Shout Out / Breaking Bad

• Walter's choice of that black porkpie hat might have been inspired from Gene Hackman.
• Juan Bolsa: Juan is Spanish for John. Bolsa means "bag" in Spanish. John + Bag = "Johnny Sack".
• The name of the last episode of Season One is "A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal", after a line from Fargo.
• Looking for a weapon, Jesse walks along a set of shelves picking up progressively more intimidating implements, like Butch in Pulp Fiction. Guess they were out of katanas.
• In "Phoenix", Jane explains away her bloodshot eyes by saying she's exhausted from working on a tattoo complex enough for the Sistine Chapel.
• In "Caballo Sin Nombre", the prospect of Walter giving up cooking meth is compared to Michelangelo Buonarroti giving up painting.
• Another Pulp Fiction reference: "Box Cutter" ends with Walt and Jesse getting breakfast in a diner, wearing t-shirts after their other clothes got covered in Victor's blood, with Jesse getting a plate piled high with pancakes and bacon while Walt just settles for coffee.
• Ted bangs his head on a table, sending several oranges falling onto his body. In the flash-forward that opens "Blood Money", Carol the neighbor drops a grocery bag full of oranges after seeing Walt again. Remember that the presence of oranges in The Godfather indicated when someone was about to have their day messed up.
• Vince Gilligan stated that his goal with Walter is to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. In "Hazard Pay", Walt and his son watch the "say hello to my little friend" scene in Scarface. This might be setting up a later shout-out when we finally find out why Walt's buying that giant machine gun.
  • The collar◊ on Walt's blue shirt in "Buyout" (the episode where he gives his "empire business" speech) is a bit larger than the ones he usually wears, a subdued resemblance to Tona Montana's flashy shirts. Walt's sitting pose during the dinner and living room scenes are also reminiscent of Tony's sitting pose◊.
• In the Season 5 episode "Dead Freight" there are actually shout outs to quite a few movies (and, cutely, the line "You've been watching too many movies"). Hank says they're going to watch Heat. Todd's murder of Drew Sharp at the end of the episode is like Waingro's execution of a guard during the armored car robbery. Mike's speech about having to kill witnesses is similar to Vincent Hanna's comment while investigating the armored car robbery scene about how Neil McCauley and his crew didn't hesitate for a second to kill the other two guards once Waingro shot the first guard, because "why leave a living witness?" The ending is also a double-shout out to Once Upon a Time in the West and The Great Train Robbery. A few more subtle shots here and there shout out to other films, such as High Noon.
• Saul compares his services to what Tom Hagen did for Vito Corleone. When Walter replies that he's no Vito, Saul retorts that Walt is Fredo.
• In telling Skyler not to talk to the cops (first or second episode of Season 5A), Saul says "When you talk to the cops, just be thinking one thing: Hogan's Heroes. Remember Sergeant Schultz?" [Skyler's blank look] "I see nothing! I know NOTHING!"
• When Jesse is sent to the hospital and badly mauled, Saul jokes about his bruised appearance by doing a reference to Rocky.
• In "Ozymandias", Hank's death is a reference to a similar death in The Wild Bunch, when Bishop kills a man in the middle of saying "Just do it alrea—" (or similar).
  • From the same scene in "Ozymandias": Hank claiming Jack made his decision "ten minutes ago" majorly parallels Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt's infamous "thirty-five minutes ago" line in Watchmen. Both situations give a hopeless vibe to the characters desperate to stop a horrifying event from happening (Walt preventing Hank's death, and Rorschach/Night Owl preventing Ozymandias from killing half of New York's population)... only for those tragic events to happen anyway.
• In "Granite State", Charlie Rose, in his interview with Gretchen and Elliot Schwarz, mentions that Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a New York Times column about Gray Matter's connection to Walt. Sorkin, who has called Breaking Bad his "favorite show", responded by writing an in-universe column about Gray Matter in Real Life.
• In the final Talking Bad, Vince says that in "Felina", Walt's final reaction to Jesse — of wanting to kill him, but then realizing that he still cares about him (by shielding him with his body) — was directly inspired by John Wayne's finally finding Natalie Wood's character in The Searchers. Additionally, Walt's final look at Junior — watching him walk back into the home that he (Walt) cannot ever go home to again — may also be an allusion to the final shot of the same film.
• Both Tuco's name and comically paranoid attitude is reminiscent to another Tuco we know.
• In "Problem Dog", Walt Jr. complains to Hank that he only had his Dodge Challenger for 15 hours.
• The bank used to deposit hazard pay for Gus' former employees is the Craddock Marine Bank, Fox Mulder's bank in several episodes of The X-Files, a series that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan wrote 29 episodes for, and was a show runner.
  • Numerous characters also share their names with ones from the series. Don Eladio Vuente's name is almost identical to Eladio Buente in the episode El Mundo Gira, a migrant worker from Mexico infected with an alien fungus played by Tuco's actor Raymond Cruz.
  • Jaycox, the policeman guarding the evidence room when Walt, Jesse and Mike use the electromagnet on it was a minor character in Folie a Deux.
  • When Saul's secretary gives Hank the phony call about Marie being injured, she uses the name "Elaine Tanner". Elaine Tanner was the mother (or rather former host) of the eponymous character in Leonard Betts, an animate tumor disguised as a man who also makes a living by impersonating an emergency services worker.
• Walt assembling a remote-controlled mount for an automatic BFG in the middle of nowhere, then installing it in the trunk of a car, is quite similar to a certain signature scene in The Jackal.
• Bogdan, Walt's boss at the car wash, has the first dollar he ever earned hung up on the wall in a picture frame. Walt even buys a soda at the vending machine with it, much like Patrick did with its would-be replacement.
• In "Rabid Dog", Saul compares Jesse to Old Yeller when he suggests to Walt that it might be time to have Jesse killed.
• After a hard few days of partying in "Thirty-Eight Snub", Badger mentions that he feels like he's turning into a Sleestak.
• Gus' appearance upon his death seems to evoke Two-Face, albeit much worse.
• Hector's paralyzed state, bound to a wheelchair and only able to make a single sound with a device to communicate, evokes Captain Christopher Pike.
• Jesse tells Walt that he’s not Welcome Back, Kotter in the pilot.

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