Shout Out / Looney Tunes

The Looney Tunes franchise has always been in tune with whatever era of pop culture they appear in, and as such, references to celebrities, art, music, literature, and pop culture of their time period are so common, that the cartoons are practically time capsules of the culture they were made in. Some have stood the test of time, while other cartoons have become rather dated because of them.

A fairly comprehensive list of pop culture references in the series can also be found here.

---

• Frank Tashlin's shorts tend to be the heaviest on pop culture jokes, with special mention given to his "Things Come To Life In A Bookstore" Trilogy (respectively made up of Speaking of the Weather, Have You Got Any Castles? and You're An Education have references to not only celebrities, but also both vintage and then-contemporary literature of the time (i.e. novels and magazines).
  • "Castles" takes this farther than usual and may well have the most pop culture references out of all the shorts in the entire series; it features Alexander Woollcott (in character as "The Town Crier"), Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (dancing on The 39 Steps), Greta Garbo (her feet are So Big), Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, The Mills Brothers, William Powell, Clark Gable (in The House of the Seven Gables), Paul Muni, Charles Laughton (as Henry the Eighth), Victor McLaglen, W. C. Fields, and Ned Sparks (as Rip Van Winkle). The globe on the cover of Pearl Buck's book The Good Earth (1937) mentions "Papa Leon and Uncle Ray", referring to Leon Schlesinger, who was the executive producer of the Looney Tunes shorts then, and Raymond Katz, Schlesinger's brother-in-law, who also worked at the studio. The book and movie references include Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927), Bulldog Drummond (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), So Big! (1932), Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932), Oliver Twist (1933), Little Women (1933), The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), Little Men (1934), So Red the Rose (1935), The 39 Steps (1935), The Three Musketeers (1935), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935), Under Two Flags (1936), The Last of the Mohicans (1936), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Three Men on a Horse (1936), Hi-De-Ho (1937), Seventh Heaven (1937), The Road Back (1937), Topper (1937), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (1937), Varsity Show (1937) The Hurricane (1937), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Rio Rita (1929), Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) (1931), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), The Informer (1935), Diamond Jim (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Green Pastures (1936), Heidi (1937) and last, but not least, Gone with the Wind.
• Tashlin's "The Woods Are Full Of Cuckoos" (1937) is another reference bonanza. The caricatured celebrities include Alexander Woolcott, bandleader Ben Bernie, gossip columnist Walter Winchell, Milton Berle (before becoming "Uncle Miltie"), Wendell Hall ("The Red-Headed Music-Maker"), singing duo Billy Jones and Ernie Hare, comedians Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa, entertainer Eddie Cantor, singer Sophie Tucker, comedian W. C. Fields, Dick Powell, black musician Fats Waller, singer/actress Deanna Durbin, Irvin S. Cobb, singer/actor Fred MacMurray, singer Bing Crosby, entertainer Al Jolson, singer Ruby Keeler, Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Haven MacQuarrie, comedian Joe Penner, Martha Raye, Tizzie Lish, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and comedians Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone and Andy Devine. Unlike all the other caricatures which are of real people, "Tizzie Fish" is a parody of Tizzie Lish, a wacky old lady known for her crackpot recipes, who was a character played by Bill Comstock on the radio show Al Pearce and His Gang, which in 1941 would do a radio version of A Wild Hare.
• In "The Case of the Stuttering Pig" (1937), a pig portrait of Oliver Hardy appears. The scene where Porky runs up and down the stairs is a shout to a similar scene from the Buster Keaton film The Camera Man. Lawyer Goodwill's transformation is also a homage to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".
• "Porky In The Northwoods" (1936); The general setting and plot is based on "Renfrew of the Royal Mounted", a popular series of books that was the basis for a series of films and a serialized kids' radio show. The name of the villain, Jean Baptiste, is a parody of explorer Jean Baptise Charbonneau, who was also known to be a fur trapper. The beaver, once its tail is freed from Jean Baptiste's trap, exclaims "I hope it won't be a permanent wave!", referring to then new "Permanent Wave" hair machines. Tashlin based the shadow shots in this (and other films of his, both animated and live-action) from UFA (Universum Film AG), a German film company responsible for films like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. The turtles seen marching during the climax are caricatured after actor George Arliss. Just near the end, the villain also quotes Joe Penner's "You Nasty Man!"
