Deep Space Homer - Cultural References

Cultural References

The two blue collar TV shows the people at NASA watch are Home Improvement and Married... with Children. In the scene where the family arrives at Cape Canaveral, the car is a parody of The Beverly Hillbillies, with Marge sitting in Granny's position. Homer and Barney's duel is a reference to the classic Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion", complete with one of Star Trek's fight themes (originally from the episode "Amok Time") and the NASA administrators betting on the combatants in "quatloos". Homer running while lying on the floor and trying to read the back of his head is an homage to the Three Stooges, particularly Curly. The TV anchor is a parody of Tom Brokaw, and is voiced by Harry Shearer. A lot of words containing the letter L were intentionally written into the dialogue because the writers "enjoy the way Tom says them."

The music at the start of the episode of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon parodies the theme from the original Star Trek series. Itchy bursts out of Scratchy's stomach in a parody of the creature from the Alien films. Itchy comes out to torture Scratchy in an EVA pod much like those aboard the Discovery craft of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Homer hopes that his crew will not be sent to "that terrible Planet of the Apes," only to suddenly figure out the film's ending; he then unwittingly performs Charlton Heston's final scene in the film. Much of the episode parodies The Right Stuff, with sequences such as Barney and Homer's training, Homer's walk to the shuttle and the shuttle's re-entry paying homage to the film. Barney sings the first part of the Major-General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance while doing flips to show how fit he is, while Homer responds with cartwheels, reciting "There once was a man from Nantucket..."

The episode also contains numerous other references to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the space shuttle, Homer floats in zero gravity, eating potato chips. This echoes the docking scene in 2001, with the use of the music piece The Blue Danube. At the end of the episode, Bart throws a marker into the air; in slow motion it rotates in mid-air, before a match cut replaces it with a cylindrical satellite. This parodies a similar transition scene between "The Dawn of Man" and the future sequence in the film, including the use of the famous Richard Strauss piece Also sprach Zarathustra.