Easter Eggs You Always Miss In Movies
Hunting for Easter eggs in movies has become a passion for large numbers of movie geeks out there. In fact, there's no shortage of YouTube channels whose whole deal is all about pointing out Easter eggs you might have missed in movies or even just their trailers. Movie sites and wikis abound with lists of Easter eggs to be found in your favorite movies.
And yet, even with all that, there are some Easter eggs from classic movies that don't appear on any site or YouTube video for some reason. You'd think with a whole cottage industry built around movie nerds sniffing out Easter eggs from every possibly corner that all the major ones would be accounted for, but these glaring omissions remain. Once we point them out to you, you'll wonder how you missed these for so long. Here's a whole bundle of movie Easter eggs that no one has ever thought to point out before now.
Blame the bunny
Mallrats was writer-director Kevin Smith's 1995 follow-up to his seminal cult film Clerks, back when his movies were about nerdy losers and comic books, and not about sexualizing his own daughter like some kind of hockey jersey-clad stoner Dario Argento. You might remember this movie for its classic scenes like the one where Stan Lee pops up to talk about Ben Grimm's junk, or the one with the schooner in the Magic Eye, or the one where Michael Rooker, currently beloved for his roles in The Walking Dead and Guardians of the Galaxy, licks butt juice off his hand. But for true cinephiles who are always looking to trump each other by uncovering the coolest and most obscure Easter eggs in movies, one scene in particular stands out.
Early in the film, lovable slacker Brodie gets dumped by his girlfriend Rene who is now dating Ben Affleck. Affleck then kidnaps Brodie and beats him up, but when Brodie's friends, including Jay and Silent Bob, ask him what happened, he lies and says the Easter Bunny (currently appearing at the mall in which the whole movie takes place) is the one who busted his nose. Jay and Silent Bob decide to avenge their pal Brodie in the way they know best: tactless violence.
But eagle-eyed viewers will catch an added layer to this scene. If you look in the background, you'll see several plastic Easter Bunnies holding baskets. And what's in those baskets? Yeah, boy, it's Easter eggs.
My Big Fat Greek Easter
My Big Fat Greek Wedding was an enormous sleeper hit in 2002, ultimately becoming the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time and spinning off a short-lived sitcom and a not-quite-as-successful-either-critically-or-financially sequel 14 years later. It also provided the title format for a whole host of casually racist reality shows.
The premise of the film? A Greek-American woman named Toula falls in love with a super WASPy dude named Ian and has to introduce him to her family, who she worries will shock his super WASPy sensibilities with their spanakopita and their Windex and what have you. In the scene where Toula finally brings Ian to meet her family, she is teaching him the Greek phrase "Christos anesti" when her father brings in what looks like a basket of smooth red stones that he and Toula then bang together.
Truly astute viewers, however, will know that "Christos anesti" is Greek for "Christ is risen" and it's what you say at Easter because Toula just said so in the movie. Furthermore, in Greek Easter tradition, the red things you pick up and knock together to see which one cracks first aren't painted stones. That's right, you sharp-eyed hunter, you: they're Easter eggs. They might be hard to spot if you're an American looking for pastel-colored or even plastic hen fruit, but impress your friends by pointing out that in Greek Orthodox tradition, bright red eggs symbolize the blood of Christ, which might actually be slightly more pleasant to imagine eating than hard-boiled eggs.
Happy Critter Day
The Critters franchise spawned a series of four films between 1986 and 1992, riding a wave of post-Gremlins popularity for movies about weird little dudes, together with Troll, Ghoulies, Munchies, and Top Gun. Critters specifically is about man-eating aliens who can roll up into a ball like Sonic the Hedgehog and the space bounty hunters who are tracking them down.
The installment in question here is 1988's Critters 2: The Main Course, a film which Roger Ebert raved "has no reason for existence." What we can conclude from this review is that this "Roger Ebert," whoever he is, had no eye for detail in film because Critters 2 has one of the coolest and grossest Easter eggs in film history.
In one scene, a man is walking through the church grounds when he notices his fly is open. While adjusting it, he sees a recently hatched egg on the ground. When he leans over to inspect it, a bunch of Critters jump in through his open fly and eat his stomach and presumably other abdominal organs before throwing his dead body through the church window.
What a casual viewer might not notice is that this man is actually dressed like the Easter Bunny, and so the implication is that the egg he sees on the ground is a weird Easter egg, when in fact it's actually a Critter egg. A very cool twist on the standard Easter egg with a nice double meaning for those paying extra close attention.
