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When MHA's manga wrapped up, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda marked the occasion by redrawing a piece of fan art a 15-year-old Horikoshi had actually mailed him 22 years earlier, long before Horikoshi was a professional artist. It's the same trick Oda pulled when Naruto and Dragon Ball ended, turning old fan submissions into farewell tributes.
The 'cargo' on Hollywood isn't cargo at all — it's an Omnic named HAL-Fred Glitchbot who's being escorted through the studio lot while an anti-Omnic group tries to take him out. The name's a little wink at classic sci-fi that's easy to miss if you're too busy fighting over the payload.
Rockstar can never resist a Sasquatch nod, and RDR2 hides one on Mount Shann, north of Strawberry. Climb high enough and you'll find an enormous skeleton lodged in the rock. The game never says what it is outright, but most players are fairly certain it's meant to be Bigfoot.
Bakugo originally slapped the nickname 'Deku' on Midoriya as a jab, since it's Japanese slang for a useless wooden puppet and also happens to be a rough misreading of his actual name's kanji. It only became something positive after Uraraka pointed out it sounds a lot like 'dekiru,' meaning 'can do it,' and Midoriya decided to keep it as his hero name on his own terms.
Halo's always worn its Starship Troopers influence on its sleeve, but ODST leans in hardest. The orbital drop pods echo the Mobile Infantry's capsule drops from Heinlein's novel and Verhoeven's film, and the ODST rule of sending commanding officers down first mirrors the Mobile Infantry's own 'officers first' doctrine.
The Prodigal Explorer wasn't just plucked out of thin air. He's named after Colt Hallam, a Riot Games staffer who's gone by the nickname Ezreal for years, and who worked on some of the earliest systems in the game, including the original ARAM mode.
The very first teaser trailer, released December 1st 2008, showed almost nothing, just Drake reaching out for a dagger in the middle of a snowstorm, rendered in the actual in-game engine rather than a flashy pre-rendered cutscene.
Naughty Dog's own team sits at around 350 people, but the finished game credits roughly 2,169 developers spread across 14 different studios who chipped in on everything from animation to localisation over the years it took to make.
In 'The Tales of Ba Sing Se,' Iroh spends the whole episode quietly helping strangers before we find out why: it's his son Lu Ten's birthday, and Lu Ten died taking the city years earlier. Iroh sings 'Leaves From the Vine' through tears, and the segment closes on a dedication to Mako, who died just before the episode aired. It's considered by a lot of fans to be the saddest moment in the whole show.
One journalist tallied up their own playthrough and came away having killed 527 enemies, more than three times the commonly cited body count for Indiana Jones across his entire film series, a fun bit of perspective on just how violent these adventure games really are.
