Easter Eggs We’ve Never Noticed in Cartoons and Childhood Favorites

Disney and other animated films are a big part of our childhood. While animated movies and cartoons are created for kids, that doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy them! Animated movies and TV shows often include so many hidden details and clever references that we don’t understand as children, which is why re-watching all our childhood favorites is so fun! As adults, we suddenly understand all those small details we’ve never even noticed when watching the films the first time around. The makers of these films and TV shows enjoy inserting all sorts of clever details and references into these movies, especially for the parents watching with their children. We’ve created a list of surprising details and amusing Easter Eggs most of us have never noticed in animated movies and TV shows – see if recognize any of them!

Predicting the Future

The Lion King is one of Disney’s most beloved films of all times. There isn’t a kid out there who hasn’t watched the film, and there isn’t a parent out there who hasn’t shed a tear when Simba lost his father. However, no matter how many times you’ve watched the animated film, we’re quite certain there are many Easter Eggs involving the movie you’ve never noticed before.

This is just one example: There’s one scene in The Lion King (1994), where Zazu, Mufasa’s trustworthy royal advisor, tells the king that the evil Scar would make a handsome throw rug. Three years later, Hercules was released to theaters, and diehard fans may have noticed Zazu’s suggestion came true, as we see the hero of the film handling a throw rug that looks just like Scar.

As we’re watching a film or a TV series, we’re too involved in the plot, the music, the bright colors, and the dialogue to notice small details and Easter Eggs. Especially when we’re kids, it’s easy to miss such references. For example, watching SpongeBob SquarePants as children, and even as adults, we’ve never noticed a crucial detail about the Krusty Krab – where SpongeBob spends most of his time!

Did you ever consider the Mr. Krabs’ restaurant is shaped like a lobster trap? If you’ve watched the show before, you can’t miss the irony here – that Mr. Krabs is a lobster! Here’s a bonus fact about the creation of the Krusty Krab; one of the show’s creators, Stephen Hillenburg, was inspired to create the Krusty Krab after working as a fry cook at a fast-food seafood restaurant as a summer job.

Hercules is not the most popular of Disney’s films, but it’s one of our personal favorites. It’s definitely not as popular as The Lion King or Mulan, but it’s a great movie nonetheless, and definitely worth watching even as an adult. If you did happen to watch the movie recently, you might remember a specific scene when the Fates are telling Hades what will happen in 18 years.

The prophecy reveals what will happen if Hades releases the Titans while the planets are aligned. In this scene, the image only shows six planets in the sky, and it isn’t an accident. At the time, in Ancient Greece (where the movie takes place), only Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were identified as planets. So, the children’s movie is actually surprisingly historically accurate.

One method of saving time, money and resources on animated films is recycling scenes and backgrounds between movies. In fact, this is a rather common and prevalent practice in animation studios. Most people don’t make the connections, since they usually recycle scenes from older movies. So no harm, no foul.

However, if you have a keen eye, or if you watch the same movies multiple times, you might be able to detect some of those recycled scenes. This example was detected by a seven-year-old boy! As he was watching Up with his mother, he noticed this particular scene looked familiar. They paused the movie and took a screenshot, and later found out the same scene appeared in the movie Cars.

Three Little Pigs is a Disney animated film released in 1993 and is considered one of the greatest cartoons of all times. You’re probably familiar with the story that follows three sweet little cartoon pigs, who are trying to build a house, only to have the Big Bad Wolf ruing their house each time.

While it’s a fun, silly, and beautifully illustrated children’s film, the animators couldn’t help but sneak in a morbid joke in the background. We bet not many people have noticed this while watching the film. In a couple of shots, you can see posters of pork cuts hanging on the wall with the word “father”.

If you’ve seen Pixar’s animated film Up, you probably didn’t pay much attention to the part when Dug finds the tropical bird that the famous explorer Charles Muntz spent years looking for. Reading these lines, you might not even remember what we’re talking about. It wasn’t the most memorable scene in the movie.

However, it wasn’t a coincidence that Dug was the one who eventually found the extremely rare bird. After all, he’s a Golden Retriever – the only hunting dog (Alpha is a Doberman Pinscher, Beta is a Rottweiler and Gamma is an English Bulldog). He then wanted to retrieve the bird back to camp. Dogs be dogs, are we right? He’s just fulfilling his life-long mission.

As we’ve seen with Hercules, Disney (and other production houses) made sure to stick to the facts and keep their films, fictional as they are (we’re dealing with talking animals and all), historically accurate. Here is another fine example from the film An American Tail.

What’s the historically accurate detail in this scene, you ask? It’s the Statue of Liberty. The famous sculpture as we know it today has a green-grey color. However, the statue’s original color was a shade of copper (as you’ve probably learned in a school filed trip). Over the years, a process of oxidization took place, changing the color of the monument. The movie takes place in 1885, the year in which the statue was completed, which is why it features its original color.