• "Porky's Road Race" (1937) features cameos of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Edna May Oliver, Greta Garbo, Charles Laughton (referencing his role in "Mutiny on the Bounty"), Boris Karloff (spoofing his role in Frankenstein), Stepin Fetchit, George Arliss, Leslie Howard, Freddie Bartholomew, John Barrymore and Elaine Barrie (riding in the "Caliban and Ariel", a reference to two characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest), and Clark Gable as a hitchhiker (referencing his film "It Happened One Night").
• The plot of "Porky's Double Trouble" is a burlesque of the John Ford film The Whole Town's Talking.
• "Toy Town Hall" (1936) references Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, Rubinoff, Rudy Vallée, and Bing Crosby, while the title is a spoof on the radio show Town Hall Tonight, featuring Fred Allen as a jack-in-the-box.
• Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid's design is obviously inspired by the minstrel makeup of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
  • In "Sinkin' in the Bathtub", Lady, Play Your Mandolin! and "You Don't Know What You're Doin!", Al Jolson's famous "Mammy!" scene is referenced. The short "I Love to Singa" is also a Woodland Creatures parody of The Jazz Singer, with the lead being named Owl Jolson, while Jack Bunny is a reference to Jack Benny of course.
• In "Bosko In Person", Bosko does impersonations of Jimmy Durante, Maurice Chevalier and bandleader Ted Lewis. Honey does an impersonation of Greta Garbo.
• In "Bosko's Picture Show", we get a newsreel called "Out-of-Tone News" (referencing Fox's Movietone News, a series of newsreels from the time), and then caricatures of Laurel and Hardy (renamed Haurel and Lardy) and appearances of the The Marx Brothers (in a 1890s melodrama spoof), and Adolf Hitler chasing Jimmy Durante with an axe.
• The name of the Bosko short "The Booze Hangs High" is a pun on the song "The Goose Hangs High". The short is also a burlesque of the now-lost film The Song of the Flame (1930), with the short using many of the same songs from the film.
• The recurring phrase "Hm, could be!", mostly uttered by Bugs Bunny, is cribbed from actor Artie Auerbach as Mr. Kitzel on the Al Pearce radio show.
• In She Was An Acrobats Daughter, there is a sight gag involving a flea named Oscar, which is a reference to a running gag on Eddie Cantor's radio show of the late 1930's. As a bonus, the flea is standing near a wallet with the initials J.W. on them, obviously referring to studio head Jack Warner.
• The title of the Daffy and Porky short Boobs in the Woods is taken after the fairy tale Babes in the Woods.
• Bugs Bunny's own This Means War! catchphrase is cribbed directly from Groucho Marx's phrase from Duck Soup.
• In 1942's The Hep Cat and the Private Snafu short "Booby Traps", we hear the line "Well, something new has been added!" This line originally comes from Jerry Colonna, one of Bob Hope's radio sidekicks. Other catchphrases of his ("Greetings, Gates! Let's operate!", "GRUESOME, isn't it?") were also commonly referenced. The Wacky Worm and Greetings Bait go further and even have a worm character based on Jerry. Other phrases of his like "Yehudi?" and "Don't work, do they?" were also referenced.
  • 1946's Daffy Doodles ends with an entire jury composed of Jerry Colonnas!
• Willoughby the dog from The Heckling Hare (1941) and Hugo the snowman from The Abominable Snow Rabbit (1961) are based directly on Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
• "X is der cwaziest peoples!", a catchphrase of comedian Lew Lehr (known for narrating animal-related stories for the Movietone newsreels) also popped up, most notably in the ending of Russian Rhapsody and Scaredy Cat.
