Shout Out / Schlock Mercenary

• Both Pronto and Pi were named after the screen names for two regulars on the series forum. Shep's visor resembles Geordi's from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• And the general uniforms for the Mallcop Command arc are effectively Next Generation command uniforms with the colors reversed... or, to be more accurate, early Deep Space Nine or Voyager uniforms.
• Given his status as the Butt-Monkey, Der Trihs' first name (John) may be one of these, too.
• One of Kevyn's early attempts at a time machine seems to be from 1960.
• If you're in a decently equipped lab, you might see Xenomorph-in-a-Tube. As well as an adult Xenomorph here
• "What's a He-man nemesis?"
• This. (With a Take That! in the commentary beneath.)
  • And the events leading up to that strip involved a salute to David Drake's Hammer's Slammers: the mercenary unit Pranger's Bangers, led by Colonel Drake Pranger, whose head, Word of God pointed out, is somewhat hammer-shaped.
• There's a city on Celeschul called San Asimov. And a Port Weber is briefly mentioned.
• LOTA. "I don't think we'd like it when it's angry." Also, Lota is too large for your puny pronouns.
• "What does a 21st Century anime have to do with whitening wool?"
• LOTA and the Burana-Bots performing the opening number from Aperture Science: The Musical by Coulton, Scalzi, and Wheaton
• Retired Rear Admiral Mikhail von Mauser. Stealthy until Thurl refers to him as "Mikki."
• In this strip, Tailor says 'We're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike!', a reference to either Zork or Colossal Cave
• In this strip, Schlock gets put back together by jumping into a pod and reassembling. Once he gets out of the pod, he says "Whoa! I know kung fu," a reference to Neo in The Matrix.
  • Later an ex-Gav makes a point of saying he didn't say "I know kung-fu!" upon emerging from the Transmogrifier.
• Here is a comparison between uplifted Apes and Dwarves
• Three words: The Lion King:
  Commentary: The second panel's resemblance to the Lion King "Pride Rock" tableau is illustrative of a little known derivation of Eddington's Law (wherein an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters eventually bash out the script for Hamlet) in which in an infinite universe, with an infinite number of points of view upon an infinite number of vistas, eventually you'll recreate all the great movie posters of the 20th century.
  
