15 Easter Eggs You May Have Missed in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

The device that Peter Quill uses to track the octopus-like monster at the beginning of the movie is not a fancy piece of machinery but a Mattel Electronics Classic Football game from the ’80s.

The crew crash-lands on a planet called Berhert, the same planet that the Hulk landed on back in the 1960s. In the comics, the Hulk fought someone called the Galaxy Master there.

Does Peter Quill have Internet access in space? Because the insult “trash panda” that he lobs at Rocket is pulled straight from a popular meme.

Director James Gunn clearly loves the foul-mouthed fowl. Howard the Duck first appeared trapped in the Collector’s prison in the closing credits for Guardians of the Galaxy. After he was freed at the end of that film, he must have hot-tailed it to Contraxia, the pleasure planet.

Peter tells Gamora that when he was little he would tell his friends that his dad was David Hasselhoff, who never visited because he was too busy filming a show with a talking car (Knight Rider). The Baywatch star later makes a cameo when Peter’s shapeshifting real father Ego (Kurt Russell) briefly transforms into Hasselhoff. (He also performed a song for the soundtrack.)

Knight Rider is also one of Peter’s many pop culture references, like Skeletor and Sam and Diane from Cheers, that go over the heads of his cohorts.

When Marvel revealed that Kurt Russell would be playing a planet named Ego and also Peter’s father, fans questioned how, exactly, a planet could have procreated with a human. Gunn came armed with answers: When Drax asks Ego about the mechanics of creating Peter, Ego confirms that he did make himself a human penis.

When Ego reveals Peter’s powers to him, the father shows his son the limits of the galaxy. Peter’s eyes literally fill with stars, and he whispers “Eternity.” Maybe Peter was envisioning a never-ending existence, but more likely the line is a nod to a character named “Eternity,” an all-powerful God in the Marvel Universe who is illustrated as a being filled with stars, like those in Peter’s eyes.

There’s no doubt that Star-Lord is a boy at heart. When he must fight his father — and can choose any form to do so — he goes with Pac-Man.

When Ego begins to take over the planets where he’s left his “seeds,” a blue blob near the Dairy Queen in Missouri (where Peter grew up) begins to envelop the earth. At one point, the blob barely misses crushing a car. The passenger in that car is Peter Quill’s grandfather, played by Gregg Henry in the first movie.

At Yondu’s funeral, the characters surround the Ravager with several trinkets, including a Troll Doll that Peter swapped for the Infinity Stone to trick Yondu in the climax of the first movie.

Another escapee from the Collector’s prison, Cosmo the Wonder Dog — a talking alien dog — doesn’t appear in the actual movie but does dance alongside the credits as they roll.

Jeff Goldbloom previewed his character from Thor: Ragnarok, the Grandmaster who forces Thor to fight in a gladiatorial battle, in the credits for Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. You can spot him dancing along with Peter, Gamora and others.

Stan Lee has shown up for a cameo in just about every Marvel movie. Fans have speculated as to whether the comic-book legend may actually be playing a character in all of these films. Some say he’s a Watcher, one of the aliens in the Marvel Universe whose job it is to literally watch important events (and not interfere). In the film, Lee chats with the Watchers, and in a post-credits scene, the Watchers bore of Lee and leave — all of which further bolsters the fan theory.

In another post-credits sequence, the priestess Ayesha says that’s she created a perfect being. She stares at a pod and declares she will call him Adam. This is almost certainly Adam Warlock, a scientifically-engineered perfect being who sometimes fights alongside the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. (In the comic books, Ayesha did not create Adam but rather is his female counterpart. They’re sometimes called “Him” and “Her.” Gunn confirmed that Adam will feature in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.)

Sylvester Stallone plays the Ravager Stakar in Vol. 2. The character is also known in the comics as Starhawk, part of another iteration of the Guardians: In the comics, he founded the Guardians of the Galaxy in another timeline. The fact that he joins up with several other characters in a post-credits scene — his sister Aleta (Michelle Yeoh), Mainframe (Miley Cyrus), Charlie-27 (Ving Rhames) and Martinex (Michael Rosenbaum) — means that we’re getting another Guardians team either in sequels or spinoffs.