• Pepe Le Pew himself is a spoof of the protagonist of the 1938 movie Algiers, Pepé le Moko, a French jewel thief portrayed by Charles Boyer. He sometimes qups "Come with me to the casbah", an (often misquoted) Boyer line.
  • Boyer's mannerisms would also be referenced in The Hep Cat.
• "Well now, I wouldn't say that." A line made famous by shorts like The Bashful Buzzard and Draftee Daffy the catchphrase of Richard Q. Peavey, a nebbishy druggist portrayed by Richard LeGrand on the long-running and then-extremely popular radio comedy (and later TV and feature film series), The Great Gildersleeve.
• Red Skelton, then a popular radio comedian, often had his "Junior/Mean Widdle Kid" character lines referenced, such as "He don't know me vewy well, do he?", "You bwoke my widdle arm!" and "I dood it!" (i.e. the ending of The Case of the Missing Hare).
• In the 40's, references to World War II were common, including the bombastic air raid drill slogan "TURN OUT THAT LIGHT!" (i.e. in Elmer's Pet Rabbit, A Tale of Two Kitties, An Itch In Time)
• Daffy Duck impersonates Danny Kaye for the bulk of Book Revue, which also features Frank Sinatra, Harry James, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and comedian Bob Burns. Books featured include Young Man With a Horn, Cherokee Strip, Saratoga Trunk, Little Red Riding Hood, The Petrified Forest, So Big (with Jimmy Durante gracing the cover) and Dante's Inferno as well as the Life and Judge magazines and the Looney Tunes comic book itself. Daffy also mentions a girl named "Cucaracha", who is "so round, so firm, so fully packed, so easy on the draw", a reference to the slogan for Lucky Strike at the time.
• Tex Avery's Hollywood Steps Out likewise is full of celebrity jokes, such as Bing Crosby being annoyed by a recurring jockey and a horse (a reference to his compulsive love of horse-racing, in spite of the fact that he had terrible luck on winning bets on them) and Cary Grant referencing three of his movies in a single line of syntax: "But if I ever told my favorite wife the awful truth, I'd land right on the front page."
  • Stars of the era featured include Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, Adolphe Menjou, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Harpo Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Ann Sheridan; Johnny Weissmuller, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, George Raft; Leopold Stokowski, Dorothy Lamour, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Sonja Henje, The Three Stooges, Oliver Hardy, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth; Kay Kyser, William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Wallace Beery, C. Aubrey Smith, Peter Lorre, Henry Fonda, Ned Sparks, Boris Karloff, Arthur Treacher, Buster Keaton, Mischa Auer, Jerry Colonna, Clark Gable and Groucho Marx. Kate Smith and Bette Davis were name-checked but did not appear on-screen (Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Shirley Temple were caricatured, but were not used). Sally Rand refused permission to use her name or her dance act, so a character called "Sally Strand" was featured instead. J. Edgar Hoover has a brief appearance.
  • The characters from Blondie have a table reserved, even Daisy the dog. Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) is dining with his girlfriend (Judy Garland) and asks his father Judge Hardy for some help to pay the bill.
• "Swooner Crooner" features caricatures of Crosby, Cab Calloway, Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante.
• "Henry!..."Coming, Mother!" (heard in shorts like Have You Got Any Castles? and Book Revue) is a reference to the radio show The Aldrich Family.
• In one short, where Yosemite Sam is chasing Bugs Bunny around a circus big top, Bugs slams a door in Sam's face, and Sam pounds on it and yells "open the door!"—upon which he turns and faces the audience to remark, "you notice that I didn't say 'Richard?'" This refers to a popular novelty song in the 1940s called "Open The Door, Richard".
• In The Daffy Doc, one of the things written on a sign Daffy holds up is "Silence is Foo!", a reference to the newspaper comic Smokey Stover.
  • Kitty Kornered also has a Smokey Stover reference by designing one of the cats after Spooky the Cat, a character from the comic.
• What's Up, Doc? has cameos of Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby as the unemployed artists.
