Shout Out / Freefall

Freefall does Shout-Out a lot.

Here’s the big list, in order by comic:

• Comic 5: The Savage Chicken's registry is 1071-CCN, a reversal to the USS Enterprise NCC-1701. Also in the same strip, we learn that the ship Florence was meant to join was 1071-CNN.
• 47: "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!" The source is questioned, but Wikiquote traces the quote to an "anonymous U.S. military saying" (1929), and says that Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1952) spread the quote.
  • As a science fiction comic, it's also possibly a shout out to Robert A. Heinlein who used the phrase more than once in his writing (Heinlein probably picked it up from his time as an officer in the US Navy, much as Wouk did).
• 74: "Will I be able to play Quake Nukem, Doomed Heretic In Castle Wolfenstein 3D on the ship's computer?"
• 79: Helix barks instead of speaking, and communicates that Sam fell down a ventilation shaft.
• 105: Sam feels the need… and Helix asks whether it is the need for speed.
• 125: Sam blamed the Noodle Incident on "that spiky haired boy with the stuffed tiger", a reference to Calvin and Hobbes.
• 184: Helix cares for a pair of rabbits that, unbeknownst to him, Florence intends to eat. He names them Bun-Bun (from Sluggy Freelance) and Kevin (from Kevin & Kell).
• 185: Helix's comment in the last panel refers to the fact that, in Kevin & Kell, Kell once ate Jerry Springer Spaniel.
• 203: Helix's "Helix Vision" contains the code THX 1138, which George Lucas frequently inserts into his works as an in-joke.
• 315: I CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!
• 331: Sam sings the theme song from Gilligan's Island.
• 350: While seeking shelter during a hurricane, Florence ends up quoting the opening monologue of The Twilight Zone (1959).
• 410: Florence deduces that, because she's not in an enchanted castle, it's a dog and not an animated mop (from Disney's Beauty and the Beast).
• 440: Sam and Helix enter a movie theater called Thimble Theater. It shows cartoons, because its name comes from Thimble Theater, the comic strip that introduced Popeye. Sam and Helix will watch a Godzilla film.
• 441 to 451: There are cameos from several other webcomics. The captions under each strip identify the characters and their source comics.
• When Rabbit Howls in 442, as well as referring to Kevin being a rabbit married to a wolf, is the title of a non-fiction book.
• Breakfast at Tiffany's in 445, as well as referring to Tiffany from The Suburban Jungle, is of course the title of a book and film.
• The monster movie is a parody of the Godzilla series. The method of defeating the monster in 449 seems to be a parody of Independence Day
• The romantic dialogue in 450 is "Oh, John Droid!" "Oh, Marsha Clone!", a reference to Stan Freberg's John and Marsha.
• 568: "On the gripping hand" is a Motie idiom.
• 597: "We are the Bureaucracy. Resistance is futile. Your assets will be assimilated." (Almost but not quite the catchphrase of the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
• 760: The ship's AI exposes Sam to danger by opening an external hatch, and responds "I'm afraid I can't do that" when Sam orders it to close it, inverting a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• 770: Stuck in an air vent, Sam tries to remember what happened to Winnie the Pooh when he got stuck — incorrectly remembering his fate.
• 818: The inspector calls Helix a "bubble bodied booby", which is nearly one of the insults Dr Smith used on the ship's robot in Lost in Space.
• 883: "Oh! I have slipped the surly bail bondsmen of Earth..." This poem is an edit of John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s High Flight.^note  Oh! I have slipped the surly bail bondsman of earth, And danced the skies on pilfered silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, towards the planet’s girth Of sun-split clouds, — to do a hundred things You have not dreamed of — free stuff that soars, I’m charmed High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I've chase past shouting beacons loud but unarmed Guide my craft through countless points of law. Up, up the long, day turning black as coal, I’ll top the wind-swept heights with clumsy grace Where never lark, or even eagle stole — And, on the silent, hunting toes I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, to lift the wallet of God.
• 969: Sam's song is derived from the Spider-Man (1967) theme song.
• 1060: There is a poster advertising paintball.
• 1064: There is a poster containing a picture of what is clearly Chrome and his mini whip Aurla from The Cyantian Chronicles.
