What are you favorite pop culture references in WoW?Follow

The ones that stand out the most to me are the goblin/gnome engineer names that are references to Star Trek characters.

I don't personally care if they toss a few funny pop culture references in the game, but sometimes I think they take it a bit too far. It's cute once or twice, but when they start having them everywhere, it sort of annoys me.

The cooking trainers in Stormwind are an excellent example of how to do and how not to do pop culture references:
Stephen Ryback - a thousand times yes.
Robbie Flay - no, thanks.

There's a (really annoying IMO) quest in Hyjal that's basically a recreation of the old Joust game.

The Opera event in Karazhan had fights based on Little Red Riding Hood, The Wizard of Oz, and Romeo and Juliet.

The entire Harrison Jones questline in Uldum is a reference to Indiana Jones. So, for that matter, is putting the staff together in Ulduman. And the achievement "Snakes, Why'd it Have to be Snakes?"

There's a quest in HFP that is very reminiscent of The Exorcist.

There are a ton of flavor ones, like the achievements "I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning" or "The Cake is Not a Lie."

And in an interesting little circle, Warcraft has referenced the Southpark episode where the boys play Warcraft. The Slayer of the Lifeless uses the same model as the Sword of a Thousand Truths, and has the flavor text "Foretold by Salzman," a reference to that episode.

And of course a ton more.

I did get a kick out of the fishing trainer in Lakeshire, Redridge Mountains...Matthew Hooper. (Richard Dreyfuss, "Jaws")

Warcraft has always been silly as hell.

FEAR MY MOO OF FURY!

Also, part 1 and 2 of apparently most of the funnies.

"I'll attract the enemy with my human call. I'm so wasted! I'm so wasted!"

Edited, Jan 20th 2011 9:03am by Mazra

Thanks for your posts so far everyone! I saw that list yesterday when I did a google search, and I think I got down to the TV references of Wrath before I gave up for the day. There are definitely a ton of references, although it seems like they're missing a lot from Cata thus far. They didn't even mention Uldum, or Schnottz in particular.

This is my favorite one I found so far:
http://www.wowhead.com/npc=44202

Horde side questa (not sure if there are Alliance equivalents or not) involving newer video game references...

Dread Head Redemption - http://www.wowhead.com/quest=13842

The chain for the quest is a lot like the game Red Dead Redemption in that you have to go out and do certain things for the quest giver and in the end you realize that you have been deceived and ... well... you get it.. (no game spoilers...)


Dream of a Better Tomorrow - http://www.wowhead.com/quest=26026

This quest has Bioshock written all over it... even the NPCs are tied in nicely. You have the quest giver who is a little girl (Little Sister for Bioshock) walking around a broken down Shredder model with a deepsea diving helmet on... the Shredder's name is "Large Daddy" (Big Daddy for Bioshock).
The little girl walks around saying stuff to Mr.D (Mr.B = Mr. Bubbles = Bioshock)... the same kind of stuff she actually would say (or very close to it) in Bioshock 1 and 2.
She also says, "Would you kindly" in one of her lines... "Would you kindly" was the phrase that was used quite a lot in Bioshock 1 and I won't spoil the game for anyone....

Here is some Little Sister dialog from Bioshock 2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YlFfphY76Y&feature=related

These quests are both new, and there may be a lot of others, but these two are the ones I have ran across so far..

Also.. if you pronounce Schnottz like it looks it sounds like "Schnots", but if you emphasize the Z you get "Schnot-zee" which everyone should get sounds a lot like "sch-****" which in the entire quest line you can see that Schnottz is supposed to be Hitler... but didn't the Indiana Jones movies have **** references in every movie? So it is expected.



Edited, Jan 20th 2011 9:32pm by PentUpAnger

If you haven't played the quest line through yet, maybe you too will have noticed nothing untoward until this tea-spittingly hilarious line of npc dialogue:

Spoiler"Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine!" Schnottz, managing to link hi-brow cinema, low-brow cinema and an internet meme in one gloriously contrived pun

Thanks for that link as well Pold! Looks like both Wowpedia and TV Tropes are going in my bibliography. :-)

Glad noone mentioned it before me.
One of my favs is Father Inigo Montoy.
A reference to an awesome film. The Princess Bride (Seriously if you haven't seen it, watch it. Funny funny movie)

One I didn't see in the wowpedia list...

The archaeology achievement Tragedy In Three Acts is gotten for assembling six specific Night Elf common-quality artifacts. The flavor text for each gives a snapshot of a tragedy involving two young lovers, loosely based on Pyramus and Thisbe (from antiquity, but more commonly known from multiple places in Shakespeare). And the artifacts themselves are all references to classic plays.