The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz/References

• The opening scene shows the Griffin family watching Aquaman on television portrayed as a lazy, unfair ruler who abuses his powers to command sea-life by giving them trivial errands.
• In the opening sequence, Peter summons Bill Lumbergh from the film Office Space to tell Lois she needs to “not complain about this” and then, “and if you could sit at the kids’ table, that’d be great.”
• Stewie tells the audience to go watch Desperate Housewives on ABC for five seconds to see how ugly the women are. He then makes a comment about actress Marcia Cross’s face looking like someone stretching silly-putty over their knee. The first half-hour of Desperate Housewives’s timeslot competes with Family Guy on FOX and, in most of Canada. Coincidentally, Marcia Cross is on screen for that entire five second flip.
• Brian torments Stewie by forcing him to watch The View. In this version, the women act very much like farm hens, clucking and such as they sit. Star Jones Reynolds even lays an egg. Coincidentally, there was a MADtv sketch in season 10 where it portrayed the female hosts of The View as clucking, cackling hens (with castmember Michael McDonald as a farmer who kills one of them when she doesn’t produce eggs for him). This is in part of the criticism of the show in which many complain that there is too much talking.
• Peter watches Jaws 5: Fire Island, where everybody seems to be a stereotypical homosexual. Mike Henry, using his voice for the performance artist, does the voice of the great white shark. Additionally, this might depict the well known idea that Jaws 4 was considered an absolutely horrible movie.
• Peter dances with Paula Abdul in footage of the video for Opposites Attract. He is superimposed over the animated role of MC Skat Kat, and sings an altered version of the original song’s lyrics, mainly replacing the line “Opposites attract” with “I’m dressed like a cat.” According to the DVD commentary, Paula Abdul had to come in and rerecord the song since the technical staff couldn’t separate her singing and replace MC Skat Kat’s lines with Peter’s.
• Peter describes Jesus going through a journey similar to Quantum Leap.
• Stewie bathes with Kathy Bates in a parody of a scene in About Schmidt.
• When Francis baptizes Stewie “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” Peter adds in “and Space Ghost.” Space Ghost was the protagonist of both an old Hanna-Barbera television show, and a parody late-night talk show parody from the mid-1990s.
• When the doctor tells Lois and Peter of Stewie’s condition, Lois asks if Stewie “will have to go through what John Travolta did in that movie.” Peter fearfully asks if he’ll have to take Stewie’s face off, like in Face/Off, in which the protagonist and antagonist traded faces. Lois then states that she was referring to The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
• The vaudeville duo sings “Fatty’s in a little jam, dead girl, dead girl” to the tune of “Camptown Races,” and refers to silent movie comedian Fatty Arbuckle and accusations that he raped and murdered budding starlet Virginia Rappe.
• After Peter converts to Mormonism, he says that one of his new wives is the “Kramer” of his collection, a reference to Seinfeld.
• A man tells his wife to imagine “a happy healthy baby boy at play. Now put him in a magic bubble and release him into the universe.” When Stewie, in a bubble, rolls by, the man tells his wife to imagine Lindsay Lohan naked and doing a backwards crab walk. Later on, Lohan appears at Peter’s door doing just that (in an alternate scene on the Volume 4 DVD, the person at the door was the Hindu guru who Peter tells that the dot on his head was from the laser sighting on a sniper rifle).
• Stewie announces that he has had a horrible morning rolling around in his bubble, with the flashback imitating the "Pinball Number Count" sequence featured on Sesame Street sung by The Pointer Sisters.
• Kirk Cameron (who did not provide his voice in this episode) appears at the First United Church of the Fonz to convert some of the members of Peter’s church to Christianity. In reality, the former Growing Pains star is an evangelical Christian himself.
• When watching television, Peter listens to television announcers that describe comedies in a light and airy tone, then switch to dark and menacing for dramas. ABC in the 1980s and 1990s was known for doing this (though other channels today carry on this tradition).
• Peter incorporates a number of elements from Fonzie in his religion. Peter tells the congregation to “sit on it,” and then “let us ‘Aaaayyyy!” two of Fonzie’s catch phrases. There is also a motorcycle in the church, as well as a jukebox, a reference to Fonzie’s trademark move of pounding his hand on a jukebox to automatically make it play his song. Peter also refers to the “mystery” of Richie’s older brother (who was never seen again after the first episode of Happy Days) and reads a lesson to the congregation from “Potsie’s Letter to the Tuscaderos.”
• After everyone leaves Peter’s religion, Peter, Brian, and Francis talk about their disgust with Madonna’s career, attitude, clothing choice, father issues, and the men she has dated.
• After Stewie is released from his bubble, he says to Brian that he and his friends at Cobra Kai will take him down, referring to the name of the gang of bullies in The Karate Kid.
• The ending sequence of Family Guy mirrors that of the opening for Happy Days and uses the song “Rock Around the Clock” by ill Haley and his Comets, the opener for Happy Days’ seasons one and two. (According to the DVD commentary, they used the Bill Haley song because they were refused the rights to the Happy Days title theme song.)
• In a flashback, Peter buys a Aaron Neville megaphone.
• In a deleted scene found on the DVD, Peter says to his followers, “There is no god but Fonzie, and Richie is his prophet,” parodying a common Islamic phrase, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.”
• In a deleted scene on the Region 4 Volume 4 DVD release, Stewie talks to Brian about the Anime series Ojamajo Doremi, thinking that it’s like a kids’ version of Sex and the City. This is possibly a reference to a lolicon-esque comment made about the show by Al Kahn.
• There are currently+ 9 different groups on Facebook called The First United Church of the Fonz (with some slight name alternations in each) in honor of the episode.
• Peter supposedly converts to Mormonism and takes three new wives, a reference to the common misconception that modern-day Mormons still practice polygamy. In reality, polygamy has not been a part of the LDS church for over 100 years; only break-off groups which are not affiliated with the actual church practice polygamy, and any member of the actual Mormon church who is found practicing polygamy is excommunicated. However, one of Peter's new wives correctly states that Mormons don't drink alcohol; as Peter himself is an avid drinker, he promptly gets rid of all three new wives by stuffing them in trash cans and pretending he never "converted" to Mormonism.

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