What kind of movie has a runtime of around 100 minutes and almost 200 Easter eggs, references, and in-jokes? Well, the kind of movie that is a parody of reboots, sequels, and remakes, while being kinda/sorta all three. That’s Kevin Smith‘s recently-released Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, currently on a “Reboot roadshow” tour around America and coming soon to a city near you. The filmmaker, who has been telling stories with the characters of Jay and Silent Bob since 1994’s Clerks, used the latest movie — his first one in the shared universe of Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and Clerks II in a decade — to remind fans what it was they loved about those other movies.
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Like, to really, really remind them. There are a lot of Easter eggs in this movie, and we probably didn’t get them all. We certainly didn’t count everything we thought was probably an Easter egg, and none of this counts recurring characters, who are basically just part of the fabric of the View Askewniverse as much as they are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so they aren’t really “Easter eggs” so much as just characters.
In addition to BenAffleck, Joey Lauren Adams, and a dozen or so other View Askew veterans, the film is jam-packed full of Hollywood stars including David Dastmalchian, Jason Lee, Joe Manganiello, Craig Robinson, Justin Long, Shannon Elizabeth, Fred Armisen, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris Hemsworth, Method Man, Redman, Jason Biggs, James Van Der Beek, Brian Quinn, and Tommy Chong.
So…if we saw it at a Fathom Events screening like a month ago, why did it take us so long to finally put together a list of Easter eggs? Well, we had notes but it took a while to elaborate on them all and clean them up into something mostly readable. Why?
Theres…well, there’s a lot of them. So try to keep up.
In the beginning…
1. Vulgar the Clown, the View Askew mascot, is trampled by a crush of characters from all of the View Askewniverse movies during the logo fanfare. You don’t know it at first, but pretty much all of these characters, including the black-and-white versions of the characters from CLERKS, will show up in the movie.
2. The film opens as Dante’s crappy old car pulls up to the Quick Stop. This is the same way Clerks and Clerks 2 opened.
3. Cock Smoker, Jay’s fake chicken sandwich stand, derives its name from an insult that has been common in the View Askewniverse since Clerks, when Jay uttered the phrase “cock-smokin’ clerk.”
4. The Cock Smoker sign hangs over the RST Video sign. In-universe, RST stayed open a lot longer than it did in real life, but now both are closed, with an entrepreneur now working to revive the store.
5. The stores used in Jay & Silent Bob Reboot are not the actual locations in Jersey; this is actually a scale replica of the block of stores. It was created by the movie’s set design team, and while it looks nearly flawless, the giveaway is that if you compare the surrounding environment in this movie to Clerks or Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back you’ll see that it doesn’t match at all.
6. The “Nails” brand cigarettes sign in the poster frame next to RST is a brand of smokes that have been around at least since Dogma. The joke, of course, is that each cigarette is a nail in the smoker’s coffin.
7. “One Adam-12,” which the police radio out while they roll up to the Quick Stop, is a reference to the TV series Adam-12, one of the earliest police procedurals to be a big hit on the small screen.
8. During Dante’s arrest, he offers to “give up” Randal Graves. Randal, played by Jeff Anderson, did not return for this film but will be back in Clerks 3.
9. In Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Jay pulled down his pants to “prove” that he didn’t have marijuana during his arrest, so his pants-dropping during the arrest this time is an encore.
10. Jay’s t-shirt is a Dark Knight Returns-Inspired riff on “Ranger Danger and the Danger Rangers,” a fake Buck Rogers-style adventure property that Randal Graves is a fan of in Clerks II. And the tattoo on Jay’s leg is the Roadrunner from Looney Tunes.
Some other things that happen in this portion of the movie, which don’t really rise to the level of “Easter eggs, but are interesting: Ant-Man franchise actor David Dastmalchian, who also appeared as Abra Kadabra on The Flash, appears as one of the cops. Since this movie features both Arrowverse and Marvel Cinematic Universe actors and references, it seems worth noting. And there clearly has to be some joke we’re missing with the guy shoveling popcorn into his mouth during the arrest, but we aren’t sure what.
Disorder in the court
11. The Buffalo Bill and “Mr. Silence of the Lambs” joke is obviously a reference to the killers from the movie that the cop name-drops. Buffalo Bill tucks his penis back in that movie, the same way Jay did during his arrest. Also, they had an “it puts the lotion in its skin and puts it in the basket” joke in Clerks: The Cartoon, borrowing a line from the movie.
12. “I’m Jay, and this is my hetero-lifemate Silent Bob” is their customary introduction going back as far as at least Dogma.
13. Justin Long’s character in this movie is a clear callback to Brandon St. Randy, his gay lawyer character in Zack & Miri Make a Porno. The voice is pretty recognizable and they gave him a lot of gay jokes to make in the courtroom scene, since Smith doesn’t own the characters from Zack & Miri so he couldn’t say outright that Long was playing the same character.
14. One of the enamel pins on Jay’s hat is the Buddy Christ, seen first in Dogma. The other pin is the “bear is driving” image from Clerks: The Cartoon.
15. The judge in this scene, Craig Robinson (best known for his role on The Office), also appeared in Zack & Miri. His name, “Jerry N. Executioner,” is a play on “Judge, Jury, and Executioner,” in the same way Will Ferrell’s character in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back was Federal Wildlife Marshal Willenholly, named for Marhsall, Will, and Holly from Land of the Lost. It’s also a continuation of a tradition of having judges with joke names, since Judge Reinhold voiced a version of himself who was a trial judge in Clerks: The Cartoon.
16. The Dick Wolf/Law & Order stuff is so on the nose that it would be hard to call it an Easter egg or reference, if it hadn’t started with Brandon describing the system with the intro from Law & Order.