Bill and Ted's Yolk-us Journey
Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey is the vastly underappreciated 1991 sequel to 1989's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, a movie that somehow managed to both kick off Keanu Reeves's career and end Alex Winter's. Bogus Journey is the rare teen comedy that dares to center on the things today's teens really care about, like Ingmar Bergman references and KISS covers. While the original film is about Bill and Ted traveling through time to gather historical personages in order to get a passing grade on a history presentation, Bogus Journey has relatively little time travel and instead focuses on the titular teens getting killed by evil robot versions of themselves and going to Hell. It rules.
While in Hell, the two dudes are forced to face their greatest fears, which include Bill's grandmother and a military school colonel who assigns them infinity push-ups. The scariest vision of all, however, is one in which Ted is reverted to a younger version of himself who had stolen a basket full of candy with his younger brother's name on it. As he digs into the basket, which contains some other objects as well, he hears a voice shaming him for his misdeed.
This voice belongs to a Chucky-faced pink rabbit who chases and taunts him for making his brother cry, revealing that the basket Ted stole was his brother's Easter basket, meaning those other non-candy objects in the basket? You guessed it. More Easter eggs.
Guardians of the Gal-eggs-y?
2012's Rise of the Guardians is an incredibly rad animated film about the Guardians of Childhood, a secret society of magical figures who help protect children and fight to keep childhood magical for them. Members include Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and Jack Frost.
While the film was released around Thanksgiving in the U.S. to catch some of that holiday season box office and even though the highlight of the film is Alec Baldwin's Cossack-style Santa Claus and his army of yetis, the bulk of the action of the film actually takes place in the spring, with many of the story's events having dire consequences for one of the Guardians known as E. Aster Bunnymund.
While it would take too long to explain the details here, it turns out that this name is actually a cleverly hidden reference to the Easter Bunny, which would explain some of Bunnymund's characteristics, like the fact that he's a large talking bunny obsessed with Easter. It also gives a new significance to the host of seemingly sentient, mobile eggs that follow him around. Once you know Bunnymund is actually the Easter Bunny, it becomes obvious that these aren't the normal walking colored eggs that you see all the time. These are actually Easter eggs. Cool, right? And all it took to figure it out was a little word puzzle solving. It definitely makes all that time spent playing the Jumble in the newspaper feel like it was worth it.
Nightmare Before Easter
Here's one of those scenes that only make sense thanks to fan theories from the internet, but if those theories are right, it makes for a cool and unexpected Easter egg.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 stop-motion animated movie that posits that every major holiday has its own town devoted to the celebration of that holiday. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, accidentally stumbles across a portal to Christmas Town and becomes obsessed with it. He decides Halloween Town will run Christmas this year and so he sends his minions Lock, Shock, and Barrel to kidnap Santa Claus so Jack can do up the Yuletide in his own stripey, spiraly, Tim Burton Hot Topic wet dream aesthetic that year.
The trick-or-treating trio don't initially come back with Santa Claus, however. Instead they bring back a roughly human-sized rabbit carrying a basket and wearing a sash that says "Happy Easter" on it. Jack tells them they went through the wrong door and they need to apologize to the rabbit.
Now here's where the cool fan theory kicks in: Since each of the portals leads to a different holiday, one of those doors might lead to some kind of Easter Town, since Easter is a major holiday in some cultures. That would mean that this man-sized, basket-toting leporine is actually the Easter Bunny, and those lumps in his basket are probably those tasty Easter eggs we've been hunting. That is, if the theory is true.
Horrible Holidays
Holidays is a 2016 horror anthology film based on the theme of, well, holidays, with each of eight shorts focused on a different holiday such as St. Patrick's Day or Father's Day, directed by a different indie horror director. Probably the best known of all the contributors is Kevin Smith, who wrote and directed the Halloween segment, in which he cast his own daughter as a cam girl who forces a guy to mutilate himself all in service to a truly tortured pun based on the Canadian pronunciation of "Halloween."
Director Nicholas McCarthy, apparently tired of the positive reaction to his 2012 horror flick The Pact, wrote and directed the Easter segment for this movie, in which the Easter Bunny is a rabbit monster that resembles a mostly naked man wearing a crown of thorns and a Jesus diaper, bearing the stigmata of the crucified Christ and spawning baby chicks from the holes in his hands. Given the opportunity to tell the scariest Easter story possible, McCarthy decided to answer the question "What does a bunny have to do with the crucifixion?" with the kind of cutting observation only an auteur director or a particularly edgy 10-year-old in your Sunday School class can provide.
Anyway, if you look closely at the beginning of this clip, you'll see the Jesus bunny monster emerges from an egg that rolls onto the scene.Think about it. The Easter bunny was in there. That's right, baby: You just found another movie Easter egg.