  The above can be considered a near miss, due to the absence of giraffes. Keep trying, universe! You're almost there!
• Although it was subtle enough to require Word of God confirmation, "key lime pie" is a reference to the second◊ Erfworld strip.
• Gavcorps gets one to Calvin and Hobbes here
  • A lampshaded example here:
    Uptrobar: A pair of ancient human philosophers pithily described this not-uncommon circumstance... Asimov said that scientific progress is less "Eureka" and more "That's funny", and Hobbes said "Scientific progress goes 'boink.'"
    Lefevre (facepalming): Watterson. That was Watterson.
• Bob the Angry Flower — don't make it angry!
• One arc is named Command & Conquer.
• Author notes reference a certain, popular "Punch and Judy" TV show.
• Their exit is a blue police box that looks bigger on the inside.
  • Petey seems to like this one - he uses a similar box as a breaching/boarding pod later on.
• The Whiteboard:
  • Comic artist "Doc" Nickel's website "Doc's Machine" gets a nod, as the name of the boat used for hunting a giant shark.
  • The fictional "Doc" appears as a background character on one of Petey's floating cities, seen in the window in the second frame of the strip.
• The imaginary TV in "The Sharp End Of The Stick" has "THX1138" printed on the back.
• Pi uses non-dairy creamer for explosives training. A couple months after Florence did the same thing in Freefall.
• In "Delegates and Delegation", using an orbital array of solar mirrors as a superweapon is referred to as "cool to read about".
• Star Wars: Combining a Brick Joke out of the name of the Kessler Array, with Admiral Chu issuing orders and emphasizing them by stating he wouldn't like to start the next millennium making Kessler runs.
• The ship chartered by the Toughs for their salvage run to Ystre is a model called "Starcraft Ghost X360".
• "Ancient Earth documentaries suggest that talking during this sort of show is required."
• One of the "Tarbots" is named Tarvalon, and it is mentioned that writing the history of the universe would be a good task for Robert Jordan.
• When enough Gavs get tired of being a demographic of identical clones, they set up the Diversity Engineering Institute. No-one else in the 31st century has a clue how hilarious the initials DEI are.
• During the "Glamour Assault" arc, the "pre-programmed" hairstyles in Ellen's new hair includes one called "The Cinnamon Princess".
• The secondhand fabber the Toughs get during the Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance arc has a defect that causes everything it produces to additionally be capable of making toast. Yes, that includes a winged toaster.
• A building in Parnassus Dom is named "Barad-Mellon," which is Sindarin for "Friend-Tower."
• Kevyn briefly suggests "umbreon" as a potential name for newly discovered dark matter proton-analog. They decide to go with "umbrion" instead.
• Clippy the Paperclip turns out to have returned in spirit (in the form of a VR tentacle) a thousand years hence:
  Tentacle: It looks like you're trying to prevent the destruction of all baryonic life. Would you like...
  Ennesby: Nope. I've got this.
• Schlock quotes Han Solo's infamous attempt to talk down Imperials investigating their shoot-out on Leia's detention level in an effort to fool the Pa'anuri. It works just about as well as Han's.
• Tagon channels Ben Kenobi with another Star Wars reference:
  It's a large body orbiting a red dwarf star, which is in turn orbiting the burnt-out white dwarf at the center of this system... I thought that a thing orbiting a thing orbiting a star was called a moon, but in this case that's no moon.
  It's a space station.
• The RPG mentions an Esspererin habitat cluster called "Lonesome, Lost Gilligan" that suffered a memetic infection of 20th century Earth TV. During the final battle we see one of their palm tree-ships crewed by a cyborg bug Skipper and a cowboy.
• Jaws: We're gonna need a bigger boat. (As well as we're gonna need bigger evidence bags.)
• This panel is also a near-duplicate for the cover of the novel.
• Arguably the entire Tongassus plot counts as a shout-out to Jaws, hitting many of the same story beats ^note The authorities don't want to believe there is a shark attacking swimmers because it will hurt tourism; the first shark caught is not the one that attacked the first victim; a swimmer looks like they're being attacked, only to be a friend pranking them; etc..
• Gorilla Captain Kerchak is named for Tarzan's nemesis.
• Carbosilicate amorphs apparently do dream of electric sheep.
• Sorlie brings the same message as the alien traffic cop from Good Omens.
• Here Elf wields the Cluehammer 40,000; the reference is also lampshaded in the footnote.
• Schlock uses his plasma cannon to go rocketing through the air, and winds up on the receiving end of a rather uncomplimentary shout-out to the opening of The Adventures of Superman:
  "Look! Up in the sky!"
  "It's a turd!"
  "On a flame!"
  "Yeah... that's exactly what it is.
• As per this strip, there is canonically a space station named Babylon 5 in Sol system. It houses a forest preserve that is one of the last places in Sol system to use centrigal gravity, named "The Spinning Gardens of Babylon Five". This also doubles as a historical reference to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
• And here we have a shout out to ''Monty Python":
  "I feel fine. I want to go for a walk.
• Ennesby makes a Firefly reference when he and Schlock are walked into an ambush: "It isn't a surprising-yet-inevitable betrayal if I've been expecting it."
• An early strip duplicates an exchange between Zaphod and Marvin in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe;
  Tagon: Hey, Ennesby, how are you doing?
  Ennesby: Badly, I suspect.
• Here, Kevyn appears to be building a model of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
• Knowing Howard Taylor's penchant for obscure references, Schlock asking "Where's the rest of me?" just might allude to Ronald Reagan's famous line in Kings Row.

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