Me Up, Scotty! at work, too: "Alas poor Yorick, I knew him" often has a "well" added to the end in pop culture.
Orsino's opening line of "If music be the food of love, play on," from Twelfth Night is often assumed to be quite romantic and/or demonstrative of a love of art. Very few include the rest of the quote: "Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken, and so die."
A particularly egregious example is the way in which Juliet's speech "Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" usually has a spurious comma added after the "thou", completely changing the meaning. "Wherefore" actually stands in the same relationship to "therefore" as "where" does to "there"; it doesn't mean "where", it means "why". Juliet is not wondering where Romeo is as commonly supposed, but is speaking to him and asking the reason for his name. (Sounds weird the first time you hear it, but it becomes cleat what she means: "Why did the man I fell in love with have to be Romeo Montague, probably my father's last choice on earth of son-in-law?")
Also, the name of the play being used to mean an ideal romance other than the ludicrously over-emotional and too-fast mess that the play portrays it as.
Romeo And Juliet itself is not a Shakespeare original, but based on an even older Italian novella. Few of Shakespeare's plays (possibly none) had original plots.
This makes it even funnier to watch the bits in Shakespeare in Love where Will is trying to work out how the story will end.
'Now is the winter of our discontent' is often said as a negative rather than the happy occasion it is 'made glorious summer by this sun of York"
As Richard is the one who says the line, it is rather bitter/sarcastic
Gilbert And Sullivan's "I am the very model of a modern major general" has been spoofed in so many cartoons, movies, and what have you, that everyone recognizes it, several people don't realize this until it's referenced in Mass Effect 2.
How many people quote lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Faust and especially the following Faust II (Faust, der Tragödie Zweiter Teil) without knowing where it's originally from?
Actor Gustaf Gründgens' famous performances as Mephisto, with sinister stark white make-up, black eye shadow and sharply upturned eyebrows, have definitely influenced later despictions of the devil in visual media.
Spring Awakening is only thought by many people to be a musical set in 1890s Germany, unless they actually look into it at all and find the original Frank Wedekind play on which it is based.
Look up just about any YouTube video for "Seasons of Love", and you will see an overwhelming number of comments about how people sang it for choir/graduation/etc. and didn't know it was from Rent.
Video Games
You've heard the Tetris theme song, right? Well, turns out it's actually a Russian folk song called "Korbeiniki", and is only really associated with Tetris outside of Russia.
World of Warcraft is absolutely the king of this, being both Troperrific and jam-packed with shout outs to damn near everything under the sun. From music/bands, novels, films and TV shows, and other video games, from the popular to the extremely obscure, if you name a piece of media, chances are pretty good that WoW has referenced it. This naturally leads to a great deal of Older Than They Think, particularly for the younger and more...culturallyunaware in the fandom. This even applies to the Warcraft franchise itself, since the MMO contains many mythology gags which are shout outs to the older RTS games, and other Blizzard games. Just look at this list for examples. Beyond the references, gameplay elements themselves are victims to this, since WoW is the 800 lb gorilla of the MMO genre. Fandumb often accuses other games of "ripping off" WoW features, when those other games had them first.
Similarly with Starcraft when Dawn of War came out there were plenty of Starcraft fans accusing it of ripping off Starcraft.
Interesting example in that Dawn of War's source material is older than Starcraft, but its gameplay mechanic is not, making this Fan Dumb half of the time.
...except that the mechanics they share are basic elements of the genre that were invented in Dune 2 by Westwood, and the two are as far apart in gameplay as two RTSs can be.
Many Western gamers assume that Guitar Freaks (or any long-running Japanese rhythm game) ripped off Guitar Hero. Guitar Freaks has been around since 1999; Guitar Hero wasn't released until 2005.
People unfamiliar with the Touhou series will automatically assume that "U.N. Owen was her?" is called "McRolled" all thanks to a viral video much to the annoyance of fans who hate that name.
Even worse, someone posted a remix of "U.N. Owen Was Her?" as John Stump's "Death Waltz", causing much confusion between both songsnote The remix is merely really complex, while the actual Death Waltz is impossible to play and entirely unrelated to "U. N. Owen".
The main character in Pokemon Red And Blue is named Red. But he's often called Ash by people more familiar with the anime. Similarily, his rival Blue is referred to as "Gary".
This is pretty common in Super Mario World ROM hacks and Mario fan games in general since some of the more well known ones use resources from obscure Japanese RPGs people likely haven't heard of (Romancing Saga, Live A Live and Seiken Densetsu 3 being some examples) and as a result some people tend to associate said resources with the fan game/hack rather than the original SNES one. Such as how many people don't know that things like the Mirage Palace and Dark Castle are from Seiken Densetsu 3 and not Brutal Mario, or that the 7 koopalings boss is a parody of the final boss in Romancing Saga 2. This can lead to awkwardness if people assume any resources from these games are plagarised.
