Non-Music Beatles References

I was watching an episode of Good Eats named Pepper, Major Pepper. In the episode Alton Brown is seeking out peppers and encounters a man who is harvesting peppers. The man is named Sergeant Pepper and he is wearing a moptop wig and is dressed in clothing slightly reminiscent of the outfits worn by The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This led me to wondering what references there are to The Beatles in non-music media (such as movies, TV shows, video games, books, comic books, cartoons, and anime). Two examples:

• In the comic book miniseries Kingdom Come (drawn by Alex Ross), The Beatles make a brief appearance in their Sgt. Pepper... guise (the series also features a large number of other cameos).
  
• In a segment Meet The Beat-Alls of The Powerpuff Girls is loaded with a massive number of Beatles references (and includes an appearance by the animated Beatles).

What references do you know of?

 

James Bond was not a fan:

 

In an episode of "St. Elsewhere", Howie Mandel's surgeon was introduced to a new nurse with the last name Crane , who;s sister was also a nurse in the hospital. He says to her : "You Crane girls really knock me out" ....

 

Family Guy has made some great Beatles references over the years. My favorite is below:

 

Dean Martin in Kiss Me Stupid: "I sing better than all of them put together, and I'm older... than all of them put together."

 

Lots of Simpsons references to the Beatles, and 3 of the four have lent their voices to the show.



The Beatles »

In the most recent episode, Krusty (the subject of an interview by Kent Brockman) says something to the tune of "I'm gonna sing a bunch of Beatles songs so it'll be too expensive to release this video...1,2,3,4..."

 

The Beatles also appeared (in Top Of The Pops clip form) in a 1965 Doctor Who episode (The Chase).



The footage has been edited out of the DVD releases, but does appear on an older VHS release of the episode.

 

You might also check out this recent thread:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/beatles-reference-on-the-addams-family

 

In Manhattan, Mariel Hemingway's character Tracy says to Woody Allen's Isaac: "You think I'm unaware of any event pre-Paul McCartney."

 

In an episode of The Flintstones, Fred and company are having trouble getting the Hatrocks to leave. Nothing they do fazes the Hatrocks (even a visit to the Gruesomes' home doesn't bother them). However, there is one thing the Hatrocks can't stand: Bug Music (parody of the music of The Beatles). All the member's of the cast put on moptop wigs and perform bug music, driving the Hatrocks away.

 

It was apparently only edited from the Region 1 (American) DVD. If you buy the Region 2 UK DVD (and have a multi-region player or a computer DVD drive that can play it), you can view the episode intact with the Beatles performance. (Despite living in the USA, I have collected the UK DVDs since they were a little cheaper, had better resolution, and weren't edited.)

Interestingly, I believe that short clip from Top of the Pops might only exist because it was in Doctor Who... which is somewhat ironic because Doctor Who is one of the most famous television shows for having had a large portion of its history erased by the BBC. So the fact that The Chase survives also helped to ensure that a small portion of this Beatles performance also survived!

The funny part of the clip is that Vicki (who was from the future) makes a comment about the fact she didn't know the Beatles played classical music. She also says she had been to their memorial theater in Liverpool (or perhaps she said London). Those lines were added to the script to be somewhat silly... with the idea that the audience would get a giggle out thinking of the Beatles as "classical" artists who would be memorialized in the future. I bet they didn't realize just how close to the truth they would come.

 

I watched a 5th season Bob Newhart episode last night. There was a Beatles reference, but I don't remember it exactly.

 

The animated film, Escape From Planet Earth has three characters who are aliens who have Liverpool accents. One of them says, "Let's never break up."

 

Only reason they were able to use that TOTP clip back in 1965 was because the BBC still held on to the kinescope of the TOTP episode.

 

I remember seeing an old episode of Doctor Who that referenced "I Am the Walrus." It was one of those episodes where there are multiple incarnations of the Doctor at the same time. One of the Doctors was trying to explain what was going on to the girl who traveled around with him (I forget which one), and said something like "I am he, and he is me," to which the girl replied "And we are all together coo coo ca-choo."

 

Gilligan makes a Yeah Yeah Yeah reference at the end of this clip:

 

The Simpsons episode about Homer being part of the Be-Sharps ("Did you say you were bigger than Jesus like the Beatles did?" "Exactly. That was the title of our second album." ) is by far my favorite, also for the musical references:
number eight *burp* number eight *burp* number eight *burp*

 

The young woman was Jo Grant, a companion of The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee). The story was The Three Doctors, a 10th Anniversary Story, which featured all of The Doctor's regenerations up to that point (The First Doctor [William Hartnell] only made a brief appearance due to ill health).

 

Without looking it up, the episode you refer to is the one where Howard is being changed by a psychologist colleague to be a more considerate person, but turns Howard into a personality that mimics the psychologist himself. Bob and Emily get Howard to try and change back so he relies on the Hartleys again, he get confused about which way he should behave, quoting the psychologist (Ned Potvillian). And then Emily says "Howard, sometimes you have to get by with a little help from your friends". Howard - "who said that?" Bob- "The uh, Beatles"

 

Get Smart - The Sacred Cows

 

Jungle Book

 

Flintstones - Way Outs

 

The entire plot of the 1965 movie The Girls on the Beach revolves around the titular girls (who surely would have been members on the SH Forums, had the internet existed back then) mistakenly believing that the Fabs are going to play at their sorority fundraiser.

Then there's this guy from another beach comedy of the era, Beach Blanket Bingo: