Shout Out / Up

From Pixar's film

• The blatant Star Wars references:
  • The dart-shooting biplanes are manned by dogs that check in as members of "Grey" Squadron, à la the Rebel attack on the Death Star. Also notice the dogs have flight names like "Red X". One of the few ones not used is Red 5, Luke's flight name. This also qualifies as a Stealth Pun.
  • One of the pictures in My New Adventure Book shows Carl and Russell going to a movie theater to see Star Wars.
• The idea of a "plateau lost in time" somewhere in South America is clearly modeled after the legendary lost plateau from The Lost World, made particularly glaring with all the references to it describing it as a land lost to time. On top of all that, Muntz's presentation of the giant bird skeleton is similar to the scene from the book, in which Prof. Challenger presents a live pteranodon as proof of his journey (a Bronto/Apatosaurus in the original stop-motion film).
• Pete Docter has made no secret that Chuck Jones is one of his heroes. Check out the shapes of the rocks during the chase sequence, the personalities of the dogs, and the fact that Kevin looks somewhat familiar....
• The infomercial that Carl watches in his house is a shout out to a viral internet video from failblog.com that can be found here.
• There's a scene where the dogs are all playing poker, in a shout out to the famous piece of pop art.
• In real life, Charles Muntz was one of the pioneers of television, known as "Mad Man" Muntz. His business model was to control every aspect of television, from programming (the DuMont Network) to the actual sets. Although he was not able to compete for long against the established radio crossover networks of CBS and NBC, many of his innovations are still in use today.
• In The Art of Up, there's a detailing of all the badges on Russell's sash. There are several badges, some that look to be modeled from actual merit badges; but one that caught his eye depicted a hand karate-chopping a watermelon in half. Wilderness Explorers are learning Self-Defense Against Fresh Fruit.
  • Another one of the badges looks just like the logo for the Fireside Girls.
  • And the badge shown with the animator credits is a sheet of paper punched for an animation disc ({==} O {==}).
• In the sequence where the house has just taken flight, it floats past the apartment of a little black girl; she has a not-so-Hidden Mickey in the form of her Minnie Mouse style hairdo (also known as afro puffs). Also, the ball she's playing with is the one from Luxo Jr. and hidden in the lower left corner is a Lotso Huggin' bear.
• The Pizza Planet truck makes a cameo in the next scene.
• A Monty Python-esque frog wakes Carl up and gets smacked for its trouble.
• One of the badges seen during the credits is the Mac beach ball "loading" cursor.
• In the credits, one of the photos is of chalk drawings on the sidewalk. One of the drawings is of Scooby-Doo.
  • Also in the credits, one photo shows Dug and a female Golden Retriever with an indeterminate yet huge number of puppies, 20 of them seen in the photo. Does that ring a bell to you, huh?
• After Carl assaults an innocent construction worker over a mailbox, one of the creepy corporate suits looks at Carl's house and puts a hand on Carl's gatepost, much like a certain famous scene◊ in The Night of the Hunter.
• Though the filmmakers didn't want to copy The Wizard of Oz too much given the similar story, the scene of Carl's house in the storm is very much taken from the scene of Dorothy in the tornado, right down to the house careening towards the camera to punctuate the end of the scene.

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