Referenced By / Street Fighter

"Man, this is worse than the time my car was destroyed!"

Advertising

• This Caesars Palace commercial ends with the narration, "What you call the greatest day of your life, we call 'Tuesday'".
• The Red Bull website posted a 2016 blog entry about how Street Fighter has become a global phenomenon, listing down all the references it has gotten in popular culture.

Animated Films

• In Shrek 2 in 2004, when Fiona in ogre form faces off against the villagers with pitchforks after her, she also does Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick and Ryu/Ken's Shoryuken^note in contrast to her Matrix Parody sequences in the first film in human form.
• In the first Wreck-It Ralph film in 2012, there are various cameos from Street Fighter II characters in the film^note such as M. Bison and Zangief in the villains support group meeting, Ryu and Ken talking in-game on an SFII cabinet, Chun-Li and Cammy in the background of Game Central Station, the group of E. Honda, Dhalsim, Guile, and Sagat as cartoon portraits hung at Tapper's bar, Ryu (again) saying "Shoryuken! (Sure you can!)" after Ralph claimed Felix will cover everyone's tab at Tapper's bar, and Blanka fighting Ralph in SFII during the film's end credits.
  • In the sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018, Chun-Li and Zangief make a cameo of them attending a book club together. Sonic is in the club too, by the way.

Anime & Manga

• In YuYu Hakusho, the name of Genkai's school is "Reikou Hadouken/Hadōken". And yes, her martial arts school does involve shooting a variety of Kamehame Hadoken at their enemies.
  • Also, a character in the show is named Gouki (literally "Great Oni/Ogre") as well, and he's an ogre-like individual posing as a human^note (while Street Fighter's Gouki/Akuma is a human martial artist who has achieved ogre-like strength and power by tapping into the Satsui no Hadou).
  • Several Street Fighter characters^note (notably Dhalsim, E. Honda, Zangief with a chest scar instead of thick chest hair, and a middle-aged Ryu as well as harder-to-recognize cameos from Eagle, Retsu, and the back of Birdie's mohawked head for the truly "eagle-eyed" Street Fighter super fans) can be seen after the bickering pair of Yusuke and Kuwabara first arrive at Genkai's temple.
• At one point during the Training Montage in Episode 4 (2012) of Symphogear, Genjuro Kazanari ends up cosplaying as Akuma/Gouki while doing Karate katas with Hibiki Tachibana dressed as Makoto from Third Strike.
• In Episode 8 (2013) of the first season of the anime My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected, Hikigaya Hachiman’s falling over and self-echo◊ is a parody of the knock-out effect from Street Fighter II onwards.
• In Episode 13 (2013) of Genshiken Nidaime, "Waiting in the Club Room", although the Attack on Titan reference on Manabu Kuchiki's part was more prominent in this scene, how Susanna "Sue" Hopkins stops him with a Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting combo by Chun-Li that ends with Lightning Kicks and the Tensho Kyaku is also of note.
• In Episode 8 (2015) of Go! Princess Pretty Cure, one of Cure Twinkle's attacks resembles the Spinning Bird Kick.
• In Episode 1 (2017) of Tsugumomo, Kiriha talks back to the game she was playing, complaining about someone crouching all the time and telling whoever told her to go back to her country that he himself should take his own advice.^note She most likely lost to the Street Fighter game character Guile, resulting in him telling her to “Return to her country” (variations exist depending on the game). “Go home and be a family man!” is the English version of Guile’s Japanese line, "Kuni e kaerunda na, omae ni mo kazoku wa irundarou...?" (literally “(You) should return to (your) country. You, too, have a family, right...?” from the Street Fighter II game).
  • In Episode 7 (2020) of Tsugu Tsugumomo (Season 2), the arcade cabinets show the Steteko Fighter title screen◊. There's also a parody of the K.O. effect◊ from Street Fighter^note (i.e., the slow-motion fall and exaggerated echoing cry) featured in said game.
• In Episode 9 (2019) of the The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious anime, Lawyer-Friendly Cameos of Akuma/Gouki◊ and E. Honda◊ appear.
• In Episode 9 (2020) of Season 2 of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Kaguya is affected by the stun/dizzy effect◊ that originally appeared in the game Street Fighter II. The scene also features life bars and the user interface of SFII as well.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: In Season 5 episode 26's title card, Big M. and Little M. spray a robot in Guile's clothing with water guns.

Comic Books

• Deadpool: While getting "therapy" from Doctor Bong in issue #27 for a post-world-saving mental breakdown, Doctor Bong claims Deadpool's hallucinations can be resolved through the clarity Deadpool achieves in physical combat. Deadpool repeatedly tries to get Wolverine to "snikt" him with his claws. When Wolverine won't budge, Deadpool picks a new way to provoke him: Shoryukening Kitty Pryde. That works.
• In Adventures of Supergirl: Back in high school, Supergirl used to play an arcade game called Street Kombat Six.

