Brian: Portrait of a Dog/References

• "X: Portrait of a Y" is a fairly common title form. However, given Brian's travails in this episode, the title might refer to the 70s TV movies "Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" and/or "Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway."
• "If you scratch him, does his leg not shake?" Brian's court speech recalls Shylock's "if you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech in The Merchant of Venice.
• The scene in whicn Lois knocks on the bathroom door and Brian says "Come." is a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard does the same when someone comes to the door of his ready room.
• The opening of the show references the sitcom Eight is Enough
• Liza Minnelli is seen saying "Come on baby, Momma's gotta sparkle..." to an M&M. This is a reference to her drug and alcohol addiction that she went into rehab for in 1984.
• Before the dog show, Brian acts like the director, Joe Gideon, in All That Jazz, using eye drops, taking a deep breath, and then saying "Showtime!"
• In the dog show, Brian is introduced as "Brain," the opposite of what occurred when Brain from Pinky and the Brain appeared on Gyp-Parody. (This may not be a reference.)
• After Peter tells Brian to "stop being a bad dog", Brian storms out of the house. Peter says, "Don't worry, he won't go far without this," holding an engine part, in a parody of the scene in The Sound of Music when the nuns reveal they have sabotaged the Nazi soldier's cars.
• When Brian is kicked out of the Sicilian restaurant, he comes across the dogs from the Lady and the Tramp, in a parody of the famous spaghetti scene.
• When Brian is hiding from the police (a scene which parodies Raiders of the Lost Ark), he finds Joyce DeWitt, who played Janet Wood on Three's Company.
• The family references Match Game when they ask "How hot is it?" in response to Meg's comment about the heat.
• Peter writes MacGyver asking him to save his dog; he sends him a drinking straw, a rubber band and a paper clip, referencing the character's ability to concoct ingenious uses for mundane household items.
• During Brian's parole hearing, he references the court case Plessy v. Ferguson, an infamous U.S. Supreme Court case that approved segregation in 1896.
• When Brian gets out of the car, Lois is singing the song "[Anything Goes]" from the Cole Porter musical of the same name.
• Lois flattens the Pillsbury Doughboy with a rolling pin.
• The final scene, in which Brian drinks from the "people" water fountain, is a reference to the ending of the novel and TV movie, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which the title character, a black woman in the segregated South, does the same at a "white" water fountain.

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