Last Exit to Springfield/References

Cultural references

 * The title of the episode is a homage to Hubert Selby Jr.'s controversial book Last Exit to Brooklyn. Also, the story of Homer becoming an union boss is very loosely based on the book's fifth part 'Strike'.
 * The body of the union president is seen buried under a football field, a homage to the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa.
 * Mr. Burns' outfit is based on Buster Brown.
 * Homer's imagination of a life of organized crime is based on the famous San Gennaro sequence in The Godfather Part II, accepting donuts rather than a necklace and an orange.
 * Lisa has a dream that echoes the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine, which Al Jean says had to be changed enough so that everything was slightly different due to legal reasons.
 * In that dream, George Harrison says: "Look lads, it's Lisa in the sky", and John Lennon: "No diamonds, though" while Lisa is flying over their (purple) submarine. This is a reference to the famous song of The Beatles: "Lucy in the sky with Diamonds", which also featured in the film. Another factor to the dream is that when Lisa is flying, clouds forming the word HATRED are shown (it was LOVE in the original movie).
 * The scene where Lisa acquires her monstrous braces and breaks her mirror after laughing maniacally due to the trauma of witnessing her braces is based on when Jack Napier sees his new disfigured appearance during his transformation into the Joker in the 1989 film Batman.
 * The song played by Lisa is Mason Williams' "Classical Gas".
 * Before Mr. Burns shuts off the power to the town in response to the strike, he says, "From Hell's heart I stab at thee" which is a reference to Captain Ahab's curse, from the film Moby Dick.
 * The workers' resistance to the power outage, and Mr. Burns' response, is a spoof of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.