To find out more about how Easter eggs in movies work, and why even the most loyal fans succumb to their power and never notice them, Bored Panda reached out to Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, where she researches and teaches science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures.

Lisa explained that “Easter eggs” are hidden messages, images or features that filmmakers, game designers, and other (usually electronic) artists include in their work for audiences to discover. "Most Easter eggs are bonus materials that are not essential to the main narrative. Sometimes they do sometimes enrich our experience of the story by connecting it with other, similar stories to create a 'shared universe.' But if nothing else, they are always meant to amuse by conveying 'insider knowledge' in a clever way,” the professor explained.

For those who’re wondering, Lisa assured that Easter eggs are usually intentional, “placed there by the director or some other individual or group involved in the creation process—see images 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 27, 31, 33, and 38).”

“Sometimes, however, Easter eggs come about as unintended or surprise effects of the technical creation process. My favorite examples of this are Mulan (in which the animators decided to have Mulan play with her hair after observing the voice actor who sang her songs do the same in real life) and Spaceballs (in which Mel Brooks gave up fighting the sloppiness of his production crew and just decided to incorporate styrofoam coffee cups into his Star Wars parody).”

Meanwhile, the term itself “was coined in 1979/80 by Atari’s then-Director of Software Development, Steve Wright, to describe a secret message that had been planted in the video game Adventure,” Lisa added. Turns out, “game designer Warren Robinett was angry with Atari for the company’s failure to include developers’ names in the game credits, so he programmed the message 'created by Warren Robinett' to appear when players encountered a special pixel called 'the gray dot' that gives entry to a secret part of the game map.”

Lisa added that sadly, Atari took that Easter egg out and “you won’t find it in any contemporary versions of the game. But you will find an homage to it at the end of both the novel and film versions of Ready Player One, where players in a massive virtual game compete to find Easter eggs—including, at the very end, the Easter egg from Adventure!”

Interestingly, Easter eggs are as old as films themselves. Lisa said that the first director known to purposely include them is Alfred Hitchcock. “Hitchcock used himself as the surprise, playing at least one cameo role in 39 of his films—indeed, he even shows up twice in 1927’s Lodger: A Store of the London Fog. These surprises quickly became part of Hitchcock’s signature style, and they quickly inspired similar hidden treats in other media.”

When asked what is the reason for film directors to include them, Lisa said that many creators use them as part of their signature style. “The earliest and still most famous example of this is probably Alfred Hitchcock’s tendency to cast himself in small walk-on roles in many of his films—a tradition continued today by Peter Jackson in Lord of the Rings and Taika Waititi in Thor: Ragnarok.”

Another reason may be that “filmmakers create Easter eggs to pay tribute to earlier filmmakers who have had a significant impact either on film as a whole or on that director in particular.” Lisa added that sometimes they do this directly, “as when Tim Burton recreates a scene from Ida Lupino’s 1964 Twilight Zone episode 'The Mask' in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and when Peter Jackson visually recreates a scene from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated adaptation of Lord of the Rings for his own live action version, (images 29 and 35).”

Other times, the homage is more indirect, “as in The Mitchells vs. The Machines, when we realize that Katie’s socks pay homage to Stanley Kubrick (image 34).”

In general, “many directors create Easter eggs to keep production crews happy and amused, especially when they are working on large, complex projects with a lot of (largely boring) moving parts. For example, it takes three years to make a Pixar film, and Pixar, of course, is famous for its Easter eggs—consider, for instance, the Easter egg from Toy Story 4 that mockingly refers back to a near-disaster of the production of Toy Story 2 (image 14),” Lisa explained.