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You'd assume the guy who made the gritty Dark Knight trilogy grew up loving Tim Burton's moody 1989 Batman, but nope. Nolan's actual childhood love was the campy 1966 Adam West show, along with the Denny O'Neil comics and Frank Miller's graphic novels he devoured as a teenager.
The Empire Hotel, which Chuck Bass owns on the show, is an actual working hotel in New York. Fans started showing up in droves after it aired, so the bar there began serving Gossip Girl-themed cocktails, including a secret-recipe 'XOXO' drink.
For years, everyone in the Fire Nation believed Iroh when he claimed to have killed the last dragon, a story that made him a war hero. It turns out he made the whole thing up to protect Ran and Shaw, the two remaining dragons hidden away by the Sun Warriors, letting the world think the species was extinct.
Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, the voices behind Joel and Ellie in the games, both turn up in the HBO series - just not as Joel and Ellie. Baker plays James, part of David's group in season one, while Johnson appears as Anna, Ellie's mother, giving longtime fans a proper nod without any recasting confusion.
In the Loki variant lair during "Journey Into Mystery," there's an arcade cabinet in the background for a game called Polybius. In the real world Polybius is a famous urban legend about a supposedly mind-warping arcade machine that never actually existed, which fits a room full of unstable alternate Lokis pretty well.
In the multiplayer map Zanzibar, there's a sign that only changes on January 1st. Load the map on New Year's Day and it swaps to read 'Baby Shark Petting', complete with a little cartoon of a kid petting a grinning shark, then quietly reverts back for the rest of the year.
Design Director Emil Pagliarulo has said 'Fus Ro Dah' is his favorite shout for its forceful simplicity, and revealed that in Skyrim's reveal trailer, it's actually his own voice yelling it in the recording booth.
Tucked away among the debris in one of the exploration-heavy Seattle areas is a glowing orb that looks suspiciously familiar to anyone who grew up with Naughty Dog's earlier platformer series. It's a straight-up reference to the Precursor Orbs collected throughout the Jak and Daxter games.
Right at the start of Chapter 9, after Nate and Cutter have their scuffle, Cutter mutters something that sounds oddly literary: 'Next you'll be standing behind me with a gun, telling me about the rabbits.' It's a direct nod to Of Mice and Men, dropped in so casually most players run straight past it without clocking the reference.
There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment where Ice King's computer screen shows off his actual browser history, and it's full of pathetic, oddly specific searches about handling princesses and strange health questions. It's a tiny detail but it adds a whole extra layer of sadness to how lonely the guy really is underneath the jokes.
