18 Directors Who Sneaked In References To Their Own Movies

Remember in John Landis’s 1988 comedy Coming to America when Eddie Murphy’s character Prince Akeem gives away a hefty chunk of his fortunes to a pair of homeless men going by the name of Randolph and Mortimer?

If they seem strangely familiar it’s because they’ve already been in a John Landis film before. In 1983, actors Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche played the brothers Duke – first names Randolph and Mortimer – in Landis’s Trading Places, also starring Eddie Murphy.

There’s another running gag in quite a few Landis films that references a script he wrote as a kid named See You Next Wednesday. Its title was ripped from a line from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and although the film was never made, Landis has sneaked in nods to it in tonnes of his movies.

In Trading Places, we see a film poster for See You Next Wednesday as a romantic drama starring Laurence Olivier while in Coming to America it’s advertised as a sci-fi starring Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis. Eagled-eyed viewers can also spot See You Next Wednesday references in other Landis films including The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London, in which it’s a porno advertised as a ‘non-stop orgy’.