• The title of the Bugs Bunny short "A Hare Grows in Manhattan" is a reference to the story A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
• The 1930 film Dawn Patrol served as the basis for the title of two shorts in the series, both called Dumb Patrol (one an early Bosko short from 1931, the other a later Bugs Bunny short from 1964).
• In the short Daffy Duck Slept Here, Daffy claims to be friends with a six-foot tall invisible kangaroo named "Hymie".
• WB animated shorts are notorious for including crew names on background objects such as billboards or boxes. "Friz" shows up a lot, an homage to director Friz Freleng.
  • The short Rocket Squad is a parody of 1950s-era procedurals (the title is a spoof of Racket Squad), Porky and Daffy play future cops in a parody of Dragnet, and a list of "known criminals" they use to find the bad guy includes many staffers working in the animation department at that time, including Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese and Eddie Selzer. A more complete listing of the various inside jokes can be found here.
• The end of Page Miss Glory has the eponymous girl quipping "Play, Don", a Jack Benny catch-phrase, referring to Don Bestor, who led the orchestra for Benny's show in 1934-35. The Cosmopolitan Hotel in it was a reference to William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures, which at the time had moved from MGM to Warner Bros. The studio was basically a vehicle for WRH to promote his mistress/common-law wife Marie Davies' film career. Page Miss Glory came from the title of the 1935 live-action movie starring Davies. The Cosmopolitan name lives on in the Hearst Corp.'s Cosmopolitan magazine.
• In Porky's Garden (1937), a little chicklet eats a bit of spinach and dons the appearance of Popeye in order to fight a giant rooster.
  • References to Popeye also appear in The Major Lied Till Dawn (1938) and Scrap Happy Daffy (1943). One of the private live-action Christmas gag reels made by the studio also included a reference to Fleischer Studios (in context, an animator is trying to "Escape to Fleischer", but ends up getting shot at by another employee).
• A Corny Concerto, besides being a parody of Fantasia, has Elmer Fudd make a reference to the 1935 song "The Music Goes Round and Round."
• Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is a wartime parody of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, notably the scene where So White stands over a well and says, "Some folks think I'm kinda dumb / but I know some day my prince will come."
  • When Prince Chawmin' arrives to revive her with a kiss at the climax, he declares, "I'll give her a kiss and it won't be a dud / I'll bring her to life with my special..." It then cuts to a black screen with the Prince's disembodied lips exclaiming, "Rosebud!"
  • So White sings, "I work all day, and I get de bluuuuuues in de night".
  • The evil Queen is seen eating a box of Chattanooga Chew-Chews, a reference to the classic big band tune Chattanooga Choo-Choo". She also has a bottle of "Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin."
• The Bear's Tale (1940) has the father bear mugging to the audience that he knows what's gonna happen next, because he already read the film's story last week in Reader's Digest.
• Malibu Beach Party has a boatload of references, including caricatures of Jack Benny, Mary Livingston, Bob Hope, Bette Davis (as Queen Elizabeth I), Andy Devine, Spencer Tracy (as Henry Stanley), Kay Kyser, Robert Donat (as Mr. Chips, a reference to his role in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips), Carole Lombard, Don Ameche, Fred MacMurray, Loretta Young, Robert Taylor, George Raft, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Cesar Romero, John Barrymore, Ned Sparks, Fanny Brice (as Baby Snooks), Charles Boyer, Adolphe Menjou, Claudette Colbert, James Cagney, Alice Faye, Phil Harris, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, and Cary Grant. The short also includes references to a few films that some of the actors starred in, including Scarface (1932), Professor Beware (1938), Stanley and Livingstone (1939) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939).
• References to the cartoons' own company are common too, including 1938's "Daffy Duck In Hollywood," where Daffy sky writes the words "Warner Bros." after snatching a cigarette from the movie director.
  Daffy: "Just giving my bosses a plug...I've got an option coming up!"