17. Joe Manganiello appears as a bailiff whose name tag reads “B. Herveaux,” a reference to the character of Alcide Herveaux, his role on True Blood.
18. “Docket #37” is one of a great many references to the number 37, which has become a kind of totem for View Askew fans after a protracted oral sex joke in Clerks.
19. “Jay and Silent Bob are back?” followed by a sigh of disappointment is the first of a number of such jokes in the movie, a callback to similar jokes in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
20. In the movie, The Cock Smoker is neither eatery nor dispensary, but “merely a promotional pop-up shop” — just like Smith and Mewes actually did in support of the movie (albeit in a state where it was legal).
Some extras: The bailiff in this scene is played by Jason Mewes’s real-world wife. Will Ferrell — Marshal Willenholly in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back — would go on to play Rick Marshall in a Land of the Lost movie in 2009.
Don’t Open — Dead Inside
21. As soon as the name Saban comes up, everyone in the courtroom makes some Power Rangers jokes, including a “deep cut” from Bailiff Herveaux. That is more or less the real-world response whenever you tell somebody that Saban is backing a movie.
22. Here’s a minor continuity flub: When accused of impinging on Saban’s intellectual property, Jay says that “we don’t own any property” – they do, or at least did. Jay and Silent Bob used their not-insignificant savings, built up while selling pot for years, to purchase the Quick Stop at the end of Clerks II.
23. And they certainly know more about intellectual property law than Jay lets on; Bob had a whole, elaborate rant about it in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
24. Saban apparently acquired rights to B&C for $3,700 on Craigslist. Aside from the joke that they are so worthless they were sold off on Craigslist like a stained futon, there’s that 37 again. It comes up quite a bit in this flick, so strap in.
25. “We’re the defendants?” Jay asks, shocked, when the trial is about to start. This has echoes of Jay’s “plaintiff” theme song that he sings to himself on the stand in an episode of Clerks: The Cartoon.
26. The whole “you’re out of order” rant by Jay is a reference to the Al Pacino movie …And Justice For All.
27. As Jay and Silent Bob approach The Esplanade (the mall), the song “Social” from the Mallrats soundtrack plays. This is a device Smith uses throughout the film: he brings in characters from another movie and uses establishing music from that film to set up the scene.
28. “Don’t Open – Dead Inside,” which of course is most famously something that was scrawled on a hospital door chained shut because the room was full of zombies in The Walking Dead‘s pilot is now a joke about the abandoned mall.
29. The mall is in such disarray that there are literal rats in the mall, so that Brodie (who first appeared in Mallrats) can have a “mall rats” joke.
30. Brodie’s Secret Stash, the comic shop seen in the film, also appeared (albeit in a different location, as they mention here) in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. It’s a reference to Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, Smith’s comic book store in New Jersey. The caricature of Brodie on the sign is reminiscent of the caricatures of Jay and Bob on the real-world Stash logo.
Hulu & Hump
31. In the store, Brodie Bruce has a shrine to Stan Lee, including a “game-worn” sweater that Lee had actually owned. This was presumably donated to the production by Stan’s family. Brodie is also wearing a Stan Lee t-shirt, which is similar — but not identical — to the one he wore in Mallrats.
“In pre-production, I figured out, ‘ooh, Brodie’s shirt will be Stan,’” Smith told ComicBook.com. “It will look like exactly like it did in Mallrats, the out of focus face, but it’s as if somebody crisped it into focus, and it turned out it was Stan all along.”
32. In the scene, Brodie is holding a small Dixie cup (which he also has in the logo and had in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, as well). That Dixie cup is a callback to Mallrats, when he used to carry it around and have restaurants in the food court give him “Coke, no ice” in it.
33. The three joints — named “Snoogans,” “Berzerker,” and “Snootchie Boochies” — are all references to earlier films. While Snoogans and Snoochie Boochies are just things Jay says, Berzerker is the name of Olaf’s Russian metal band from Clerks, a t-shirt for which Jay wore in Strike Back.
34. How High is this movie’s version of Purple Rain. In Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, the pair said that they patterned their lives after Morris Day and Jerome from Morris Day and the Time, seen in the Prince-led film Purple Rain. Here, it’s Silas and Jamal from How High.
35. Riffing on “Netflix and chill” with “Hulu and hump” is actually somewhat more significant that it first seems. This is the first in-universe confirmation that Jay and Silent Bob definitely have a sexual relationship, and after years of being fairly homophobic, Jay seems to have come to grips with his sexuality.
36. The Bluntman v Chronic ad appears on the back of a Ranger Danger & the Danger Rangers: Into the Dangerverse comic, riffing on the same story we already talked about but also featuring art inspired by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There are plenty of other comics on the shelf in Reboot, and many of them might be fun to try and talk about, but that was the important one.
37. Bluntman v Chronic is obviously a Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice riff, right down to the helmet that Bluntman (the Batman-inspired character in the movie) is wearing looking like the armored one from that movie.
38. When Brodie says, “Don’t tell me you guys had no idea that there’s a reboot being made of the comic book movie you two were the basis for,” or something very much like it, it’s almost word for word what he said to Jay and Silent Bob in Strike Back before revealing to him that a Bluntman & Chronic movie was happening.
39. “What the f–k is a reboot?” Jay asks, and Brodie takes him to a computer to show him a news site and to explain the differences between sequels, remakes, and reboots — of which Jay & Silent Bob Reboot is kind of a little of each.
40. Movie Poop Shoot (“on the pot since 2001”), the website that he uses to share the news with them, is the same one where Holden McNeil showed Jay and Silent Bob the nasty comments on the internet about them in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Here, there are no comments but it stands in for Wizard magazine, which is no longer published. Now, an internet site with a minimalist font and a blue-and-white color scheme has to deliver the news.*
*Picture us staring at the camera and shrugging.