Quentin Tarantino fans have come up with the term Tarantino-verse – this means that his iconic movies are all corresponding and exist in the same universe. Why are we bringing up Tarantino in an article about Cartoons? Because we feel like the same thing is happening with Walt Disney. We’re starting to detect a Disney-verse.

This is one example of the existence of a Disney-verse: in the 2002 film Lilo a Stitch, you can find a reference to the 1998 animated film Mulan. First, Lilo visits a restaurant called “Mulan’s Wok” (coincidence? I think not), and if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a poster of Mulan hanging on Nani’s bedroom wall.

If you look for them, you might find allusions and similarities and many films, even if they seem completely unrelated to one another. For example, there’s an eerie similarity between Toy Story and The Shining. Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror film. The one and only. You might have picked up on that when watching Toy Story for the third time.

When Buzz and Woody try to escape Sid’s house, the carpet in the house might have looked familiar. That’s because we’ve all seen that carpet before, in The Shining. The same carpet as in the hotel where Danny plays with his own toys. This is an especially clever reference since Sid’s house is like a horror house for Woody and Buzz.

Many of us grew up watching the 1992 animated comedy Rocko’s Modern Life. Or more precisely, many of us grew up watching Nickelodeon, and we wouldn’t necessarily change the channel when Rocko’s Modern Life came on, although it wasn’t our favorite show. But we digress. We’re here to talk about a particular scene in the series.

It’s no secret that Nickelodeon and Disney are big rivals – they’re both big production houses creating similar content and fighting for the same audience. If you ask us, there’s no reason why the two can’t coexist, but that’s for another discussion. There’s one scene in Rocko’s Modern Life where Nickelodeon takes a jab at Disney – you can see a certain famous mouse trapped inside the mousetrap.

In every animated film or TV series, there’s always a villain, but one of the worst and most memorable villains in the history of animated television is Scar from The Lion King. You can tell that he’s a villain just by his looks – you know, that nasty scar and the fact his claws are always out. That’s one of his trademarks as a villain. But what does it mean?

Well, if you don’t know too much about cats, allow us to explain: felines keep their claws retracted when they don’t need them (for example when they’re napping or eating), and extend their claws when they need to use them (for example when they’re angry or scared and prepared to fight someone, or when they need to scratch something). That’s something most viewers probably never noticed – but Scar always keeps his claws out, as if he’s ready to fight at any moment.

Children’s films are a lot more sophisticated than most of us think. The creators pay great attention to details, and every movie is thought-out. One scene in Finding Nemo is a great example of this careful attention to detail. Gil is the leader of the Tank Gang (lol), a lawless group of fish living in a tank at the dentist’s office.

It so happens that the leader of the pack, Gil, belongs to a species of fish that is not cut out for captivity, called a Moorish idol. So, it makes perfect sense that he’s the one always scheming and looking for ways to escape the small aquarium. Most people won’t notice this, because we don’t really recognize fish species, but even this smallest detail is thought out.

Many of us grew up watching Cartoon Network. Their shows had something different than the rest of the children’s networks, they had a unique quality to them. In a sense, they seemed more appropriate for grownups, which is probably why we liked them so much! You know which shows we’re talking about, don’t you?

Anyhow, much like we’ve seen with Disney and Nickelodeon before, Cartoon Network also used to hide gems in their TV shows. For example, you may or may not have noticed that Dexter (from Dexter’s Laboratory) has made a couple of appearances on The Powerpuff Girls. One time, he was shown as one of the girls’ toys, and another time, he was shown in kindergarten with them!

The attention to details in animated films will never cease to amaze us. There are so many details that go over us unnoticed since we don’t really pay attention to small details while watching a film, especially when it’s a children’s film. We’re too invested in the plot to notice everything that was carefully constructed around it.

In The Little Mermaid, Ursula uses a butterfly in the spell that transforms her into a human. Then, in her human form, she uses the name Vanessa – a genus of butterfly. This is meaningful because in many cultures around the world, butterflies are a symbol of transformation. So, even this seemingly meaningless detail required thought and research on the writers’ part.

This is something you may not have noticed before, but you won’t be able to ignore it from now on (if you ever happen to watch the movie again). In Toy Story, the toys never blink with both eyes, but rather, they wink. Nothing (and we mean nothing) in animated films is an accident or a coincidence, and this, too, is done on purpose.

This is a cinematic trope called “Offset Blinking”, and is used in animated films to indicate that a character is either out of place or not very bright. In Toy Story, it’s partly used to remind the viewers that the characters are, despite everything, only toys, and they aren’t very clever. Pixar used this trope in other films as well.