Five pop culture Easter eggs from Steven Spielberg’s career

Hidden secrets: The director has made plenty of sly references in his films down the years
Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
Harry Fletcher29 March 2018

Steven Spielberg’s new film Ready Player One is jam-packed with wonderfully geeky pop culture references, but the director has never shied away from including cheeky Easter eggs in his films down the years.

These are the droids you’re looking for

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Teaming up with Star Wars’ George Lucas for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg couldn’t resist a nod to Lucas’s iconic sci-fi movie by including a set of “ancient” hieroglyphs depicting none other than loveable droids C-3PO and R2-D2. The pair can be seen over Indiana Jones’s right shoulder during the scene in which he removes the ark from the Well of Souls.

R2-D2 hanging out

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978)

The Lost Ark wasn’t the first time R2-D2 popped up in Spielberg’s films either. Eagle-eyed audiences will have spotted him looking very much at home in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hanging upside down from the alien mothership in the film’s climactic scene.

We’re going to need a bigger boat

Jurassic Park (1993)

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As well as acknowledging other directors’ works, Spielberg has never been averse to referencing his own films from time to time too. Jurassic Park’s computer programmer and chief saboteur Dennis Nedry, played by Seinfeld’s Wayne Knight, can very briefly be seen watching Jaws at his desk before meeting a grizzly fate of his own.

Look familiar?

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

The director’s love of Star Wars continued when he included a Yoda Halloween costume and a Boba Fett action figure in ET, simultaneously merging two of the most-loved cinematic universes of the era.

Phone home

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)

The Star Wars references certainly didn’t go unnoticed and in 1999 his old friend George Lucas repaid the compliment by including a race of ET-influenced aliens in the Phantom Menace’s Galactic Senate sequence. Now that’s certainly something to phone home about.

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