Bickety-Bam!
41. Referencing Star Wars (here, Brodie uses The Force Awakens to talk about reboots and sequels) is a tradition that stretches back to Clerks.
42. After claiming that Hollywood only makes remakes and reboots, not sequels, he adds, “They don’t even make Squeakquels, yo,” with a wink. Jason Lee, who plays Brodie, also played Dave in the Alvin & the Chipmunks movies, including Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.
43. In case you needed to be walked through it, Brodie says that we are soon reaching “Point Break for pop culture,” which is of course both a phrase that suggests a crossroads where things go downhill…and also the name of a movie with a notoriously bad remake.
44. Kevin Smith gets referenced directly, since he is directing the Bluntman & Chronic reboot, as “The guy who directed Cop-Out.” Jay asks if “they still let him make movies after that walrus s–t?,” a reference to Tusk. In the film’s third act, Smith himself (when he’s playing himself, not when he’s playing Silent Bob) references both Tusk and Cop Out, too.
45. The Chronic Con logo is, aside from featuring Jay and Silent Bob, a pretty obvious riff on the Comic Con logo.
46. The movie starts early with some Kevin Smith/Kevin James confusion — another thing that happens in real life and that Smith has routinely joked about.
47. Looks like Kevin Smith’s t-shirt in the Omaze video features the Michael Avon Oeming art that appeared on the cover the Wizard magazine in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
48. Brodie refers to Hollywood as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” which is an obvious reference to Star Wars but which also might explain why he left his job as the host of The Tonight Show, which is the gig he had at the end of Mallrats but gave up before Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back to live more quietly and own a comic shop.
49. “Bickety-bam, Kevin James can’t finish the movie,” Jay says when laying out their plan to ruin the reboot. This is a nod to Mallrats, when they plan to destroy the stage where a game show is to be filmed, in order to prevent the show from happening. In that version, it ended with “bickety-bam, the motherf—er’s rubble.”
50. “On that note, cue the music,” followed by Jay and Brodie making strange musical noises is the same way they exited the Stash in Strike Back.
Charge it to the Underhills
51. Joline at Southbest Airlines (Molly Shannon) does some heavy lifting as an irate airline desk jockey who stands in the way of Jay and Silent Bob boarding a plane. It’s a reference to an incident where Southwest told Smith that he was too large for the seat he was sitting in and would have to leave the plane, since it was fully booked and he could not buy a second seat or upgrade to first class. That’s what the “You mean he’s still too fat to fly?” joke was all about. The “too fat to fly” rant by Jay, in which he talks about calling Bob “lunchbox” and saying things like “fly, fatass, fly,” are all references to lines from previous movies.
52. The $337 plane tickets are another 37 spotting.
53. The pair are turned away from the plane, forcing them to drive across the country instead. This is a callback to when they were turned away from riding a bus in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and had to hitchhike.
54. The CLIT is the fictional — even fictional in-universe — terrorist group that Jay and Silent Bob were accused of leading in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. It stands for the Coalition for the Liberation of Itinerant Tree-Dwellers,” because the crime that was staged was the theft of a monkey being held in an animal testing facility.
55. Don Juan De La Nooch, the fake name Jay gives to Joline, is what the angel on his shoulder tells him to act like in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, during a fantasy sequence.
56. Ride Me Now is obviously just Uber or Lyft, but with added sexual innuendo. This carries on the tradition of business names like Cock Smoker or Mallrats‘s carpet store, Rug Munchers.
57. Ralph Garman plays Ted Underhill, a jerk whose credit card information Jay and Bob steal. It’s a reference to Ted Underhill, a country club member whose identity the detective-journalist Irwin Fletcher steals in the movie Fletch in order to fake his way into a club he needs to visit as part of his investigation. A bonus feature on the Fletch DVD is called “Charge it to the Underhills.”
58. The logo behind Underhill, for Southbest Airlines, looks a lot like an inverted version of the Alliance logo from Star Wars.
59. The three strains of gold — Jay and Bob’s pride and joy blunts — are “Snoogans,” “Berzerker,” and “Snoochie Boochies.” While snoogans and snoochie boochies are nonsense catch-phrases used by Jay in previous movies, “Berserker” is the name of a Russian metal band that Silent Bob’s cousin Olaf plays in.
60. When they get picked up and get in the car, Jay offers Bob a blunt rolled to look like Silent Bob, and when Bob initially rolls his eyes at it, Jay declares that it “belongs in a museum,” a reference to the Indiana Jones movies.
Fun fact: “snoochie boochies,” “noonch,” and “Berzerker” have all had more than one spelling in the franchise’s history.
Ride Me Now
61. “Those teen girls they sure love their Tiger Beat, am I right? I’m wrong,” rants entrepreneur/Ride Me Now driver Todd “Merkin” Merkinski. Tiger Beat published its final issue of the print magazine in December 2018 (although it does still exist as an online publication).
62. The way Merkin says “Hollywood, California” is a reference to a running gag cut from the movie. You can see it in the credits. The gist is that everyone is hopeful that Jay and Bob are going to Hollywood, Florida, because they hate Hollywood, California.
63. Loki from Dogma appears and delivers a monologue explaining where he went: basically it’s the backstory to Jason Bourne, played by Loki actor Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity and its sequels.
64. “I was Loki in the ’90s, before it was cool, and I did it without the fake British accent,” Loki says, throwing (joking) shade at Tom Hiddleston.
65. Reminder: all the Thor jokes in this movie? Well, Damon played Loki in Dogma, but he also played the actor who played the fake Loki in Thor: Ragnarok.
