On 10/17/06, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 17/10/06, Parker Peters onmywayoutster@gmail.com wrote:
Congratulations, you've nuked half of the television-related articles
on
wikipedia.
NOR is fine and good, but pop culture references do help people
understand
an episode. Instances would be scenes where (for example) the Simpsons
rip a
scene directly from a Quentin Tarantino movie.
...
But to "nuke it from orbit"? Ouch. As for a source, see if one can be
found,
and if necessary just use the two sources side by side as your
reference.
Maybe I should have been more specific - I'm certainly not advocating the removal of /all/ pop-culture references.
Ok, you needed to be more specific then.
The original example
quoted was:
"When Shauna, Brian's love interest introduces herself, there's heavenly singing of the name 'Shauna' in the background. This parodies a scene from Ferris Beuller's Day Off when Jennifer Grey's character tells Charlie Sheen's character 'It's Jean, but most guys call me Shauna.'"
That, to me, is not obvious.
Perhaps not, and perhaps that's a good candidate for calling for a source on.
A scene ripped direct from a Tarantino
movie is definitely a cultural reference, but "singing of the name 'Shauna' in the background" doesn't, to my eye, appear to have any relation to the quoted scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off at all, and smells strongly of a fan getting a little too enthusiastic.
Quite possibly; "one for the talkpage" would be my reaction. Put the question there, see if anyone can source anything to justify it.
There are also cases of repeated cultural references/running jokes in
shows that only become clear after a longer period of watching (for example [[1729 (number)]] in Futurama). These might seem harder to prove but are still an order of magnitude better to include than /hidden allegorical meanings/, which was the main point of my post.
That's also a good point, and again: a lot of time, series in-jokes don't get mention in publications or otherwise until there's some exhaustive end-all book about the series (which will only happen for serious cult favorites/major popular series, which is perhaps 5% of all series in totality), but they do have meaning and are worth mentioning.
For example, suggesting that the "Alien" series of movies are actually
allegories for the state of American politics, which I actually read in a print publication once.
Pot Smoker Monthly?
But seriously, I've seen those movies, and to say they're allegorical for anything other than bloodbaths is just silly.