Fan Works

• Oversaturated World: Oversaturation: Bland-Name Product such that "Street Fighter" = "Alley Brawler" and "M. Bison" = "F. Buncher", leads to a reference with Bison's memetic "OF COURSE!" from the movie for a text notification tone:
  "OF COURSE!"
  Everyone jumped at the sudden outburst. Rainbow Dash then laughed. "Really? F. Buncher from the Alley Brawler movie?"

Films — Live-Action

• In the 1993 Hong Kong film City Hunter starring Jackie Chan as Ryo Saeba from the source material, Ryo gets knocked into an arcade machine and begins seeing himself as various Street Fighter II characters (up to and including Chun-Li), and his opponent as Ken.
• In the 2017 version of It, Pennywise says, "Play a game with me, would'ya? I want Street Fighter!"
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle: Spencer plays Street Fighter V on a PlayStation 4.
• Ready Player One:
  • Many Street Fighter characters can be seen everywhere in the movie, such as Ryu walking between the vehicles before the start of the race, and Blanka dancing with Chun-Li at the Distracted Globe. Chun-Li and E. Honda are also fighting for the Artifact early in the story. They later take part in the final battle on Planet Doom.
  • Parzival does an absolutely epic HADOUKEN! to Sorrento's avatar in the final confrontation. Also, the Groin Attack after that is executed in a manner very similar to Guile's Flash Kick.
• In Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, there's a scene where toys from the Street Fighter IV incarnations of Ryu and Ken come to life and battle each other as the two kids watch. They use sound effects from Street Fighter II instead though.
• Captain Marvel: One of Carol Danvers' memories is her playing Street Fighter II in Pancho's Beer.^note This is an error, as Carol was taken from Earth in 1989, while Street Fighter II came out in 1991.
• SHAZAM! (2019):
  • Eugene shouts out "Hadouken!" when he zaps one of the Seven Deadly Sins with his lightning ability.
  • One of the nicknames Freddy has for Billy's transformed state is "the Red Cyclone" (Zangief's official nickname).

Live-Action TV

• In Season 5, Episode 15 (1998) of Sister, Sister, Tamera mentions she's been on the Softball Team but quit to be a Cheerleader then she quit being a Cheerleader so that she could spend more time breaking her Street Fighter III record.
• In Season 2, Episode 19 (2013) of Revenge (2011), "Identity", Nolan Ross boasts, "Truth be told, he threw me a token and jumped me in front of Street Fighter and I turned into Bruce frickin' Lee!"
• In Season 4, Episode 7 (2014) of Workaholics, "We Be Clownin'", while playing swimming pool basketball, Blake Henderson shouts, "Sonic Boom!" and hurls the ball like Guile's projectile move as he himself dives into the pool.
• In Season 1, Episode 13 (2015) of Fresh Off the Boat, "So Chineez", Eddie Huang asks his mother Jessica, "Why are you dressed like Chun-Li from Street Fighter?" after seeing her don hair ribbons and a Qipao.
• In Season 3, Episode 2 (2016) of Black Mirror, "Playtest", Sonja playfully flirts with Cooper in her apartment regarding his surprise at her game collection, with her saying, "A girl never beat you at Street Fighter?"

Music

• Hi-C's "Swing'n" (1993) and DJ Qbert's "Track 10" (1994) sampled Street Fighter II, and the Street Fighter film soundtrack (1994) which is the first major film soundtrack to consist almost entirely of Hip-Hop music.
  • According to DJ Qbert, "I think hip-hop is a cool thing, I think Street Fighter is a cool thing".
  • According to Vice magazine, "Street Fighter's mixture of competition, bravado, and individualism easily translate into the trials and travails of a rapper."
• Grime MCs such as Dizzee Rascal were sampling Street Fighter II in 2002, and Street Fighter II has been sampled "by almost every Grime MC".
  • Grime DJ Logan Sama says, "Street Fighter is just a huge cultural thing that everyone experienced growing up [with] such a huge impact that it has just stayed in everyone's consciousness."
  • According to Jake Hawkes of Soapbox, "Grime was built around lyrical clashes [and] the 1v1 setup of these clashes was easily equated with Street Fighter's 1-on-1 battles."
  • The game became an integral part of BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Charlie Sloth's "Fire in the Booth" freestyle segments, using samples such as "Hadouken", "Shoryuken", and the "Perfect" announcer sound.
• Arctic Monkeys: The original single release of "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" includes a mostly-instrumental (save for a spoken intro) B-side called "Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick".
• Street Fighter II sound effects and music have basically been sampled and referenced in hip-hop music by the likes of The Lady of Rage, Nicki Minaj, Lupe Fiasco, Dizzee Rascal, Lil B, Sean Price, and Madlib.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Brad Williams mentions in his stand-up routine a time when he had to defend his mother from someone being rude to her in the middle of traffic, so he had to come out of the car and then pretend to do the "Hadouken" to scare the person off.