Western Animation
Many famous pieces of classical music have been hijacked by Disney, Looney Tunes and other (usually older) animated sequences, and are many people's only exposure to such works. Many people still have the urge to sing "Kill the Wa-bbit" along to Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", thanks to Elmer Fudd's memorable version in the classic Bugs Bunny short What's Opera, Doc? And the use of a romanticized version of the Pilgrims' Chorus when Bugs enters on horseback, dressed as Brunnhilde, and fools Elmer/Thor (he used the same entrance, music and disguise with equal success against Hermann Goerring in a wartime cartoon).
30 Rock had an episode where it's revealed Liz's cell phone ringtone is "Ride of the Valkyries", resulting in this exchange:
Phoebe: Oh, you like Wagner. Liz: No, I like Elmer Fudd.
Looney Tunes also stole heavily from "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini, to the point where almost every major theme in the piece has been used in some cartoon. For a lot of those, it's via another reference—see below.
And Rossini suffers again in Rabbit of Seville, this time with the overture for the Barber of Seville.
How many people can listen to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 and not be thinking of a cartoon at the same time?
Dance of the Reed Flutes: Are you thinking of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut or Lemmings?
Similar to the above with Dance of The Sugar-Plum Fairy for Tetris - although "Korobeiniki" (see further down this page) is even more strongly associated with it.
Before Fantasia 2000, most people would associate Rhapsody in Blue with United Airlines.
The Theme from Peter Gunn was composed for the TV series Peter Gunn, in 1958.
Felix Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" has probably been heard and remembered more from old cartoons than from the concert hall or recordings.
Likewise, if you've heard of the turn-of-the-century song "Hello, Ma Baby", it was probably from One Froggy Evening.
Or perhaps even Spaceballs, which seems to have used it in reference to One Froggy Evening. It's even the same recording of the song!
Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" is inextricably linked to assembly-line montages thanks to Looney Tunes.
How about The Merry Go Round Broke Down for the Looney Tunes theme song?
The character Foghorn Leghorn was based on the character Beauregard Claghorn, from Fred Allen's Allen's Alley radio program.
"Sing, Sing, Sing", originally by Louis Prima, played most famously by Benny Goodman, is known to a whole generation of eighteen-to-twenty-somethings as "the Chips Ahoy song".
"Sing, Sing, Sing" seems to be the stock music used to evoke '30s swing jazz.
Woody Woodpecker's laugh is so universally recognized, that some people even forget where the Annoying Laugh to rule them all came from in the first place.
Some young adults are reminded of Hey Arnold! when they hear music from Carmen or "Ride of the Valkyries" thanks to the episode "What's Opera Arnold"?
The name of episode itself could possible be a shout out to the well known Bugs Bunny episode "What's Opera Doc"?
The animated Saturday morning show The Smurfs used nothing but clips of classical music for mood and theme setting.
Futurama has an example in the boy from the pair of Victorian dressed Street Urchin children who are recurring characters. They are clearly meant to evoke Charles Dickens, as his crutch is identical to that famously used by A Christmas Carol's Tiny Tim, although what the writers seem to have missed was that Tiny Tim was not one of Dickens' urchin characters. Then again, it's Futurama; it was probably on purpose.
Lampshaded again in Futurama, as the Fungineers who designed the Moon Landing 'historical' recreation with singing whale hunters as astronauts have certainly gotten their historical facts through popcultural osmosis.
Fungineering as a whole seems to be based on a massive foundation of Memetic Mutation.
Another one from Futurama is simply the theme song. Most people associate it with the series, but it's actually just a slightly tweaked version of part of the Maurice Béjart ballet Mass for our time. The original was written back in 1967 by experimental composer Pierre Henry and is entitled "Psyche Rock".
Speaking of Fantasia, there's likely not a soul on Earth who doesn't associate "L'apprenti sorcier" by Paul Dukas with Mickey Mouse.
Or take "Dance of the Hours" from Ponchielli's ballet La Gioconda. When you hear it, you'll either think of the dancing hippos from Fantasia, or you'll start singing, "Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh, here I am at Camp Granada..." (Allan Sherman's well-known funny song). Or both.
People of a certain age will probably first think of the 2 Live Crew song "Me So Horny".
Or Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back", which similarly references the line.
Ren And Stimpy's music for that show was made up almost entirely of classical and jazz music.
Ren & Stimpy closely associate Raymond Scott's "The Toy Trumpet" with the army. This troper assures the reader that the tune has been heard just everywhere, but no one can even place it: [1]
Many kids today will hear old Hawaiian standards only to think they first came from Spongebob Squarepants
In the Henry and June segments on KaBlam!, kids might think that the ska background music originated from the show, but they're really just instrumental versions of songs by The Toasters.
Also, the H&J shorts as well as Action League Now used various stock/classical pieces often used in Spongebob or The Mighty B.
Narrator (after four masked turtles hop out of a sewer pipe): I'm afraid popular culture as successfully eradicated the actual identities of the true poets of art. In my opinion, it stinks!...And now for a brief reality check. Michelangelo was a brilliant artist. Not a turtle.
Humoreske was a romantic piano piece composed in 1839, but most 90s kids call it the "Slappy Squirrel Theme".
Due to the penchant most voice actors had for impersonations, many young viewers were able to recognize the voices of famous actors and celebrities long before they had any idea of who they were.