66. Loki also becomes the first to reference “God, who looks exactly like Alanis Morrisette.” This comes up again later. Morrisette played God in Dogma, and had a brief cameo in the post-credits stinger to Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
67. “You just got touched by an angel, son,” Loki boasts, referencing the popular ’90s inspirational TV series Touched By an Angel.
68. Mooby’s restaurant, which first appeared in Dogma, makes the first of many appearances in the film following Loki’s monologue. In Dogma, Loki and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) shot up a board room full of executives from the company that makes Mooby the Golden Calf products.
69. Chicago comes into play again — as noted in the film, Jay and Bob previously came here in between Chasing Amy and Dogma in order to find Shermer, Illinois, the fictional suburb where John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club took place. It’s also where they met Bethany in Dogma.
70. Jersey Local 404 is the marijuana dealers’ union that Jay and Bob belong to, as seen in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. They present their membership cards this time, in the same way that Pumpkin Escobar did in Strike Back when they encountered in him Hollywood.
Open Your Mouth, Do It Yourself
70. The signatures for the President and Secretary of Jersey Local 404 are the signatures of Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, respectively.
71. Dave Mandel, creator of Veep and executive producer on Clerks: The Cartoon, makes a brief cameo outside of the Mooby’s as a guy double-fisting coffee cups. This is a follow-up to his cameo in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, in which he stood outside of a bus and drank a cup of coffee.
72. Every time you see anybody slamming on glass walls like Merkin does when he’s being arrested, you can safely assume it is probably a reference to the climax of The Graduate.
73. Jay’s “open your mouth, do it yourself” is the latest example of him being annoyed by Bob’s unwillingness to talk.”You can always tell that f—ing Amy story” came up in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Notably, though, it pretty much only comes up when the story (or joke) needs it to.
74. Miss McKenzie (played by Smith’s wife, Jen Schwalbach) is the name of her character in the universe of Tusk and Yoga Hosers, where she’s the mother to Harley Quinn Smith’s Colleen.
75. Her name tag also says “Missy,” the name of her character from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Smith has said that the two are not the same character, so it just happens that she plays two women named Missy, we guess.
76. Grant Hicks, the newscaster who sits next to Missy, is played by Brian O’Halloran, who also played Dante Hicks in Clerks and Gil Hicks in Mallrats. Grant was a newscaster in Dogma, who was murdered during Bartleby and Loki’s rampage in the third act but revived when God intervened to fix things.
77. Justice, Jay’s love interest from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, is back — and so is a brand new version of her musical, sexual intro. Apparently Jay knows the eggplant reference even if Bob doesn’t.
78. Jay getting taken from behind by Justice feels like a continuation of the homoerotic elements of his character. That might seem like a stretch, since a lot of heterosexual couples engage in “pegging” — but in that same scene, you can spot Jay reaching out to look at and touch Grant during intercourse with Justice.
79. Boo Boo Kitty F–k is the nickname Jay gave to Justice in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. It’s a long story. Later, though, we get Justice saying “Oh, you remembered!” when he uses the nickname — a callback to the action scene at the end of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. That same conversation (we’re jumping ahead but this is the last one, we promise) also references Justice’s jail time from the end of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
80. The bad review they leave for Merkin is nearly-identical (except with the names and circumstances changed) to the “all you motherf—ers are gonna pay” rant from the Mooby’s internet station in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
Kate Miccucci plays the clerk at the Mooby’s, which isn’t technically an Easter egg, but seems worth mentioning. No idea who the guy is manning the grill, but given the nature of the scene and his role, it seems impossible that he wouldn’t be somebody, so feel free to chime in below.
Jay and Silent Bob are in your hizouse!
81. As with the Mallrats gag from earlier, there’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back music playing as they approach Justice’s house.
82. “Lady lady lady Jay and Silent Bob are in your hiz-ouse!” Jay shouts as the door opens. When Justice invited Jay and Bob to join her, her friends, and their patsy in a van in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, they announced themselves by sliding the door open and shouting “Ladies, ladies, ladies, Jay and Silent Bob are in the hiz-ouse!”
83. “Come, son of Jor-El, kneel before Zod,” besides being a Superman II reference, is also what Jay shouted after knocking out a security guard in Mallrats.
84. Milly’s hockey gear makes her the latest character in the franchise to embrace hockey. In Clerks, they played it on the roof, in Mallrats, it was Brodie’s video game, and on and on.
85. Jay makes a sexually charged joke about the Super Friends cartoon by referring to intercourse with his ex-girlfriend as getting into “the Hall of Justice.”
86. Justice is the only character besides Jay and Bob who calls out that the fact that they’ve already done the whole “trip to Hollywood to stop the movie” thing before.
87. Millennium Falcon is his daughter’s name — although apparently she was originally Millennium…whatever Justice’s last name was…becuase Justice took Reggie Falcon’s last name after they got married. She piles onto the Star Wars gag by saying that she had been friends with Jay and Bob “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”
88. Milly’s room is decorated with a bunch of potential Easter eggs, but we only spotted a few really telling ones. One is the Bussing poster. There were also hockey trophies and a Harlequin card posted near the door (a nod to Harley Quinn’s real name).
“I didn’t even include that,” Smith told ComicBook.com of the Bussing poster. “I walked into her set, onto Milly’s set, and Nate [Jones], our production designer, who built that beautiful fake Quick Stop, had that poster hanging up. I was like, ‘Where the f–k did you get this?’ And he was like, ‘It was hanging up as they were coming out of theater at the end of Strike Back.’ I was like, “I know, but how did you get it?” He’s like, “We didn’t, we just kind of approximated it.” And I was like, ‘Wow, man, what a fucking great eye for detail.’”