Sports

• Street Fighter actually influenced Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) combat sports. During the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) MMA event in 1993, while Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II were best sellers, both were mentioned by UFC promoters when advertising UFC 1 as a real-life fighting video game tournament.
  • There was a trend in 2013 where people posed pictures of themselves throwing a Hadouken. MMA fighter Shane Campbell even threw a Hadouken at his hapless opponent in the ring, before pummeling him.
• One of the Signature Moves of avid gamer and Occidental Otaku Kenny Omega is the Hadouken (or at least Ryu's Hadouken Stance with no fireball).
  • He is also known for doing Zangief's Final Atomic Buster on a blow-up doll (it's a bit harder to do on a real person) live in a wrestling ring.
  • He also has a ripcord flying knee move he has named the "V-Trigger".
  • Here's him playing as Cody Travers (not that Cody) of Final Fight and Street Fighter Alpha 3 fame during Cody's 2018 gameplay trailer for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition.
  • Here's him referencing Akuma/Gouki as one of his special entrances in the All Elite Wrestling Fyter Fest 2019 event. He'd later do the Hadouken together with The Young Bucks in the ring.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: One collectible poster is depicted with the title of 'Legendary Fighter'; the lead, Bruce M. Bee, is clearly a dead ringer for Ryu.
• Cuphead: Ribby and Croaks' attacks are patterned off those of Ryu and Ken.
• The first stage of Dark Judgement has players fighting enemies in a military camp, one of them being a female mook in fatigues labelled "Cammy" in-game.
• One of the characters in Final Fantasy VI is a monk named Sabin, whose special moves are performed by inputting a sequence of buttons. The Aura Cannon is done by doing a quarter circle and then pressing A.
• Gone Home:
  "I had no idea how I would ever, like, have an excuse to talk to her... until I noticed that she and her friends hang out and play Street Fighter at the 7-11 every day after school".
• When Kirby copies the fighter ability, inputting the Hadouken command has him shoot a ball of energy.
• The arcade in Later Alligator has a Street Kiter II cabinet.
• Jean of Lunar: Eternal Blue has a fist-driven ki attack which Working Designs localized as "Haduken". This was changed to "Blue Dragon Palm" in the later remake.
• Chun-Li makes a cameo as a news reporter in the intro of Mega Man 9.
• The Mega Man X games featured Street Fighter Easter Eggs. X could get the Hadouken (X1) and Shoryuken (X2) from a gi-clad Dr. Light by performing certain feats. These move were executed the same as in their game of origin (with Fire substituting for Punch), and could kill anything in one hit. X had to be at full power to use them.
  • Then there's Magma Dragoon, who wears humongous prayer beads around his neck, has a "tien" symbol on his body, can perform the Hadouken, Shoryuken, and Tenma Kuujin Kyaku, and did some pretty questionable things just to fight X. Why hello there, Akuma.
    • He can also fire his projectiles both high and low, not unlike Sagat.
  • The Ultimate Armor in X4, X5, and X6 has the Psycho Crusher as its Giga Attack.
  • The Gaea Armor's Giga Attack in X5 is pretty much Chun-Li's Kikoushou Super Art.
  • In X8, Burn Rooster's Enkou Kyaku also mimics Akuma's Tenma Kuujin Kyaku, whereas Avalanche Yeti can unleash a Shoryuken after burrowing in the snow. In the same game, equipping the K-Knuckle turns Zero's (or Layer's) Enkoujin and Hyouryuushou (techniques gained from the aforementioned bosses) into these same moves (albeit with the respective bosses' elemental affinities), and additionally replaces Rasetsusen (obtained from Dark Mantis) with Senpuu Kyaku, a stationary version of the Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku. X can also perform the Shoryuken if he has the Ultimate Armor equipped.
• Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U: Ryu's gimmick—a pressure-dependant light/heavy attack mechanic—is a reference to the first Street Fighter I arcade cabinets, which had tunable-by-pressure kick/punch buttons.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: Shanty was updated with a palette swap based on Kimberly around the time the latter was revealed for Street Fighter 6.
• Toonstruck: Fingers mentions "Sweetfighter" is one of the most popular Cutopian games.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: Tsutsuji and Akamatsu play a fighting game similar to Street Fighter with Etra resembling Chun-Li in the game.

Web Comics

• In 8-Bit Theater, one of Black Mage's most powerful spells is the Hadouken. Variants include the Fighterdouken, where he instead uses his companion Fighter as his ammunition.
• Bob the Angry Flower: There is one comic strip where Bob goes to a cinema to watch the Street Fighter film.
• In Knights of Buena Vista, The Real Man player Mary mentions that her characters don't need Hadoukens to knock a monster on its butt.

