Shout Out / The Walking Dead (2010)

• Carl's T-Shirt has the logo for Science Dog on it, which is a reference to Robert Kirkman's other comic book series, Invincible.
• In "Tell It to the Frogs," Daryl tells Dale to "take your stupid hat and go back to On Golden Pond."
• The CDC has been referring to the zombie problem under the code name "Wildfire," and they've been studying it in their secret underground lab. "Wildfire" was also the government's code name for certain categories of pandemic, and the secret underground lab built to combat them, in The Andromeda Strain.
• In "Bloodletting," you see for a split second quite a bit of Blue Sky in Merle's drug stash while Daryl is looking for some antibiotics for T-Dog.
• As Glenn is explaining his plucky compliance to the group's sometimes insane requests of him to Maggie, he likens it to "playing Portal."
• T-Dog compares Daryl to Rambo in his search for Sophia.
• In "Seed", when Carl is picking through the abandoned kitchen, a tin of canned meat can be seen with the brand name "Smeat", most likely in reference to the preferred food of smokers in Waterworld.
  • The packaging is in fact identical. This is noted to be a common prop, however its prevalence in the aforementioned film - which features a post-apocalyptic setting populated by scavengers surviving on the leftovers of civilization - supports the idea that it may have been used deliberately in this case.
• In "18 Miles Out," Rick says that his cousin once spent 24 hours stuck on an icy road and passed the time by listening to The Lord of the Rings on tape.
• In "Prey", while looking for Andrea in the warehouse, the Governor starts dragging his shovel on the ground and whistling a song, much like in The Shining.
• In "This Sorrowful Life", when Merle is rounding up walkers to lure towards the Governor, the first walker we see, stumbling out of the building, looks a lot like one of the zombies encountered at the airport in Dawn of the Dead (1978).
  • In "Conquer", one shot of Aaron killing a zombie is a direct homage to Dawn.
• In "Infected", according to the Word of God, the scene of man getting out bed after turning into a walker and his guts spilling out of his body is a homage to a scene from Day of the Dead (1985).
• The cold open to "The Grove", with The Ink Spots' song "Maybe" playing on the soundtrack, is very much in the style of the original Fallout, going from a wholesome kitchen setting to reminding that there's a zombie apocalypse underway. You almost expect Ron Perlman to narrate how war never changes when the opening credits roll.
• Carol executing Lizzie also draws some major parallels to the ending of Of Mice and Men.
• During the tunnel attack in "Us", we briefly glimpse a walker that's a dead ringer for "Bub" from Day of the Dead.
• Dwight watches an old VHS tape of Who's the Boss? in "The Cell."
• In "The Calm Before", the movie that the four communities watch is a Baby Huey cartoon.
• In "The Storm", the sudden close-up of the frozen walker outside Hilltop resembles the sudden close-up of Jack Torrance frozen in the hedge maze at the end of The Shining.

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