Happy 50th, HAL: Our Favorite Pop-Culture References to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

‘WALL-E’: Along with “The Black Stallion” and “Never Cry Wolf,” director Andrew Stanton screened “2001: A Space Odyssey” for his animators to provide them with inspiration while making this audacious sci-fi fable. Stanton has confirmed in interviews that the design of the primary antagonist — the onboard autopilot computer nicknamed “Auto” — came straight from the cold, unfeeling red eye of HAL 9000. In the streakless lens through which it monitors the characters, there’s both hostility and a complete lack of expression. (Stream “Wall-E” on Starz, rent it on Amazon or iTunes.)

‘Moon’: Director Duncan Jones has stated that Gerty 3000, the artificial intelligence unit programmed to manage the spaceship housing Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), is also a distant nephew of HAL’s. In addition to its smiley-face readout, Gerty has an all-seeing camera lens that exudes the same detached menace as HAL’s does, and the soft (though historically often subtly menacing) tones of Kevin Spacey’s voice grant Gerty a similar reassuring presence as well. Jones has also clarified that the homage is purely aesthetic, and in no way a reflection on Gerty’s function in the story. (Stream “Moon” on Netflix, rent it on Amazon or iTunes.)

‘The Simpsons’: The writing staff for this immortal sitcom never met a pop-culture reference it didn’t like, and the writers have returned to “2001” on multiple occasions. In the Season 3 episode “Lisa’s Pony,” an ape with Homer’s face causes a ruckus during a riff on the film’s “Dawn of Man” sequence after he reclines against the monolith — and tips it over. “Deep Space Homer,” from Season 5, sends Homer into orbit, where he gobbles potato chips in zero-gravity in a motion recalling the docking scene from “2001” (think “Blue Danube”). That same half-hour also swipes the often-imitated match-cut Kubrick created between a spinning bone and a spinning space station: In “The Simpsons,” the moment comes when Bart tosses a marker into the air that then cuts to an image of a satellite to conclude the episode. (Stream “The Simpsons” on FX.)

‘History of the World, Part I’: As the knowingly grandiose title suggests, the writer and director Mel Brooks sought to capture the whole of human existence with this comedy anthology, and there was no better place to begin than with Kubrick’s “Dawn of Man.” Brooks narrates the rise of a tribe of primitive, apelike creatures who experience their first sparks of intelligence — and then promptly use them for furious onanistic purposes. A sophomoric joke wrapped in a somewhat loftier reference, it succinctly encapsulates Brooks’ bawdy flexibility as a humorist.

‘South Park’: To provide context for any “South Park” reference means wrestling with a base minimum of insanity, and the Kubrick reference in “Trapper Keeper,” from Season 4, is no different. In this case, the “2001” nod is buried deep inside a plot involving a vigilante sent from the future (named ... Bill Cosby) and a “Dawson’s Creek"-themed Trapper Keeper that will decide the fate of the universe. A formless blob sharing a consciousness with Cartman (don’t ask) speaks to Kyle in a recreation of HAL’s charged exchange with Dave, right down to the chilling and dispassionate line, “I can’t let you do that.” (Stream “South Park” on Comedy Central and Hulu.)

‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’: In Tim Burton’s reimagining of the beloved novel by Roald Dahl, Johnny Depp’s whimsical Willy Wonka entreats his tour guests to join him for a technological breakthrough: the first-ever chocolate bar to be transmitted via television airwaves. To create an appropriate sense of momentousness for the occasion, Burton positions a towering Wonka bar in the place of the monolith from “2001,” on an outcropping of rocks surrounded by screeching primates. Much to his amazement, young Charlie Bucket can reach right into the screen and pluck it for himself, in fulfillment of what remains to this day an impossible dream. (Rent “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” on Amazon and iTunes.)

‘Mad Men’: As part and parcel of his obsession with verisimilitude, “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner sampled liberally from the pop culture of the 1960s, and the Season 7 episode “The Monolith” isn’t shy about borrowing from Kubrick. Technology and the rapidly changing world it represents frighten the ad executives of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and visual cues in the episode liken the sudden appearance of a giant computer to that of the towering black monolith of “2001” — it’s a harbinger of their creeping obsolescence. Their paranoia turns out to be not entirely unfounded: The computer drives one junior staffer to fittingly Kubrickian madness. (Stream “Mad Men” on Netflix.)

