When the fire drill was chaotic, Mr. Burns stated that he has seen more orderly behavior in a Ritz Brothers film, a reference to the American comedy trio.
Two of the employees paired in the race are "Haney and Drucker". This is a reference to the American sitcom Green Acres, in which Mr. Haney was the junk dealer and Sam Drucker owned the general store.
Smokey Bear's catchphrase "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" is satirized as being ambiguous.
Smithers compares Bart and Lisa to the Bobbsey Twins, the principal characters of the American children's novels series.
Marge accidentally projects a film about the story of National Parks that includes the commentary of John Muir. Muir was an influential Scottish-American naturalist considered to be the "Father of the National Parks".
By using a telegraph, Mr. Burns tries to send a help message. However, the telegraph communicates Burns with a dummy of Samuel Morse in a museum.
Homer and Burns are trapped in a cabin in the snow just like The Lone Prospector (Charlie Chaplin) and Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain) in the 1925 film The Gold Rush. Like Big Jim McKay, they also start to hallucinate.
Mr. Burns finds a Bazooka Joe comic strip on the floor of the cabin.
While trapped in the cabin and slowly going mad, Mr. Burns begins thinking that Homer wants to kill him so he can ride his corpse down the mountain to safety. Homer does just that in "King of the Hill", where he rides the frozen corpse of C.W. McAllister down the Murderhorn.