• 1080: A tank containing a Sphyrna Zygaena is labeled no jumping.
• 1087: Crikey! Florence's nature show host impression is based on Steve Irwin.
• 1100: The "portrait of Snarky's mother" is a reference to the mascot of Eric Burns' blog Websnark, and the discussion of what it's made of includes a shout-out to Burns' webcomic Gossamer Commons. Sitting in the corner of the first panel is one of the dancing badgers from the Badger Badger flash video.
• 1110: Both The Funday Pawpet Show and viewer/participant Sakana Katana.
• 1115: "Looking at it that way, we're lucky every human planet isn't named Bob." In case you missed it, there is a poster of Titan A.E. in the background.
• 1122: As Winston describes terraforming with "dots" of life which either die or spread, the background shows Conway's Game of Life.
• 1128: Winston and Florence each mangle a famous line from Casablanca.
• 1139: The dumpster Sam and Helix are scrounging in contains Robby the Robot and an Interocitor.
• 1212: "Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Alien abduction of coffee."
• 1290: The serial number given for Helix is the years of birth and death for Karel Čapek, writer of Rossum's Universal Robots.
• 1372: "Klaatu! Barada! Doggy!" is a reference to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
• Every strip from 1390 to 1476 features a cameo. The robot religious meeting has robots from just about every TV series or film with robots, including Robbie, a Cylon, ED-209 , Astro Boy, a Skutter, K9, and even Noo-Noo.
• 1523: "Captain Sam's Super Secret Special Order 191." Found wrapped around three cigars in an envelope in the grass, no less.
• 1624: "My God, he's full of crickets!". 2001 of them, to be exact.
• 1626: "Security computer is mostly harmless."
• 1683: When Sam needs to come up with an alias in a Cryogenics lab, he claims to be "Leonard Snart. Captain of this Cold facility." Longtime The Flash villain Captain Cold's real name is Leonard Snart.
• 1694: The questionnaire Florence uses to see if her mind has been tampered with starts with a rather well-known question from Blade Runner.
• 1780: "I hate you, Sam. I hate you more than any woman's ever hated a cephalopod."
• 1817: On reactivating Blunt, Edge quotes Dr Frankenstein's rant on bringing the creature back to life in Frankenstein (1931).
• The 2009 Christmas Day strip has Max Post reading about Christmas to the robot religious studies group. Specifically, it's Luke 2:8-10 (King James Version), the same reading Linus recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas (although Linus does a few more verses).
• 1864: The store window has cameos of characters from several webcomics. The comment below this strip identifies the cameos.
• 1893: Sam mangles a couple of quotes from Star Wars.
• 1902: Edge quotes W. C. Fields.
• 1950: The sparkling monster, with the side-note that something similar happened to Vlad Dracul over time, is a reference to the sparkling vampires of Twilight.
• 1987: "Welcome. I'm Bennie, this is my jet." This is a reference to Elton John's song, "Bennie and the Jets".
• 1995: "Please feel free to use the airsickness bag under your seat. A friend of mine is collecting. She's going to make a comet." It would be a Vomit Comet.
• 2017: A series of robots identify each other by their ID numbers. The numbers given are actually the birthdates of Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle.
  • 2033 continues the joke, with a robot whose ID number is Enrico Fermi's birthday.
  • And again in 2042, with physicist James Clerk Maxwell's birthday.
• 2019: A robot playing chess in the set-up war arc, unlike others, has the name painted on its back: Joshua (after WarGames). Joshua quotes War Games on the next page.
• 2032: How to open a door: Talk about saying "mellon", like in The Lord of the Rings. The door opens, because "I thought I heard somebody talking out here."
• 2044: Bennie quotes Lucy from A Charlie Brown Christmas: "I've been kissed by a dog! I have dog germs! Get hot water! Get some disinfectant! Get some iodine!"
• 2045: Bennie's film has a title inspired by Snakes on a Plane.
• 2070: Clippy (a Shout-Out itself, see below) speaks dialogue spoken by Deckard word for word when examining a picture of Florence in a crowd of robots.
  • Well, almost word for word. It was the first time Clippy had seen Florence, so he had to say "Doggy!".
