Wasted Talent/References

• At the beginning of the episode, Meg is reading Popularity for Dummies.
• Alexis Radcliffe's name is a reference to Radcliffe College, a separate all-women's college to complement Harvard's once all-male insitution. The two were completely joined in 1999.
• Death reappears after “Death Is a Bitch” and it is revealed that he drives a Volkswagen Beetle. This part also reveals Death’s face.
• Roughly the first half of the episode is a homage to the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Upon finding the winning scroll Peter is instructed by a stranger to run home as fast as he can to his house. Pawtucket Pat and his Chumba wumbas are a parody of Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompas. Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket and Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe are depicted during the tour of the brewery. The music played when Peter finds his scroll is identical to the music played in Willy Wonka when Charlie finds his golden ticket. During the Pawtucket Pat song, the lyrics "You'll drive drunker than Oksana Baiul" refers to 1994 Winter Olympics champion Oksana Baiul's 1997 drunk driving accident because of which she entered an alcohol rehab program in 1998.
• The Mexican actor Pawtucket Pat hires to stage the shooting is Cheech Marin.
• The Chumbawumba characters are a reference to the band Chumbawamba who are best known in the US for their 1997 hit “Tubthumping,” the lyrics of which reference the pleasure of drinking.
• The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones appears.
• Peter’s piano repertoire is movie and TV show theme songs, including Dallas, Nine to Five, The Incredible Hulk, The X-Files and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
• At the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme that Peter plays, Mary Richards is seen in the audience, whereupon she throws her hat in the air as she did in the opening credits of that show. She and the hat freeze as they do in the credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but in typical Family Guy bending of the rules, the audience around her keeps moving at normal speed.
• Lois compares Peter to “the idiot” from Shine.
• In a scene, Cap’n Crunch is speaking to the don from “There’s Something About Paulie” (who himself resembles Vito Corleone), requesting a hit on Count Chocula in retaliation for claims made by Count Chocula stating that Cap’n Crunch cuts the roof of peoples’ mouths. This relates to the claim that the cereal actually did cut your mouth, although this notion was dismissed in the early 1990s.
• The last scene, with the last brain cell in Peter’s brain, parodies The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last” (in the same way as the Futurama episode “A Head in the Polls.”)
• In the first scene in the concert hall, a conversation takes place between a father, a mother and a son, where the father makes a reference to buying bad crack from a friend of the son, the father bears a striking resemblance to and it may be a reference of the “I learned it by watching you” commercial which was part of the US anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA). The commercial referenced first aired in the 1980s.
• The end credits of this episode parodies the "sad walking-away song from The Incredible Hulk".
• Peter was on the 70s-80s game show Password with Tony Randall in a flashback.

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