Continuity Nod / The Avengers (2012)

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• Black Widow mentions to Coulson that Stark doesn't trust her after finding out she's a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in Iron Man 2.
• We get clips from previous films either as Flash Back or as raw footage, especially when it comes to Captain America.
• Pepper Potts' previous meetings with Coulson are referenced.
• When inspecting the hologram of the Tesseract at Stark Tower, Tony gets a look on his face that says: "Wait a minute, I know this! This cube was in my father's journal..."
• Banner mentions nearly destroying Harlem, referencing the Hulk's fight against the Abomination at the end of The Incredible Hulk.
• Banner also mentions that at one point he tried to kill himself, but the "other guy" spat out the bullet. This was shown in the alternative opening to The Incredible Hulk.
• Banner's remark about putting him in a pressurized tube underwater is the same quip he made to Betty about not taking the subway in The Incredible Hulk.
• Banner's ability to just shake off Stark zapping him unexpectedly is reminiscent of an early scene from The Incredible Hulk, in which his trainer in breathing techniques slapped him mid-conversation to challenge him to keep his heart rate under control.
• Iron Man refers to the new suit as Mark VII, indicating past armors. He also uses the lasers from Iron Man 2, and they're still apparently one-offs until he upgrades to the Mark VII suit, which has them apparently running off the suit's own power (JARVIS tells him they'll lose power before cutting through a Leviathan's armor).
• Practically every plot element of Thor was mentioned throughout the movie.
• Tony still doesn't like to be handed things.
• Tony mentions that his father knew Captain America. Who found the Tesseract while searching for the Captain?
• Insulting Thor to his back is still not a good idea.
• Black Widow makes an allusion to Tony's talk with General Ross in The Incredible Hulk.
• Jane Foster is explained as being transferred to a distant place to protect her from Loki. Her actress was very pregnant at the time of production.
• The gun Coulson uses on Loki was reverse-engineered from the Destroyer in Thor.
• The Hulk can't lift Mjölnir because he isn't worthy.
• Hulk chasing Natasha through the helicarrier is framed similar to Obadiah Stane chasing Pepper through the Stark Industries building.
• Captain America, when first meeting Loki in Germany, notes that the last time he went to that location, he also had to deal with someone who believed he was higher than everyone else, referring to either Red Skull or Hitler.
• Cap says that Loki's scepter may run on magic, but it looks like HYDRA technology. Thor stated the reason in his own movie: Asgardian technology is so far advanced beyond current human tech that it is indistinguishable from magic to Midgardians.
  • Later films reveal that Cap was even more correct than Thor realized: the technologies seem similar because both HYDRA weaponry from Steve's era and Loki's scepter are powered by Infinity Stones.
• Cap destroyed a punching bag when Fury walked in at the end of his movie. When Fury walks in on him in this movie, he's working a punching bag and knocks it off its chain, though he doesn't destroy it. When he's walking out, he picks up a punching bag from a row of them he has on the floor.
• Tony's line about bringing "the party to you" is a callback to a line Natasha says to Tony in Iron Man 2 when the Hammer drones attack.
• Loki uses it as a taunt when he traps Thor with an illusion trick.
  Loki: Are you ever not going to fall for that?
• The conversation Thor and Loki have just before trading blows in the climax mirrors the one Odin and Laufey had after Thor's destruction of Jotunheim.
• A very subtle one, but a lot of Tony's dialogue while mourning over Phil Coulson reflects Yinsen's death in the first Iron Man movie.
• The beam of light generated by Selvig's portal device resembles the beam created by both the Bifrost in Thor and the overloading Arc Reactor in Iron Man. The generator itself incorporated design elements from both the Bifrost (where the beam emerges) and the Arc Reactor (the coil surrounding the iridium).
• Colonel Fury makes a note of how wars are won by soldiers, not weapons, to the council. Colonel Philips makes a similar statement (Quoting Patton) in Captain America.
• When Tony is encouraging Bruce to view The Hulk not as a curse, but as a gift, he references the initial chest injury he suffered in the first Iron Man movie. He also mentions the levels of gamma radiation Banner was exposed to should well have killed him, but he survived for a reason. This is also a Call-Back to how Tony viewed his own survival of the attack in Afghanistan.

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