89. Soapy’s t-shirt says “shut the f–k up” in individual letters using American Sign Language.
90. Bob’s favorite movies — A Quiet Place and The Shape of Water — obviously both center on having at least one main character who doesn’t talk.
Eric Carrasco’s Cameo
91. When Reggie & Justice leave, Jay and Bob turn around for the first of numerous shots that mirror them with the girls, in case you didn’t notice that Soapy being hearing-impaired gives them a story reason for her character not to talk.
92. Jay and Bob then turn around and huddle in an exaggerated yell-whisper, in the same way they did when they were talking about how to deal with Jason Biggs and James Van Der Beek in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which was itself the second such huddle in the movie, after Ben Affleck and Matt Damon did it in Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season.
93. RideMeNow driver #2 is played by Eric Carrasco, a former writer on Supergirl and current one on Smith’s Netflix He-Man series. You can see Bob eventually trying to wave away a stink — the last remnants of a fart joke that didn’t make the film’s final cut.
“He legit made me laugh on set,” Smith told us. “He did a look. There was a beat that we cut, a fart joke that we cut from the scene, and his expression on the fart joke, I kept. It’s actually like when Jay goes, ‘Holy s–t, she poisoned us.’ That was Eric reacting to a pretty loud fart instead.”
94. “I love sugar” is a nod to the way Brent (Seann William Scott) says “I love animals” in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
“Seann was one of my favorite parts of Strike Back,” Smith said. “We still quote him — me and Jason particularly. The, ‘I love animals.’ There’s a moment in this movie where Harley’s like, ‘Do you want some of my chocolate?’ And [Jay] goes, ‘S–t, yeah, I love sugar.’ That was our Seann William Scott shout-out, man.”
95. When Jay and Bob pass out, they come to and see Method Man and Redman. That’s a corollary to the scene in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back when they hallucinated the Scooby gang stealing their kidneys.
96. The “hit the road — the road, the road” thing is likely a reference to “the unwritten book of the road” from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, especially since it cuts right to Jay and Bob posed like Jay is going down on Bob. George Carlin played a hitchhiker who used oral sex to make his way across the country using “the book.”
97. “Just outside New Orleans” is the answer when Jay asks where they are after ditching the RideMeNow — which is true! That’s where they shot the movie.
98. Bob’s laughing at Jay, then hiding it with a serious expression when Jay looks, and then hiding a thumbs-up and a smile again, is a callback to when he did that with Suzanne during Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back when Jay was ranting at her.
99. Like in Strike Back, they end up in a van full of girls.
100. The blueprints (for Operation Predator Editor) look like, and serve the same basic purpose as, the blueprints Bob used for his schemes in Mallrats.
Can you dig it?
101. Holy Roller makes a reference to The Cannonball Run — a movie starring Burt Reynolds, another frequent reference in Smith movies. In Mallrats, Gwen revealed that she had sex on a pool table during the Halloween party, where she looked just like Burt Reynolds’s character in Smokey and the Bandit — except for the mustache. In Dogma, Jason Lee’s Azrael kills a woman named “Mrs. Reynolds” and takes control of her house as his evil base of operations.
102. Turns out, Holy Roller wasn’t really a pedophile, which explains the cross seen in the back of the van — but that only appears in the credits.
103. “Kick his ass to Asgard, where Thor lives” — this on comes up a bit later, when “Assguard” is the name of the portable toilets outside of the Klan rally.
104. I’d f–k Chris Hemsworth til he’s Thor – a nod to a Bluntman and Chronic montage in Jay & Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, where the “it makes ’em Thor” joke debuted.
105. “You girls are international diamond thieves, aren’t you?” Jay asks, suddenly convinced that he is being conned like he was by Milly’s mom.
106. Shan Yu’s lack of knowledge of the Bluntman and Chronic movie (she didn’t recognize Jay and Bob?) could be seen have been a clue, but her reaction to “any one of you girls wearing catsuits under your clothes?” is priceless in hindsight.
107. The expression on Bob’s face when the van rolls out and the girls leave them behind is the same reaction he had when the Critters of Hollywood car took Suzanne in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
108. The moment where they enter the an with their fists raised, ready to fight, and teeth clenched, is how they approached Biggs and Van Der Beek when they came out of their huddle in Strike Back — and the surprised “this isn’t necessary” reaction to the empty van is the same one they had when they saw that Suzanne had beat up their foes for them.
109. Just like the pin on Jay’s hat, there is a small buddy Christ on the dashboard of the van. while it presumably existed in previous scenes, every time we saw the movie, it jumped out at us when Jay sees the Klan lighting up their cross and slams his hand on the dashboard, causing the Buddy Christ to fall over.
110. The “Can you dig it?” is a nod to some of Chris Jericho’s early WWE catchphrases (Jericho plays the Klan leader).
The most important thing we’re ever gonna do — again
111. Silent Bob’s monologue is a modified version of Alec Baldwin’s speech from Glengarry Glen Ross. Baldwin played Leonardo Leonaro in Clerks: the Cartoon.
112. “Now who’s stupid, you dirty sheepf—er?,” which Milly shouts at the Klansmen, is what Jay said to Seann William Scott’s Brent after they threw him out of a moving fan in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
113. The Hollywood Babble-On sign at the Improv, which features Smith and Ralph “Ted Underhill” Garman, is one of the establishing shots for Los Angeles.
114. The shot of Milly as she looks at the Hollywood sign is a nod to Coal Miner’s Daughter.
115. We aren’t going to (and can’t) get into every Bluntman & Chronic cosplayer at Chronic Con, but let’s just say “there’s a bunch of them, and a lot of them are inside jokes,” and stick with that, right? It’s basically like any other popular character — think Deadpool — at Comic Con: you’ll have people who mash up all kinds of insane and clever stuff into their costumes.
