Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow - Homages

Homages

First-time director Conran incorporated many references to classic genre films into his own movie: "The work of those artists and writers from the pulps and Golden Age of Comic Books like Airboy was really the template for us. To some extent we stole from it, to some extent we expanded on it -- hopefully we added enough of our own sensibility. We tried to approach it almost as though we lived in that era and were just another group of artists trying to make a work comprised of those pieces and inspirations. We wanted the film to feel like a lost film of that era."

When early in the film newspaper clippings from around the globe are shown, in the Japanese newspaper the iconic silhouette of Godzilla is clearly visible. Similarly, during the New York sequence when Sky Captain deploys a bomb to stop a giant robot, the shape of King Kong can be seen on the Empire State Building in the background. During the underwater dogfight sequence a light momentarily displays the wreckage of a ship with the name "Venture"—the tramp steamer that sailed to Skull island (pictured) in the 1933 version of King Kong. In the same scene, what appears to be the wreckage of Titanic can be seen, as well an ancient underwater city which seems to be a nod to the legend of Atlantis.

The villain's main logo bears striking similarities to the logo for Crimson Skies, a game universe that some critics noted bore stylistic and plot similarities to the film.