The Best Easter Eggs You Didn’t Notice

photo courtesy of unsplash / jan vasek

After countless episodes and like, six hours of scouring the internet, we compiled a list of the best easter eggs from your favorite shows.

The Office — The George Foreman Grill

Okay, full disclosure, The Office is full of great easter eggs, but the BEST one has to be during one of the most uncomfortable episodes in the series. Remember back in season two when Micheal burned his foot on the George Foreman grill he placed next to his bed? You know, so he could wake up to the smell of bacon? That same grill shows up again during the “Dinner Party'' episode next to the tiny bed Micheal’s been relegated to. It’s kind of hard to believe Jan would willingly sleep in the same room with Micheal and his George Foreman sizzling pig meat at 7 AM, but relationships are all about giving and taking right?

WandaVision — Show Within a Show Credits

WandaVision is a show within a show, and it takes inspiration from some of the most iconic sitcoms throughout the decades for each episode. Complete with era-appropriate music, gags, and most importantly, end credits. The credits Wanda uses for each episode don’t match the actual cast and crew for the actual show, but she does include the names of some lesser-known employees at Marvel. In the fifth episode, Wanda includes names like Courtney Young as a Production Manager, but her real role in Marvel is as a dialect coach. Patrick Haskew is another one. He’s a visualization supervisor for the MCU team, but in the wonderfully dark world of WandaVision, he’s a hairstylist (and a good one, Wanda’s perm looks great). It’s honestly really nice to see some of the lesser celebrated crew get some attention, even if it’s only a little bit. The Marvel Cinematic Universe took a lot of people to create, and if you ask us, they all deserve a little more praise.

Atlanta — “Awaken My Love”

In the ninth episode of Atlanta’s first season, Earn finds himself sitting in a woke white guy’s office, full of mementos from his trip to Africa and of Black culture. It’s really surreal to look at, and while we’re listening to this Craig guy lecture Earn on why he should go back to Africa to reconnect with his roots, we barely notice that he’s got a vinyl of Childish Gambino’s album “Awaken My Love” on his shelf. Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino) writes and stars in Atlanta, and this was actually the first time the album cover was publicized— two months before the album was even released. It went on to go platinum, so at least woke-white-guy Craig knows good music when he hears it.

Friends — The Doodle Board

The diehard Friends fans will have noticed this when they rewatched the series for the third time. Though, for those only vaguely familiar with it, the doodle board in Joey’s apartment has a different message for each episode. At first, it corresponded with the plot of each episode, but as the show went on, it started to detract into reminders for the guys to buy groceries or random drawings with impressive amounts of detail. What’s even more impressive is that a group of friends can afford a 1,500 square foot apartment in New York City while somehow never going to work.

Avatar: The Last Airbender — Classical Chinese in the Intro

We can all agree that Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest animated TV shows to ever grace the small screen. Period. During the intro of every episode, we zoom in on a map with characters that most 9 to 14-year-olds wouldn’t be able to make out even if they could pause their DVR and had Google Translate at the ready. Those characters aren’t in ordinary Mandarin, but rather Classical Chinese, a written form of Chinese from the 5th century. The characters next to the four nations read, “benevolent water,” “strong earth,” “fierce fire,” and “harmonious air.” The symbols at the top and bottom of the screen form a couplet, that roughly translates into, “Powers are divided into Four / The World [all under heaven] is guided by one.” It’s so mind-blowing how much attention to detail there was for this show, and it’s one of the many things that makes Avatar: The Last Airbender so great.