  • Lampshaded in a number of cartoons, most notably in Daffy Goes Hollywood in which he disguises himself as the Academy Award ("J.L. is waiting!") and in The Big Snooze which has Elmer tearing up his W-B cartoon contract after being bested by Bugs once too often.
• Daffy Duck in Hollywood features a parody of director Josef von Stenberg (as Director von Hamburger). The "film" Daffy makes features snippets from Gold is Where You Find It (1938).
• A later Bugs Bunny short has Bugs star in a TV show called You Beat Your Wife, a reference to Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life.
  • Well, you might not have caught it if you saw this short on The WB or on Cartoon Network (since 2001) as both edited this sequence out and every mention of the word making the dialogue awkward and choppy (especially on The WB which didn't edit it out as well as Cartoon Network did).
• The Honey-Mousers is a spoof of The Honeymooners, of course.
  • Similarly, the antagonists of "Half-Fare Hare" look and act like Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.
• The Mouse that Jack Built is a rodent version of The Jack Benny Program, right down to getting Jack Benny and the cast to voice the characters. In a live-action scene, Jack appears as himself!
• The title of the Bugs Bunny short Prince Violent (often altered to Prince Varmint) is a nod to the Hal Foster newspaper comic Prince Valiant.
• Hollywood Daffy (Freleng, 1946) has Daffy impersonating a studio director fooling the o-fay Joe Besser-like gate cop into thinking he'll make him a star. Daffy examines him and asks "What's Errol Flynn got that you haven't got?" before interjecting, "Don't answer that!" This refers to Flynn getting hit with (but eventually acquitted of) a statutory rape charge a couple of years prior to the cartoon's premiere.
• Goofy Groceries, besides the obvious reference cavalcade (including Jack Benny as... Jack Bunny), features a spoof of Superman, ironically just before another studio made their own animated adaptation of the character.
  • The Private Snafu short Snafuperman is a spoof of the Fleischer Superman shorts, right down to reusing the actual theme song (with permission from Paramount).
  • Super-Rabbit and Stupor Duck are also spoofs of Superman.
• The Great Piggy Bank Robbery has Dick Tracy being Daffy's favorite comic, and while reading it, he gleefully quips "I Love that Man!", a reference to the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show. Among the villains he meets during the climax are the Wolf Man, Neon Noodle (an ersatz of Frankenstein's Monster) and Bat-Man (as in, a walking baseball bat, but it's an obvious nod to the DC comic character). A gag from Tex Avery's MGM short Who Killed Who? is also referenced (which in turn was a reference to the ending of The Public Enemy (1931)), but put into a grimmer context, and the first part of Daffy's dream reuses the "Pin it on ya!" gag from an older Tex Avery short Thugs With Dirty Mugs. The scene where Duck Twacy announces to the criminals, "You're all under arrest!", was cribbed from a moment in RKO's Gunga Din when Sgt. Cutter (Cary Grant) does the same to a temple-full of Thugs. (As in, actual Thugs.)
• The Wabbit Who Came to Supper is a spoof of the 1939 play and 1942 film The Man Who Came To Dinner. As he showers and shaves, Bugs sings "Angel in Disguise", from the 1940 Warner Brothers film It All Came True (which, like The Man Who Came to Dinner, starred Ann Sheridan). When Elmer tries to coax Bugs into leaving, gently patting him on the head, which Bugs claims is terribly hurting him. Bugs references a running gag from the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly when he threatens to call Uncle Louie: "Operator, give me Walnut three-three-fifty… Ohhh, that you, Myrt? How's every little thing?" (By coincidence, Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd, also played "Doc Gamble" on the Fibber McGee show.)
  • Daffy Duck also has the Nazi officer call up Myrt in Daffy the Commando.
• Yankee Doodle Daffy has Daffy acting as a talent agent for the kid duck "Sleepy LaGoon", which is a reference to the song "(By the) Sleepy Lagoon", a piece of light orchestral music written in 1930 by Eric Coates, a version by Harry James topping the charts in 1942. Daffy also does a Carmen Miranda impression.