• 2075: Mr. Kornada's robot is named Clippy, after Clippy The Paperclip of Microsoft Office notoriety.
• 2169: Sam refers to the wall-climbing sequences in Batman (which made it look easy because they were filmed on a flat set with the camera turned on its side).
• 2192: Max Post is playing Asteroids or a similar game.
• 2209: "Soylent toasters are made from people!" is a reference to Soylent Green.
• 2210: "Representation? Does that mean taxation?"
• 2242: Edge's line in the first panel was first said by Daffy Duck in a Looney Tunes short.
• 2253: Blunt's invocation of You Shall Not Pass! references Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Compare:
  Gandalf: I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.... YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
  Blunt: I am a. Servant of humanity. Wielder. Of the rubber ball. YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
• 2256: Blunt's serial number 19031995 is the birth and death years of Alonzo Church.
• 2265: Sam stole the security passes from these scientists: Doc Nickel, Doctor Zarkov, Doctor Quest, Doctor Strange, Doctor Manhattan, Doctor Octopus, Doctor Sivana, Doctor Tenma and Doctor Solar.
• 2283: Clippy quotes from Goldfinger.
• 2296: Florence uses the transponder for motorcycle 24601. Jean Valjean was prisoner 24601. The reference is timely; this comic appeared a few weeks after the film of Les Miserables did debut.
• 2299: One of the robot police quotes Robocop.
• 2305: Mr. Raibert's phone demonstrates the advances in small speaker technology, in a shout out to the Maxell ad showing the listener being blown away by the sound fidelity of one of Maxell's cassettes.
  • Max Post is using one of H Beam Piper's favorite Unusual Euphemisms.
• 2312: one of the robots in a massive robot on robot fight has his head jacked up just like the classic "Rock'em Sock'em Robots" game.
• 2335: Mr. Kornada's socially impaired robot does a spot-on imitation of The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon when he's knocking on someone else's door.
• 2343: Varroa, like Daffy in Ali Baba Bunny, describes the vast wealth he's suddenly and illicitly acquired as making him "comfortably well off".
• 2347: The police chief's mobility rig is named L Linear Rig B, AKA Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles. This must have confused some readers initially, because the author later ''stated the Chief calls her "Eleanor."
• 2374: Sam's reasons for pursuing the challenge of figuring out Kornada's scheme sound suspiciously like the reasons The Bandit gave Cletus for pursuing their own challenge, in Smokey and the Bandit.
• 2379: When Kornada is being arrested, he tries to intimidate the Chief of Police by saying "My dad is Li Gang". That phrase had become a meme in Chinese internet circles after a drunk driver tried using it as his defense.
• 2413: Sam's explanation of why a criminal should not kill his victims makes sense to Qwerty, to his horror — which he phrases as if a scene from Lovecraft.
• 2446: The location is Ice Station Azkaban
• 2467: Dr. Bowman's first words to Florence echo the Ghost of Christmas Present's first words to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Dr. Bowman, who we already knew shared a name with a character from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is revealed to have much in common with another character from the same film.
• 2470: Dr. Bowman: "Now stop making me angry. I don't like me when I'm angry."
• 2496: Sam borrows one of Bugs Bunny's tricks from "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" to escape Blunt.
• 2502: Sam uses a quotation which might have been said by Napoléon Bonaparte, attributing it to "the human general".
• 2503: A Memorial Day tribute shows a couple of robots looking at a memorial wall with names like "Auto Turret 0057" and "Orbital Defense Satellite 025" — and an entire column of Bolos.
• 2544: Dr. Bowman's chief minder quotes from Colossus: The Forbin Project, a movie about an AI that takes itself in a direction its creators didn't intend.
• 2554: When pointing out the intelligent design of a brain he's made, Dr. Bowman asks if he looks like a blind watchmaker.
• 2560: Dr. Bowman's AIs are put into maintenance mode through a combination of biometric security and the exquisitely clever Trigger Phrase; "You were/will be from Gandahar."
• 2566: One of the items in Dr. Bowman's closet is a sealed beaker of Chemical X.
• 2586: Freefall hangs a lampshade on lampshade hanging with a literal lampshade.
