The Naked Man (How I Met Your Mother) - Cultural References

Cultural References

• Among the strange occurrences at Ted's apartment is a scene where Robin is seen pointing her gun at two thieves, one of them aiming at the other one and that one aiming at Robin. This is a typical Mexican standoff situation, seen in many movies, especially well known from Reservoir Dogs.
• Mitch describes his technique as a mixture of surprise and pity, or "shock and awww", a play on the military technique of rapid dominance known as Shock and awe.
• Barney describes The Naked Man as being like a superhero, the Superman to Barney's Batman, contrasting the Barney complicated approach, gadgets, gimmicks and secret identities, to the simple idea of ripping off one's clothes.
• When Ted admits he is wearing tinted sunscreen because he wants his eyes to stand out, it is a reference to makeup artist Carmindy from the television series What Not to Wear.
• The poses Barney and Ted use refer to the Captain Morgan rum logo, Superman, the Heisman Trophy, Mr. Clean, the Coppertone Girl, Rodin's The Thinker, and actor Burt Reynolds, who posed nude for Cosmopolitan in 1972.

• When Ted is naked in Vicky's apartment, he opens a book of love poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and discovers it is bookmarked to his favorite poem, which appropriately is "Soneto XXVII, Desnuda" ("Sonnet 27, Naked, You Are.."). The poem originally comes from Neruda’s "Cien sonetos de amor" (One Hundred Sonnets of Love), dedicated to his beloved wife (at the time), Matilde Urrutia, and is divided into the four stages of the day: morning, afternoon, evening, and night.

• The end of the episode is a reference to Commissioner Gordon's ending monologue in The Dark Knight.