Shout Out / 8-Bit Theater

Anime & Manga

• The ninjas don't knows it yet, but they're heads are about to explode from my ultimate swrod technique! Wait for it!
• Thief and Red Mage are betting on whether Black Mage's internal dia/monologue will last five or ten minutes:
  Red Mage: Go ten, Go ten, go!
  Thief: I'm more of a Gohan guy.
• The title of episode 158: Unfamiliar Ceiling.

Comic Books

• The opening segment of the epilogue is an obvious shout out to Kingdom Come.
• The strip where Dr Swordopolis asks Fighter "Did you choose the sword, or did the sword choose you?" is titled "A Shout-Out to All You Web-Heads Out There", presumably referencing J. Michael Straczynski's "Did the spider choose you?" storyline.
• Episode 830 is called "Fighterine" and has Red Mage divide the Light Warriors into three teams called Uncanny, Astonishing and Extreme. These are all prefixes to X-Men comics, and the fact Fighter's on all the teams at once is a dig at Wolverine Publicity.
• In Episode 863, Fighter's description of how White Mage might react to the destruction of Onrac bears a startling similarity to Hal Jordan's reaction to the destruction of Coast City. The strip is called "Emerald Dawn", which is also the title of one of Hal's origin stories. A few strips later, we get "Emerald Twilight", which is the title of the afore-referenced "Hal goes evil" storyline.

Film

• From this strip:
  Red Mage: Black Mage, initiate Plan 9.
  Black Mage: From Outer Space?
  Red Mage: The same.
• From Strip #473:
  Kary: I'm living fire. You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?
  Red Mage: You know, for a second there, yeah, I kinda did.
• Black Mage once mentioned that he used to like black robes, but "they were killed by that play, The Magics."
• "So we've struck him down only to make him become more powerful than we could possibly imagine?!"
• The title of this comic is a shout out to the first Ghostbusters film.
• The film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, gets more than a few gags lifted from it. Later Thief gets turned into a toad...

Literature

• When Thief stole his class change from the future the title of the strip was Thief of Time.

Live-Action TV

• One of Black Mage's pick-up lines for White Mage is "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"
• 8BT also has an archer captain... With a second-in-command called Commander T'Pol.
• Heroes:
  • After a few episodes of the second season aired, Black Mage asked "Did getting skewered through the chest somehow (and nonsensically) remove all my powers?" Thankfully, he did not proceed to turn up in Mexico.
  • The comic referenced Heroes one more time.
• This comic referred to the too short-lasting Ninth Doctor Who along with the famous Fourth.
• Black Mage singing "A Horse With No Name" is a reference to NewsRadio.
• When Fighter is inspecting the damage to the airship, a lot of what he says sounds a lot like Star Trek technobabble, including that the "GN/DN tubes" are damaged and "may as well be decorative". "GN/DN" is a injoke of the Star Trek: The Original Series set designers, indicating that a conduit "goes nowhere and does nothing".

Music

• Brian Clevinger shows up in Episode 124 wearing a KMFDM shirt.
• The last lines in this strip sure sound familiar... (The title spells it out if it isn't obvious already.)
  Fighter: Isn't it ironic to yell the word "silence"?
  Drizz'l: Like the good advice you didn't take?
  Fighter: Don't you think?
  Drizz'l: You don't pick up sub-text, do you?

Tabletop Games

• Exalted:
  • When Red Mage tells Fighter to "Make your swords as things unto chainsaws", the card he uses to do it is an Exalted charm-tree card; the name and effect refer to a (now fixed) exploit with Exalted's Glorious Solar Saber charm where you could theoretically conjure a sword capable of making infinite attacks in a single second, which fans affectionately called the Glorious Chainsaw Method.
  • Red Mage's advice to Fighter has both the visual appearance and the naming style of an Exalted Charm.
• Episode 645— Red Mage explains where they get their new powers from:
  Red Mage: But now we've ventured into an expansion. All-new, Absurdly powerful Occupational Character Classes are now available!
  Black Mage: And where does this alleged power creep come from?
  Red Mage: Rifts in Space-Time, mostly.

Theatre

• In one strip, prior to a mass stabbing, Red Mage tells the victim that the Light Warriors are "gonna get Ides of March on your ass."

Video Games

• Final Fantasy:
  • What happened when Black Mage went to Hell? He took it over and returned to Earth.
  • Final Fantasy VII fans should find this scene disturbingly familiar.◊
  • In the Epilogue, Akbar's Not-Useless Tools has among its implements for sale a buster sword and gunblade, while one of the notices Fighter reads on the quest board is a recruitment notice for SOLDIER, (Black Mage: "Lame"), repelling Galbadian aggression ("somehow even lamer"), the search for a missing Alexandrian princess (BM gets interested, but they already got a Black Mage), escorting a religious pilgrimage ("I'd rather chew my own neck off.") and join the fight against Shadowlord.
  • The logo of the 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book has Red Mage holding a sword in one hand and tossing up a d20 with the other. This results in a similar stance to Final Fantasy XIV's Red Mages, who wield a rapier-and-floating-crystal combo.
• Black Mage's HADOKEN!
• Darko takes the form of Magus to talk to Black Mage.
• Fans of Mega Man should find Fighter's helmet very familiar.
• While analyzing Ur, Red Mage refers to him as "a basic Krakenoid." Fighter hears something very different, and is hit with inspiration for his strategy to defeat the fiend: a paddle and lots and lots of bricks.
• The Final Boss, Chaos, has Fomortiis' head.
• After bonking Vilbert with a cow, Fighter manages to use Black Mage to cast a fireball, then explains, "It's just a half-circle from back to front. Simple." This is how Dhalsim's Yoga Flame is used.

Web Animation

• In this strip when Drizz'l describes the true guardian of Marsh Cave, Black Mage imagines Trogdor.

Webcomics

• Undead Dinosaur Comics

Western Animation

• Family Guy:
  • In this strip:
    Red Mage: Love, hate, clouds, *thud*.
  • This strip makes another Family Guy reference - one Black Mage hilariously subverts.
• When Bikke fantasises about leading the Dark Warriors, he imagines them all as pirates with a "Pirates of Dark Warriors" logo that looks a lot like that of The Pirates of Dark Water.
• The works of Matt Groening are referenced quite frequently, particularly in earlier strips.
  • Akbar's Airships (Not Deathtraps) has a counterpart store called Jeff's Discount Deathtraps as a reference to Akbar and Jeff. Jeff has yellow skin and an overbite.
  • Black Mage's interaction with the spell shop owner is drawn from Bart and Comic Book Guy's dialogue in "The Day the Violence Died."
  • The old man's rambling about summoning circles—er, squares, is reminiscent of Grampa Simpson's never-ending yarn about the ferry to Shelbyville from "Last Exit to Springfield."
  • Dental plan!

Other

• Red Mage has a universe-destroying spell called "Ice-9". This is a triple shout out to the also dangerous substance from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle, level-nine spells in Dungeons & Dragons, and the simple naming system in early Final Fantasy games (Ice-1, Bolt-2, Fire-1, etc.).

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