• Daffy Duck's "Hoo-Hoo!" is an exaggeration of the catchphrase of comedian Hugh Herbert.
• References to The Three Stooges are in The Girl at the Ironing Board, Buddy's Lost World, Porky in Wackyland (as in Dough for the Do-Do), Wholly Smoke and Hollywood Steps Out.
• Kitty Kornered has the cats create a fake alien invasion radio announcement in the vein of the infamous Orson Welles The War of the Worlds broadcast. Later, they assume the appearances of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders cavalry (in reference to the then-popular film Arsenic and Old Lace) when they charge up a staircase to attack Porky.
• Bunny and Claude are parodies of the infamous crime duo Bonny and Clyde as well as the 1967 film based on them.
• Babbitt and Catsello from A Tale of Two Kitties are caricatures of Abbott and Costello.
• Beaky Buzzard's voice was modeled after ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's character Mortimer Snerd.
• Casper Caveman from Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur is yet another parody of Jack Benny, although this time is less notorious, its most notorious nod being at the end when he says "Goodnight, folks".
• Little Hiawatha from Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt is a caricature of Disney animator Ward Kimball, and it also doubles as a reference to Disney previously doing an adaptation of the Hiawatha story in their Silly Symphonies series.
• Porky Pig and his early batch of friends, including Beans the Cat and others, were inspired in part by the Our Gang series of films.
• "Was this/that trip really necessary?" a slogan used to encourage people not to take unnecessary trips to free up gas and rubber for the war effort and to free up space on trains to ferry troops to their duty locations, was often heard in these films. It even popped up in some postwar shorts, such as Baseball Bugs.
• "It's a possibility!" (From the ending of Tortoise Beats Hare and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, a reference to Artie Auerbach's catchphrase as Mr. Kitzle during Al Pearce's radio shows)
• The traveling salesman character in Jungle Jitters (1938) is modeled after radio's "Elmer Blurt", played by comedian Al Pearce. His weekly catch phrase was, "Nobody home, I hope - I hope - I hope!" The cannibal queen is based on the character Tizzie Lish, played by Bill Comstock, from the same program. Her regular greeting was, "Hello, folksies!"
• "That ain't the way I heard it!" (Tortoise Wins by a Hare, a reference to "The Old Timer" character from the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly)
• "'T ain't funny, McGee!" (Daffy Duck and Egghead a reference to the character Molly, addressing McGee in Fibber McGee and Molly)
• "Don't you believe it!" (In Bacall to Arms a reference to a 1947 similarly titled radio show in which popular legends, myths or old wives' tales were debunked with this quote.)
• "Aha! Something new has been added!" and "So round, so firm, so fully-packed. So free and easy on the draw." (The Hep Cat, Plane Daffy, a reference to Lucky Strike cigarettes)
• "Beeeeeeyoooooooh!" (Hare Ribbin, a reference to a commercial for Lifebuoy soap against B.O. (body odor))
• "I'm only tree-and-a-half years old!" - Baby Bottleneck and Russian Rhapsody, quoted from a character named Martha (Billy Gray) on the Abbott and Costello radio show.
• "Ah say! I'm from the South, son!", "That's a joke, son!", "Pay attention now, boy!" - Kenny Delmar as Senator Claghorn in The Fred Allen Show. Foghorn Leghorn was entirely based on this radio personality.
• Racketeer Rabbit features caricatures of Edward G. Robinson and Peter Lorre. When Rocky points a gun at Bugs to get him to confess and Bugs begins babbling in the style of the famous Lucky Strike tobacco auctioneer (L.A. "Speed" Riggs) heard on radio's Your Hit Parade and The Jack Benny Program at the time (his catchphrase being "Sold American!", which was referenced in other Looney Tunes shorts). When Bugs poses as Mugsy, he also imitates a mannerism of George Raft when he's flipping a coin.
• In Africa Squeaks (1940), the gorilla is a rather un-PC caricature of heavyweight boxing contender Tony Galento, and features his catchphrase "I'll moida da bum! I'll moida 'im!" Spencer Tracy, who portrayed Stanley in Stanley & Livingstone, and Kay Kyser are also caricatured.
