Cultural References
When Meg asks her mother to help teach her how to drive, Lois suggests Peter take her driving instead. With Peter refusing in order to continue watching an episode of Star Trek, actor William Shatner, as portrayed by series creator Seth MacFarlane, then appears on the screen. Going on to suggest her father is not the best driver, Brian recalls a previous driving incident Peter had with Wile E. Coyote, in which he accidentally ran over the Road Runner in the middle of the desert. When Peter is concerned about the "Ostrich" he just hit Wiley tells him to keep going. Continuing to suffer a withdrawal from not being able to watch television, Peter has a Wizard of Oz-inspired nightmare featuring Alf from the 1986 NBC sitcom ALF, Gilligan from the 1964 CBS series Gilligan's Island, The Robot from "Lost in Space", Jeannie from "I Dream of Jeannie" who promptly transforms into Samantha from the 1964 ABC series Bewitched. After creating a cardboard cutout in the shape of a television, Peter walks around town with the contraption strapped to his waist, perceiving the actions around him as television. Two women talking over lunch suggests that he is watching the television station Lifetime, two elderly people out walking reminds him of CBS, a group of African Americans playing basketball suggests UPN, and James Woods High School reminds him of Beverly Hills, 90210. After TV service is restored and most of the Griffin family is watching Star Trek, James T. Kirk tells his crew that there is a dangerous mission in that someone will surely be killed. He says the landing party will consist of himself, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and "Ensign Ricky" (a redshirt), who, upon being called, cynically says "Oh crap!". At the end of the episode, after Meg accidentally hits and kills Shatner with the Griffin family car, the group of people looking over includes the actor who played "Ensign Ricky" stating "Wow, I did not see that one coming."
Read more about this topic: I Never Met The Dead Man
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)