The big picture
Universal Pictures has been using an image of the planet Earth with some version of its name superimposed on it since basically the beginning of its existence, even if it has evolved quite a bit in the studio's century-plus history. One thing has been consistent, however: It's always the logo on top of our regular old round globe Earth. Or is it?
Hop is a 2011 film from Universal that finally put to celluloid the traditional story you've all known since childhood — that the Easter Bunny has a son who would rather play drums in a rock and roll music band than deliver Easter baskets, and whose dooks are actually jelly beans instead of nutrient-rich cecotropes coated in a thin layer of mucus like a regular rabbit's.
The genius behind the hidden Easter egg in Hop is that it comes before the movie even starts. Before the opening credits even roll. Yeah, that's right. Scrub that cursor on the YouTube clip all the way back to the beginning to see what you might have missed in the theater because you were digging popcorn kernels out of your lap. What do you notice? That familiar Universal globe isn't quite how you remember it. It isn't round. (And, no, it isn't flat either, weirdos.) It's kind of ... oval? You might call it egg-shaped?
If you think about the theme of the movie — a rock and roll music Easter Bunny — then you know it's not just an egg planet.
Bugs and Eggs
Easter Yeggs is a 1947 theatrical short starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd that sees Bugs assigned the duty of delivering a basket of colored eggs given to him by the Easter Rabbit, who claims that his feet are too sore to finish the job. The first house Bugs visits features a young child who beats Bugs up while shouting, "I want an Easter egg! I want an Easter egg!" a sentiment everyone reading this list can get behind. Hopefully Bugs comes through with one for us all. At the next house, Bugs comes across Elmer Fudd who is apparently in the middle of some infantilism role-play, and it all ends up with Bugs blowing up the Easter Rabbit with a bomb, the traditional ending for any good holiday special.
Now, to a modern audience the title of this short may seem rather unusual. The word "yegg" is not used very often in modern parlance, but a quick glance at the dictionary reveals a yegg is a safecracker or burglar, which maybe describes the first kid Bugs visits? Anyway, if you look up yegg in a rhyming dictionary, it turns out it rhymes with "egg." Is it possible then that the title is meant to be a reference to Easter eggs? Are the colored eggs Bugs is given by the Easter Rabbit actually Easter eggs? Maybe the Dead End Kid — and we — got what we wanted after all.
A visitor from another village
Although these days Rankin/Bass Productions is perhaps best known for its Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, they actually produced a large number of non-Christmas specials between 1964 and 1987, including a frankly staggering three separate origins for the Easter Bunny in a span of six years.
The last of these three Easter Bunny specials was 1977's The Easter Bunny Is Comin' to Town, which, as the name implies, is a sequel to 1970's Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, and actually follows the template set out by that previous film maybe a little too closely.
Filling the role of the Winter Warlock from Santa Claus is a grumpy bear named Gadzooks who has a tendency to steal anything holiday-related that anyone tries to carry past his home on Big Rock Mountain. In one scene, the future Easter Bunny, Sunny, tries to cross the mountain only to be accosted by Gadzooks. When Gadzooks inspects Sunny's basket looking for snacks, he finds the basket is full of colored stones that Sunny intends to sell as paperweights.
A close viewing of the film, however, will call to mind an earlier scene in which Sunny and his friends actually painted a large number of eggs bright colors in order to specifically fool Gadzooks. So not only does this scene feature some cool Easter eggs, it actually reveals the true, historically accurate origin of Easter eggs. Not too shabby!
Who Hard-Boiled Roger Rabbit
1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the most ambitious crossover event in history, no matter what Marvel Studios says. Where else can you see Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Droopy, and Pinocchio in one movie? If Marvel really wanted an ambitious crossover, they would have had Thanos and Darkseid playing dueling pianos.
Anyway, one scene in particular stands out to fans scouring this reference-laden flick for Easter eggs. In this scene, human detective Eddie Valiant is taunted by an egg-peeling barfly for working a job with a toon. Eddie angrily shoves the egg in the lout's mouth before we learn that Eddie's long-standing anti-toon prejudice comes from the fact that a toon killed his brother.
It might seem like a stretch, but could this egg be an Easter egg? Hear us out: Disney is known for its perfectionism and its animated films are filled with — what would you call them? — like little hidden references and details in the background that you would have to be really paying attention to see? Is there a term for that? Anyway, it's unlikely that such a noticeable choice would be meaningless.
So, a prominent inclusion of an egg in a movie that stars a rabbit should be setting off some alarm bells in your head. Egg plus rabbit? Sounds like Disney thought they could slip an Easter egg past us without us noticing.
If you made it all the way to the end, congratulations! Happy Easter 2018, and happy April Fools' Day to anyone who doesn't celebrate Easter.