Web Video

• The Angry Video Game Nerd:
  • In one episode, the Nerd reviewed Street Fighter 2010 for the NES, and to a lesser extent, Fighting Street for the TurboGrafx-CD and Street Fighter: The Movie for the Sega Saturn.
  • In his review of the Amiga CD32, the first game the Nerd reviewed was Dangerous Streets, which he compared unfavorably to Street Fighter.
  • In his review of the 3DO, the Nerd reviewed Super Street Fighter II Turbo, pointing out that the ideal way is to play the game is with six buttons, so he used the ProPad controller by STD Entertainment to play it. Unfortunately, he found out that the X button pauses the game, and since it can't be changed in the options menu, it results in the game accidentally being paused at inopportune moments.
  • In his review of the Commodore 64, the Nerd reviewed the titular console's ports of Street Fighter I and II. He called the latter game Street Fighter II: The Shit Edition: Turdo, and was subsequently baffled as to why they even made a Commodore 64 version of the game in the first place, since it was such an old system even at the time. He also pointed out the box's Very False Advertising of using screenshots from the arcade version of the game that the Commodore 64 obviously couldn't display.

Western Animation

• In Episode 7 (1999) of Beast Machines, "Proven Ground", a robotic version of the Street Fighter arcade game (with sampled SFII sound effects) is being played by Rattrap.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In "Bato of the Water Tribe" (2005) and "Sozin's Comet" (2008), June wrestles with a man whose design is based off that of Ryu.
• A Cutaway Gag in a 2011 episode of Family Guy shows Peter fighting his clothes launderer as a fight from Street Fighter II. The fight is held in E. Honda's stage (with the in-game music), Peter fights like Ryu, and the launderer fights like E. Honda.
• In Season 2, Episode 12 (2012) of The Amazing World of Gumball, "The Words", Darwin spams Gumball with fireballs a la Street Fighter until Gumball is kayoed complete with slow-motion fall and echoing scream. They are also rendered in pixel graphics.^note Gumball then gets his revenge on Darwin by doing a complicated super move composed of Guile's Flash Kicks, Liu Kang's Bicycle Kick, Spider-Man's Maximum Spider, and Oro's (Level 3) Yagyou Dama while saying, "You (Darwin) are just a pet who grew legs!"
  • In Season 3, Episode 33 (2015) of Gumball, "The Society", Gumball in a Robin Hood outfit does the Shoryuken followed by the Expecto Patronus spell as his audition for a role in a play, much to school counselor Mr. Small's chagrin.
  • In Season 6, Episode 5 (2018) of Gumball, "The One", Gumball references the "Hadouken" attack from the Street Fighter series when he throws his burp onto Darwin.
• In Season 1 Episode 10 (2012) of Gravity Falls, "Fighter Fighters", the titular SF-like fighting game featured "Rumble" as a bare-chested blond Ryu and Ken hybrid battling against "Dr. Karate" or a mustachioed Guile with M. Bison's uniform.
• In Season 6, Episode 4 (2012) of Robot Chicken, "Poisoned by Relatives", Ryu in Sagat's stage in Thailand talks to Ken over the cellphone, clarifying that Ken isn't fighting "E. Honda" but instead "a Honda" (as in the car bonus stage). Ken is flabbergasted by this, saying this is the stupidest thing he has ever heard.
  • In Season 6, Episode 15 (2013) of Robot Chicken, "Caffeine-Induced Aneurysm", during what appears to be the climax of the All-Valley Karate Tournament in The Karate Kid, rival Johnny Lawrence performs the Hadouken from Street Fighter on protagonist Daniel LaRusso, which turns him into a flaming skeleton a la Mortal Kombat fatality.
  • In Season 7, Episode 16 (2014) of Robot Chicken, "Bitch Pudding Special", Bitch Pudding does the Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku on the Squirrel Wizard then ends the attack with a no-fireball Hadouken pose^note (kind of like the Hadouken Stance in the Alpha Series or the Hashougeki in SFV and SFVI).
• Regular Show: In the 2014 episode "Bad Portrait", Mordecai weaponizes paint by performing a Hadouken and Shoryuken. Rigby also imitates Blanka's electric attack when he shakes paint off his fur. Mordecai also does the super move version of Ken's Shoryuken, the Shinryuken. Mordecai even throws Rigby at the paint-covered Benson to simulate the Psycho Crusher move of M. Bison.
• In a 2014 episode of American Dad!, Roger the Alien throws the Hadouken at Stan Smith's SUV while wearing Ryu's signature karate dougi.
• In Season 3, Episode 10 (2014) of Brickleberry, "Amber Alert", Steve Brickleberry faces off against his bully by mimicking Street Fighter moves like the Hadouken, Sonic Boom, and Yoga Flame with the expected results.

---