‘Zoolander’: The comic premise of this fashion-skewering comedy from Ben Stiller is simple but potent: Male models may be “really, really, really ridiculously good-looking,” but that doesn’t mean they’re intelligent. When Stiller’s empty-headed Derek Zoolander and the equally vacuous Hansel (Owen Wilson) are tasked with extracting files from a computer, they’re utterly stumped. They poke around searching for a power button, getting more and more agitated until they begin beating the console, at which point the unmistakable strains of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” creep in and just like that, they’re apes in the “Dawn of Man.” (Stream “Zoolander” on HBO, rent it on Amazon or iTunes.)

‘Community’: Always dense with allusion, this meta-sitcom emulated one of the strangest and most surreal scenes of “2001” for its third season premiere. Greendale College’s resident smart-aleck, Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), hallucinates that he’s transforming into the elderly pariah, Pierce (Chevy Chase). It’s a clear reference to Dave’s arresting confrontation with his withered future self in the blindingly white room. While the scene passes in under a minute, the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, still made room for a shot-by-shot imitation of the series of claustrophobic color-inverted eyeball close-ups. (Stream “Community” on Crackle or Hulu.)

‘Magnolia’: Paul Thomas Anderson likes to wear his influences on his sleeve, and for this staggering drama about crisscrossing lives in Los Angeles, he paid clear homage to Kubrick with a restaging of one scene from “2001.” While the infirm game show producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) lays on his deathbed moaning in agony, his compassionate nurse, Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman), paces about, trying to make him comfortable. Anderson’s composition follows that of Kubrick’s meeting between Dave and Future Dave, and the “Zarathustra” needle-drop drives the point home. (Rent “Magnolia” on iTunes or Vudu.)

‘Gangs of New York’: Another master synthesizer of his influences, Martin Scorsese looked to Kubrick’s vision of the future for one shot in this vision of the past. In it, he borrows a bit of iconography for a charged moment in which a butcher’s knife thrown in the air stands in for the bone lobbed by the apes during the opening of “2001.” The attention to detail is so fine that the rotations of the knife even match those of the bone, each edit calibrated just so. (Look for it at about 1:46:50 into the Netflix streaming of “Gangs.”) (Stream “Gangs of New York” on Netflix or rent it on Amazon or iTunes.)

‘Sunshine’: Director Danny Boyle recreated another “2001” sequence down to the tiniest detail in this film when he stranded three space travelers (including a still-green Chris Evans) in an airlock, their only hope of escape being a jump to an adjacent one. Their perilous jet to the next airlock may as well have been stenciled from a similar set piece in “2001” that forces Dave to scramble for his life outside the craft. The rhythm of the cuts, the careful contrasts of the scale of each wide and tight shot — it all comes from Kubrick’s playbook. (Rent “Sunshine” on Amazon or iTunes.)

In “Being There,” the use of Eumir Deodato’s funky rearrangement of “Zarathustra” when Peter Sellers’ plain-spoken messiah leaves the house pays homage to “2001.”

Kubrick playfully checks himself in “A Clockwork Orange,” placing a vinyl copy of the soundtrack to “2001” in a prominent location when Alex (Malcolm McDowell) goes to the record store.

Another in-joke: In Mike Nichols’ “Catch-22,” the “Zarathustra” theme plays to commemorate the first meeting between Yossarian and Luciana (Alan Arkin and Olimpia Carlisi), an odds-on nod to Kubrick’s having almost directed the film.

For the hallucinatory trip into the afterlife “Enter the Void,” director Gaspar Noé has claimed that he modeled the DMT trip after the Starchild psychedelic sequence.

Sillier parodies of the HAL 9000 appeared in Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy “Sleeper” (in that instance voiced by HAL’s original voice-actor, Douglas Rain) and in the spoof “Airplane II.”