When Bart raises his head out of the pile of leg warmers in the smoke outside, the song "The End" by The Doors is heard, mirroring a sequence in the film Apocalypse Now, where Willard raises up from the mud. He is also wearing green cameo body paint.
After Lisa quits ballet and rejects Busby, he puts on a bowler hat and struts out of the theater to the song "On Broadway", referencing a dance sequence in All That Jazz.
Homer's mispronunciation of "Surgeon-General" as "Sturgeon-General" is a reference to the movie "Corrina, Corrina", starring Whoopi Goldberg and Ray Liotta. In it, a small child refers to the "sturgeon-general"'s health warning about the dangers of smoking as an explanation for burying the adult characters supplies of cigarettes in her sandpit.
The family watch CSI, the commercials feature Friends (Lisa Kudrow).
The music that plays as the raccoon climbs into the Ballet School sounds a lot like the theme from The Pink Panther.
The sequence and music where the ballet teacher dances onto the bus is a parody of both Rocky and Chorusline.
The section about "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" was edited out in repeats because of copyright issues.
When Lisa mentions the smoking on "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody", she mentions that Zack tried smoking to impress a girl. This never happened in the real TV show.
On the couch gag Wile E. Coyote pants a fake couch wich the Simpsons run into.
Trivia
This marks the second time a Simpson member to take up ballet.