• 2613: Ability to follow direct orders is indicated by calling a banana a small off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden. He also threatens to leave should she ever be ordered to identify a female aardvark.
• 2631: Dr Bowman repurposes a line spoken by Clint Eastwood's character in Magnum Force.
• 2635: Sam lets Vexxarr, Kevin, Pip, Trace, Doc, and Freddy pass through their comic at his own profit.
• 2656: Among the staged scenes intended to confuse people attempting to learn what's happening at the secret base are a Jaeger hangar and a re-enactment of the bus stop scene from My Neighbor Totoro.
• 2665: Sam guesses that the secret base might contain "ancient artifacts of power like JPL peanuts or Sikorsky's fedora".
• 2714: Rather than Alice of Wonderland's six impossible things before breakfast, Bill Raibert is happy with the one.
• 2725: Edge paraphrases Princess Leia's request for Master Kenobi's assistance. (Also a minor CMOF for Edge.)
• 2768: An orange three-eyed robot is named Blinky, the same as the orange three-eyed fish in The Simpsons.
• 2786: Dvorak misquotes the inspirational speech that opens each episode of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• 2793: A robot asks, rhetorically, "Do we sit with folded hands while humans hurt each other?" In Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" and sequels, well-intentioned robots attempt to protect humans by completely taking over their lives and preventing them from doing anything that might even possibly be harmful. (In Williamson's story it is the humans who sit with folded hands, having been left with literally nothing to do.)
• 2906: "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like" is a quote from Monty Python's sketch "The Pope and Michelangelo".
• 2917: The judge in the second panel is Hannover Fiste from Heavy Metal, and his tirade is a direct quote from the movie.
• 2924: Blunt Perfectly describes Mr. Kornada's problem. The mayor (acting as judge) supplies the affluenza name for it. Blunt then refers to Patient Zero, Ethan Couch.
• 2933: Here we get the other reason for Clippy's name: he's a paperclip maximizer.^note An AI given the goal of maximizing paperclip production and no constraints on how it goes about doing so is likely to cause incredible destruction as a side effect. Clippy was given the goal of making Mr. Kornada the richest person in the star system in 30 days, and no limits on how to do it beyond the basic three laws of robotics.
• 2945: Clippy informs us, recasting questions as statements: If you prick us, we do not bleed. If you tickle us, we do not laugh. If you poison us, we do not die. And if you wrong us, we shall not seek revenge.
• 2994: The mayor's assistant uses the iconic quote "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" before delving into its significance for Sam's benefit.
• 3022: Chris has a toy Dalek on his side table.
• 3067: Sam quotes the parable of the Mote and the Beam.
• 3174: Sam explains the recurring motif in human mythologies of fire being stolen from the gods, with a familiar interpretation of the Polynesian version.
• 3175: When Sam talks about the Other Golden Rule, he references The Wizard of Id.
• 3212: The Kzinti Lesson is referenced by a warning on the Savage Chicken's exhaust.
• 3219: Sam's version of prospective duck evolution, complete with sign reading "ALL HAIL CARL BARKS"
• 3220: One of the entries on the list of things that have tried to eat Sam are rodents of unusual size.
• 3233: The barter dialog is straight out of Monty Python's Life of Brian.
• 3260: Another chase scene ends with a slew of cameos and Doc from The Whiteboard informing everyone he needs to start repairing the fourth wall.
• 3275: Sam has a decidedly familiar checklist.
• 3308: It appears that the Sqid maker god is Microsoft Bob. The interior of his home is, predictably, the Microsoft Bob interface.
• 3311, 3312 and 3307: When Sam tells the legend of how the Sqids stole fire from Bob, the three Sqids that perform the theft are Lairee, Coily and Mho.
• 3340: Sam discusses the occasions where he runs into something that "everyone knows" and he's hearing about it for the first time.
• 3482: The Thurmads reside in Apartment Gattaca.
• 3589 features a space version of Girl with Balloon by Banksy.
• 3673: Before successfully identifying the DOGGY! a station robot wonders if Florence is a loaf of bread.
• 3774: "Don't Look, Ethel!" is from "The Streak".
• 3813: Helix begins his story by quoting Zork. "It was pitch black. I was likely to be eaten by a grue."

---