116. We see a lot of brand placements, like Hot Topic (who did exclusive march for the movie) and Aftershock Comics — but the one that sticks out the most (because it plays into a gag from the credits) is Image Comics. Remember that one; we’ll come back around to it.
117. The Bluntman & Chronic comic book covers and action figures are real. There are a bunch of t-shirts and other merch that don’t exist in the world (although probably ill later), although it’s doubtful we’ll ever get that urn in mass production.
118. The outfit worn by Milly after she bought merch at Chronic Con is what Jay wore in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
119. “F–k Kevin James; Kevin can wait,” she says, not just continuing the Kevin Smith/Kevin James joke from earlier but name-dropping James’s sitcom Kevin Can Wait in the process.
120. Jay describes stopping the reboot as “the most important thing we’re ever gonna do. Again.”
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’s Keith Coogan
121. Diedrich Bader reprises his role as a security guard from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
122. After a bunch of jokes about the movie, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter‘s Dead’s Keith Coogan appears in the flesh.
123. Security Dick calls his fists the “Hammers of Justice,” a reference to Bader’s finale speech from Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
124. “The fishes are done, man” has been said a couple of times already, but it’s worth noting once Keith Coogan gets in on the joke himself.
125. The music playing as Jay and Bob make their way through the convention, running between rooms, is the same music that was playing as they navigated the Miramax lot with that same security guard chasing them.
126. Kevin Smith’s mother and brother are the cosplayers directly in front of Jay and Bob in the Biggs/Van Der Beek panel. Bob taps Smith’s mom on the shoulder and gives her a thumbs up.
127. The bickering, name-calling, and career-shaming between James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs is unchanged in 18 years, apparently.
128. The Comic Book Men cast make an appeance and Ming reads a poem about the series’ cancellation.
129. The Clerks 25th anniversary reunion panel features a bunch of actors from the movie — and Jay & Bob turn black and white, indicating that even in-universe they are kinda/sorta self-aware.
130. “Tube of Wonderful” from Chasing Amy shows up as they enter the room for Bluntman Beyond, Holden McNeil’s comic book podcast (which derives its name from Smith and Marc Bernardin’s Fatman Beyond).
Who are they? Harold and Kumar?
131. The “morose mother f—ers…smells like somebody s–t in their cereal” introduction is how Holden greeted Jay and Silent Bob when they came to his studio in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back — but even then, it was a reference to how Jay and Bob greeted Holden at the diner in Chasing Amy.
132. “What are you two dirt merchants doing in this neck of Hollywood?” is a parallel to his asking the pair “What are you two dirt merchants doing in this neck of the woods?” in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
133. Upon seeing the cables for Holden’s interview, Jay asks, “You trying to destroy the stage?” That’s another reference to the time he tried to prevent the game show from happening in Mallrats.
134. “Finger Cuffs,” the name Jay calls Alyssa when she arrives, is the nickname she had in high school, given to her by one of two men she engaged in a three-way sex act with. That nickname, and the story behind it, was what drove the insecure Holden away from Alyssa when they were dating in Chasing Amy.
135. Alyssa says that Holden’s comic Chasing Amy was “Always a story that should have been told from queer perspective, or a woman’s perspective, or any perspective other than a CIS white man’s,” and Silent Bob makes a puzzled face. That critique has been lobbed at Smith’s version of Chasing Amy a lot over the years.
136. “Who are they? Harold and Kumar?” Alyssa asks upon meeting Jay and Bob, which has echoes of the internet commenter in Strike Back who referred to the characters as “a third rate Cheech and Chong or Bil and Ted.”
137. The n-ts, n-ts, n-ts “rave music” sound used to simulate a porno soundtrack and suggest a sex act is something Brodie did in Mallrats.
138. When Holden explains in vitro fertilization, he tells Jay that he “filled the cup,” which references Jay’s joke from when he first met Justice in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
139. He further says that in vitro is “Science, bro,” which is likely a nod to the Marvel Universe’s “science bros.”
140. After that, Holden says that he met “a girl who loves me,” and makes a head move. That’s the same thign he did when he was telling Banky about Alyssa near the start of Chasing Amy.
I spend my days chasing Amy.
141. The hand motion Bob makes when he sees Amy is Holden’s “shared a moment” gesture from Chasing Amy.
142. The song that plays while Holden talks about Amy is “Stay” by Mary Born, a song that played during a key moment in Chasing Amy.
143. Holden’s speech about his kid being more interesting to him than the entertainment industry stuff is Smith’s defense of casting Harley in everything.
“I got to go one level deeper and stand there in the middle of the movie, put on the brakes, and make a speech through him, where I’m like, ‘Look, this is where I am in life now,’” Smith told ComicBook.com, talking about the impact of getting Ben Affleck back for the movie. “And it’s basically a speech for everybody who’s like, ‘You’re still making movies with your f—ing kid? Would you stop?’ And Holden pleads my case, where he’s just like, ‘Really? That’s all I care about right now. That’s who I am, that’s what I’ve been working toward.’”
144. During his speech, Holden says that before kids, you feel like you are the main character of the world — “Bruce Wayne in one lifelong issue of Detective Comics” — and then follows up with the joke that later you realize that “you aren’t Bruce Wayne anymore.” This is, of course, a pretty clear reference to his having been — and stopped being — Batman in the movies.
145. He also references “Bruce Wayne’s mom, whose name escapes me,” an obvious poke at the “Martha” scene from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
“The joke was in the script, but the look to camera, he gave us,” Smith told ComicBook.com. “It wasn’t scripted or anything….We did the first take, and that was the second take. I told him, ‘I got everything I need to cut the scene from the first take. Let’s just be loose and have fun. Do whatever you want in the second take.’ So on the second take when he does the Martha thing, he stops, because on Strike Back, we did that quite a bit. But I didn’t say, ‘Hey, you should do this.’ He just f—ing gave it to me for free. And I was behind camera just f—ing going, ‘Yes.’”
