- This episode’s title is a reference to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
- After Kyle mocks him, Peter says that he's making him sound like Michael Stipe, which was R.E.M.'s frontman.
- The scene in which Stewie visits the Institute of Chicago, erroneously referred to as the Chicago Museum of Art, is a direct homage to the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The painting Stewie stares into is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by post-impressionist painter, Georges Seurat. The song accompanying this segment is the original from the film, and is a cover of the acoustic version of the song by The Dream Academy of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths.
- Parodying Gremlins, Peter feeds a mogwai a drumstick after midnight, causing it to turn into Fran Drescher, whose head Peter then microwaves. Fran Drescher was last seen in “Fifteen Minutes of Shame.”
- When Herbert says his phone is ringing, he imitates the Nokia tune.
- When Brian advises Stewie to “wait and see” whether or not he has cancer, Stewie says “Jim Henson had a wait and see attitude, and look what happened to him. Now we’ve got wrong-sounding Muppets,” a reference to Henson’s failure to properly address a cold he had, which led to pneumonia, and ultimately his death in 1990.
- Dick Cheney is portrayed as a Walmart greeter in a cutaway. He greets each customer with “Go fuck yourself,” a reference to a 2004 incident where he said those words to Senator Patrick Leahy after he asked the Vice-president about Halliburton’s alleged war profiteering.
- In a parody of TaB soft drink commercials in the ’80s, after getting off his beach chair during a tan, Stewie drinks a can of TaB, then slowly looks at the camera.
- A parody of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes’ Tony the Tiger called Terry the Tiger is seen in the Griffin kitchen, saying “They’rrrrrrrrrre foooood!”
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