• At the end of Baby Bottleneck, the mother Gorilla picks up the phone and cities "Mr. Anthony, I have a problem!" This refers to John J. Anthony, who presented the daily radio advice program The Goodwill Hour.
• In Daffy Duck Slept Here, when Daffy tricks a half asleep Porky into stepping out a window (thinking he's boarding a train), Daffy repeats the famous Mel Blanc joke from the radio version of The Jack Benny Program, with Daffy announcing "Train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc—amonga!"
• Red's voice in Little Red Riding Rabbit is inspired by Cass Daley, a comic actress from screen and radio, and her appearance is that of a stereotypical bobbysoxer.
• In The Stupor Salesman, Daffy quips "Ah, there's good news tonight!", a reference the the catchphrase of Gabriel Heatter. The quote was also used in The Hole Idea, albeit tweaked: "There's baaaaad news tonight..."
• In The Film Fan (1939), Porky is watching a movie that is a parody of The Lone Ranger, and the ranger spoofs his famous catchphrase with "Hi ho...you know!" before riding off.
• In Hyde and Hare (1955), when Bugs sits down to play the piano, he remarks "I wish my brother George was here.", a reference to pianist/showman Liberace.
• In the original version of A Wild Hare during Bugs' game of "Guess Who?" with Elmer, Elmer's second guess was "Carole Lombard." Carole Lombard was a blonde, comic actress of the 1930s and 1940s who was married to Clark Gable and died in a plane crash in 1942. For the 1944 re-release of this short, "Carole Lombard" was replaced with "Barbara Stanwyck."
• In Acrobatty Bunny, when Bugs looks inside a lion's mouth, he yells "Pinocchio!", referencing the scene where Pinocchio is inside the belly of the whale.
• In The Bashful Buzzard, one of the buzzards drags a parade of elephants through the air, and the runt at the end is holding a flag saying "I am NOT Dumbo!"
• Boston Quackie is a parody of Boston Blackie.
• Porky's Snooze Reel features a caricature of Xavier Cugat as a so-called Tax Expert in the newsreel Porky narrates.
• Banty Raids ends up with the beatnik bantam being tricked into marrying Foghorn Leghorn forced into a bridal outfit. When Foghorn protests "But I'm a rooster!", the bantam replies "We can't all be perfect".
• Little Blabbermouse and Shop, Look, and Listen feature a character who is a parody of W.C. Fields, who is pestered by the Little Blabbermouse.
• In Dog Gone People, Rupert watches a TV show called Plassie.
• In Porky's Hero Agency, Porky dreams that he's the Greek hero "Porkykarkus", the name being a reference to Parkyakarcas, the stage persona of comedian Harry Einstein. The Gorgon is a parody of the character Lizzie Tish from radio's Al Pearce and His Gang, and among her victims are expies of The Three Stooges. When going to confront the Gorgon, Porky comments "I hope she's t'home, I hope, I hope, I hope", which was the catchphrase of another Al Pearce character, Elmer Blurt. While using the anti-stone antidote on various statues, Porky fits the Venus de Milo statue with Popeye arms, complete with a snippet of his theme playing; Porky also uses it on a temple, then on a smaller one labeled "Shirley".
• Attack of the Drones is chock-full of references to the Star Wars movies. In addition, near the beginning of the short it's shown that Zoidberg, the Great Gazoo, and a Klingon are members of the council that Daffy is a part of.
• The Fair-Haired Hare: The ending gag has Yosemite Sam's house blown sky high with him still in it. He exclaims, "Well whaddya know, I got me a cabin in the sky!" Cabin in the Sky was a 1943 film based on a Broadway musical.
• Person to Bunny had a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Edward S. Murrow, called Edward R. Burrows.
• Bugs' famous carrot-chewing stance was initially a reference to Clark Gable eating a carrot in the same fashion in It Happened One Night.

---