146. Holden’s conclusion to his speech — “So I spend my days chasing Amy, so to speak” — is a callback to the way Silent Bob ended his Amy story in Chasing Amy.
147. When Jay and Bob have left, Holden turns to Amy and makes a rapid-fire series of tongue-in-cheek references to the Ben Affleck movies Gone, Girl, The Town, Justice League, and Argo.
148. Kevin Smith comes out on stage and launches into his heart attack monologue — including a tongue-in-cheek “I don’t know if any of you have heard” line because he knows that he’s shared that story a lot over the last year and change.
149. “I hate this guy. He forces his kid to be in everything he makes,” says Milly (played by Kevin Smith’s daughter) as Kevin Smith talks on stage in a Kevin Smith movie.
150. Here’s a meta-joke: The Bluntman v Chronic movie scene that Kevin Smith shows the audience at Chronic Con in the movie…is the same scene he showed his panel audience at Comic Con International in San Diego this year.
Bluntman v Chronic
151. It probably goes without saying that Supergirl star Melissa Benoist and Batman Forever star Val Kilmer are cast in the Superman and Batman proxy roles for Bluntman v Chronic.
152. The gas grenade fired at Chronic looks like one of the Kryptonite gas canisters from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Chronic’s response to it is very similar to what Superman had in that movie (or Benoist’s Supergirl has sometimes had) when breathing the gas in.
153. Stoner icon Tommy Chong plays Alfred the butler (not that one, a different one).
154. The giant hand that pokes through the wall is from Cock-Knocker, played by Mark Hamill in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. At one point, Smith entertained the idea of having Ben Affleck play the role in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, before opting instead to write the Holden McNeil scene.
“I was going to bring him in and insert him into Bluntman and Chronic scene, Bluntman V Chronic, as Cock-Knocker,” Smith told us. “I asked him ‘So you want to come down and be Cock-Knocker?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, it’ll be fun.’ I slept on it. The next morning, I texted him. I said, ‘You know what, man? You’re making a trip all the way here. Let’s make it worth it. How would you like to play Holden instead? Because this thing takes place at a Bluntman and Chronic Con. And so, Holden created Bluntman and Chronic, co-created them with Banky. So it would make sense if you were here.’”
155. “He kinda looks like the director,” Milly says of Silent Bob, finally stating the obvious after like 10 jokes about how ugly Smith was.
156. Kevin Smith’s jorts not only make an appearance, but get referenced twice. The filmmaker regularly wears jean shorts and hockey jerseys, two things that Silent Bob ends up in later…
157. Backstage, Smith is wearing a George Carlin t-shirt. Carlin, the legendary comedian who played a selfish Cardinal in Dogma, passed away in 2008.
158. “F–k Cop Out,” Smith says when lighting up his blunt.
159. The mirror gag — where Silent Bob copycats Kevin Smith and tries to convince him that he isn’t an intruder but some kind of reflection or optical illusion — has been done to death, although probably the best known version is intro to The Patty Duke Show.
160. The first assistant director on Bluntman v Chronic is the same one from the Chaka Luther King version in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. He is played by Joseph Reitman, who was previously married to Shannon Elizabeth.
Worse Than House Party 4
161. The AD says that the production is “worse than House Party 4, trust me when I say that.” While we have never heard any notoriously bad stories about the production of House Party 4, it may just be an echo of Chaka’s line that “this movie’s gonna make House Party look like House Party II,” from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
162. Silent Bob is wearing a a Silent Bob jersey with the number 37 on it when he re-enters the stage dressed as Kevin Smith. This may be his first really significant wardrobe change since Dogma.
163. Supergirl stars Chris Wood and Jesse Rath play a pair of Bluntman and Chronic cosplayers with terrible accents, while Smith’s Fatman Beyond podcasting partner Marc Bernardin sits stoically next to them.
164. “She probably paid to see Yoga Hosers,” Rath’s character quips when Shan Yu (or whatever her real name is) pulls a gun on Kevin Smith.
165. “Commence collusion” isn’t really an Easter egg, but it is a joke that really only works just now. It’s the only suggestion of any contemporary/Trump-inspired humor in the Russian spy stuff, which otherwise feels like it could come out of pretty much any ’80s movie.
166. “One of ’em was wearing a catsuit, I f—ing knew it,” Jay yells as Shan Yu pulls her regular clothes off to reveal her catsuit. Remember, he DID ask.
167. Iron Bob is, pretty much, just the Mark 1 Iron Man costume with bits of it modified to look like Silent Bob instead of a vaguely humanoid form. It was designed by Robert Kurtzman, who worked on both Tusk and Yoga Hosers, as well as From Dusk Til Dawn and Bad Boys II, among many others.
168. “Our Scrap is Metal, Man,” declares the sign which, because comic nerd, makes us feel like it’s a Metal Men reference.
169. Stan Lee’s role in the movie was originally going to be in the Chronic Con scene, where he would be taken hostage rather than Kevin Smith. Instead of running him down like they do with Smith, they likely would have talked about his value as a pop culture phenomenon.
“Stan was definitely meant to be in the movie,” Smith told ComicBook.com. “He was the entire third act of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. He was the dude on stage that the Russians came to get. It was Stan-centric, and then of course, we lost Stan. So at that point, I changed it. I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to be there on set, so Kevin Smith can be the guy that they’re going after. That’s one less person I have to ask to do something.’”
