Shout Out / Recess

• Ashley Spinelli's last name is a reference to Maniac Magee novelist Jerry Spinelli.
• Ever notice that Upside-Down Girl looks and dresses an awful lot like a certain someone? She even has the same voice actress, who plays several characters on the show, but specifically uses her Helga voice for Upside-Down Girl.
• Also, King Bob may be a reference to another character from Hey Arnold!: Big Bob Pataki, The Beeper King. They have similar appearances: unibrow, dark hair, perpetual scowl, and are both bossy and don't like being distracted from whatever has their attention(and as a bonus he's voiced by Arnold's original VA Toran Caudell).
• The "Terrifying Tales of Recess" segment with Mikey's living bike starts out as a parody of Stephen King's Christine and later when the other kids' bikes come to life it turns into a parody of Maximum Overdrive.
• The series is littered with shout-outs to Hogan's Heroes.
  • Matter of fact, this series is an Expy of Hogan's Heroes: T.J. and the gang are expies of Hogan and his men; Principal Prickley is an expy of Kommandant Klink; Miss Finster is a more competent expy of Sergeant Schultz; in fact, the Third Street School playground looks almost like a compound of a prison camp. The two series' theme songs sound incredibly similar too.
  • One episode takes the cake with a senior citizen that TJ is visiting recalling the POW camp he was in during the war to be filled with Expies of the cast of Hogan's Heroes. The flashback ends with the Kommandant yelling, "ROOOOOGAN!"
• The Ashleys are parodies of The Heathers. Ashley Q. in particular looks like Heather Duke. Ashley's T's outfit resembles that of one Cher Horowitz.
• Vince's nightmare about turning into a geek in "Big Brother Chad" is a parody of the opening of A Goofy Movie, with Max's nightmare about turning into Goofy.
• Principal Prickly's secretary is named Ms. Lemon.
• The prequel-movie All Growed Down is named after the Rugrats movie All Growed Up and, as one may expect from the name, has an inverted premise. All Growed Up was a sort of look-ahead to the future of the Rugrats characters' lives, while All Growed Down shows us the Recess gang when they were in kindergarten. The main difference is that Rugrats turned it into a full spinoff, while Recess did not. This is also funny when you remember that the creators of Recess worked on Rugrats before the show was supposed to end in 1994.
• Ashley A. owns a Hello Kitty lunchbox.
• They make several references to Diff'rent Strokes, specifically the famous line "What you talkin' bout, Willis?"
• SAL 3000 is, unsurprisingly, a parody of HAL 9000 and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Hank the Almighty Janitor, who solves complicated math questions left on the chalkboard, is a shout-out to the film Good Will Hunting.
• Spinelli's Amazingly Embarrassing Parents, Bob and Flo, might be named after Robert Reed and Florence Henderson, who played the parents on The Brady Bunch.
• Mikey mentions that he has a "Great-Uncle Mary" - just like the three main characters in Over Sea, Under Stone, which is "Great-Uncle Merry"
• In "The Story of Whomps", Miss Grotke is seen reading "Hillary Poffer" (complete with matching font), though it looks disguised as a romance novel.
• In "First Name Ashley", Spinelli is forced to watch pony movies with her eyelids held up, an obvious reference to A Clockwork Orange.
  • The Ashleys "welcome" Spinelli into their clique by chanting "ONE OF US! ONE OF US!"
• At one point in "The Kid Came Back", TJ's ranting about how since they can't get rid of that one kid, they'll be "slacking in their twenties, clerking in a video store!"
• In "The Rules," Spinelli claims that King Morty "drove the snakes out of the music room," a reference to the legend that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.
• Gretchen's personal computer Galileo is a reference to the short-lived Apple Newton PDA.
• Spinelli's middle name is Funicello, which is likely a reference to the famous Disney Teen Idol, Mouseketeer, and Beach Party star Annette Funicello.
• In "The Girl Was Trouble," when Kurst reveals that she traded away Gretchen's Galileo computer, Gretchen shouts "KUUUUURST!" much like KHAAAAAN!"
• In "Pharoah Bob", Bob, drunk with power, punctuates his orders with "So shall it be written, so shall it be done!"