Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Easter Eggs

I went and saw X-Men: Days of Future Past this weekend. Very good and I highly recommend it, especially if your a comic book/X-Men fan. Of course, you should stay after the credits too.

What does this have to do with Easter eggs?


Well, for those of you who don't know, an Easter Egg in addition to being a colorful spring pastime, is when there's something hidden in a movie, TV show, or even a book, which is an inside joke, or hidden message. In the recent Godzilla movie, for example, when the main character and his father return to their house after 15 years, the camera pans past a terrarium which has a piece of tape on it with the name Mothra.

Now, Mothra is the other famous monster from Japan, who fought alongside and against Godzilla in easily a dozen movies. He's never shown, or even mentioned in the new version outside of that quick camera shot, but it's just a little nod to the monsters of the past and something to give fans of the older movies an extra smile.

You see a lot of these in movies, and some on television. Finding them in books is much rarer, though there are some authors who slip things in. The thing is, many people probably would never even consider such a thing in books.

The thing when it comes to Easter Eggs in books is that they have to be done just right. Slipped under the nose without being too obvious, at least for the first read through. After all, if a reader is happily skimming along through the story and sees a particular name pop out at them, it pulls them out of the story and interrupts their reading. One or two of those might be okay, but too many and the book becomes harder to read.

The best ones are the ones that slip by unnoticed, and are only discovered when pointed out or on multiple read-through's.

Such is the case with three little snippets I slipped into Class 5. In order, but without giving them away completely, there is...


A name from the British TV series Red Dwarf.


A line from the movie Evolution.


And a name from the Anime series Full Metal Alchemist.

So if you have a copy of Class 5 and you're familiar with any of those, feel free to go back, re-read, and see if you can find them. ;-) 

If you know of other books with Easter Eggs, feel free to share them in the comments section as well. 

Thanks, and cheers!

~ Shaun



1 comment:

  1. I'm an Easter Egg junkie. I love reading them, seeing them in movies and inserting them into my own works. Any genre specific story I write, for example, will have hundreds of them. In my mind, it's a smart way to get people reading again and again, plus it's fun.

    The one Easter Egg that stands out in my mind is with the viewpoint character of a story I wrote called, The Waiting Room. The character is wearing a Bon Jovi 2003 concert t-shirt and I describe the shirt in great detail, but not much else about the character.

    The reason is that I want people to imagine themselves being that character, so I don't want to pigeonhole the reader. But the reason I describe the shirt so clearly is because my cousin died not long after seeing that concert and the Easter Egg is there mostly for her family and friends if the story ever gets published.

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