170. The public declaration of wildly inapprorpriate sexual stuff during the convention (by Jay) feels like Brodie during the game show in Mallrats.
We won’t count it, but we will SAY it: We have no idea whether “somebody save me” was a Smallville reference or not…
Marvel Gonna Sue Somebody
171. We get two quick-hit MCU references with a Russian saying “is Robert Downey, Jr.!” and Kevin Smith saying “Marvel gonna sue somebody” as Iron Bob tears into the convention hall. The latter is a reference to “I think George Lucas gonna sue somebody,” what Chaka Luther King said in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back after Jay, Bob, and Mark Hamill’s Cock-Knocker all started having a light saber duel.
172. Ahead of the big battle, Jay cries out in Valyrian — and then Kevin Smith points it out to the audience. This language is from Game of Thrones.
173. “I’ll f–k anything that moves,” Jay’s battle cry, is actually one of the first thing he ever said on camera in Clerks.
174. Hard to know whether the “KGB Sonic Disruptor” is a reference to the Marvel Comics series from the ’80s Sonic Disruptors, but we’re going to count it.
175. “Nyet-flix” — a mash-up of “nyet” and “Netflix,” seems to be what Shan Yu says as she’s knocked out.
176. After Milly says “let’s get aggressive, girls,” the face that Sophie makes looks like the “lion face” that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon make while preparing for Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
177. “All that’s left is the emotional denouement,” Smith says, which would just be standard storytelling speak, except that “denouement” was one of the title cards that flashed on the screen in Clerks.
178. There is now a Redbox in front of the former RST Video, presumably indicating that, like Jay and Bob, the block of stores they stand in front of is growing and evolving, too.
179. The stories Jay tells Milly in front of the stores are from Mallrats, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and Clerks II.
180. Milly says “f–k ’em if they can’t take a joke,” which may be a nod to a deleted scene from Chasing Amy where, after being insulted by comic shop employees, Banky Edwards throws a garbage can through their window — Do The Right Thing-style — with a note attached that said, in part “like my grandmother always said, ‘f–k ’em if they can’t take a joke…and break their windows.’”
No one swipes right on Groot
181. “Sometimes we used to get so high we thought we were a cartoon,” Jay says just as the audio cuts out, referencing either Clerks: The Cartoon or Jay & Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, or both.
182. As the film ends, Dante pulls up again and there’s a quiet visual gag where he can’t open the shutters on the window because there is gum in the locks. That is how Clerks began, so it’s a nice way to end this movie (kind of — the credits continue on and contain a lot of new material).
183. Jay says in a deleted scene used in the credits that someone “Uses Jaws as a unit of measurement just like we do.” Jaws references date back to Clerks and are a staple in Kevin Smith movies.
184. Stan Lee’s cameo in this movie, rather than being a Russian hostage, is instead just Stan Lee and Kevin Smith “rehearsing a scene” for Jay & Silent Bob Reboot. The genuine affection the two have for one another comes through, and it makes for a funny and heartwarming reminder of the man behind so much of Marvel’s success.
185. “Me and Silent Bob modeled our whole lives after Silas and Jamal,” Jay explains in an extended version of his How High rant in the comic shop. That is almost word for word the way he talked about Morris Day and Jerome in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.
186. Brodie Bruce’s daughter is Banner, he reveals in a scene cut from the movie but present in the credits. That means that her name is Banner Bruce, the reverse of Bruce Banner (the Incredible Hulk).
187. “Dear Sega Boy” and “normal one moment, a rage of emotions the next” are both references from Mallrats, although the aforementioned Hulk joke re: Brodie’s daughter makes that name-drop even funnier.
188. “No female swipes right on Groot here,” Jay says, both referencing the popularity of dating apps and comparing the usually-quiet Silent Bob to Groot, the member of the Guardians of the Galaxy who only says “I am Groot.”
189. When discussing whether or not to ditch Jay and Bob, Milly tells Jihad that they are not passing the Bechdel test — a standard created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel that asks, basically, whether a piece of media contains any scenes where two women are talking and it isn’t centered on men.
190. The Kush Brothers, the “weed millionaires” from Chronic Con, are actually the two kids that Jay and Bob almost beat up in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and the song one of them sings to demand payment from Jay is a variation on the one Jay sang at him in that movie.
Gum in the locks
191. Jay jokes that the lighting at Chronic Con has “more lens flare than a JJ Abrams movie,” which is a pretty self-explanatory joke.
192. Remember waaaay back when we talked about that Image Comics sign? Well, this movie actually includes a bit from a Walking Dead panel, in which Robert Kirkman reveals a terrible “truth” about the end of the series, and then gets a dual purple nurple from Jay and Bob for killing Carl and Glenn.
193. Holden says that while he wasn’t a fan of Ben Affleck and Kevin Smith’s collaboration Jersey Girl, “Affleck was the bomb as Batman, yo,” a reference to one of the most popular lines from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, when he says “Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms, yo.” Jay responds “Batfleck like a motherf—er,” an echo of his response to the Phantoms line in Strike Back.
194. Chris Hemsworth’s hologram promises us that he would never be in this movie because he has “like 37 franchises,” and then jumps on the “The dishes are done” train before signing off.
195. Lastly, we find out a secret that has hung over the View Askewniverse for 25 years: Who put the gum in the locks in Clerks? Jay and Silent Bob, of course. Who else would it be?
“That was a discovery while we were on set, while we’re standing out in front of the place,” Smith said. “It wasn’t even in the script; it was just me standing there and Brian’s pulling up in the wide [shot]. And so, I was like, ‘Do me a favor, and screw Jay at the line.’ And Jay goes, ‘Oh, because there’s gum in the locks like in Clerks.’ And I was like, ‘Well-remembered, my friend.’”
