For Dutch speakers, there is a special kind of pleasure to be had when they can spot a Dutch artefact in the background of an American film or computer game. Whether the creators meant them as official “Easter Eggs”, or whether it was just a coincidence, here are a few times when some tiny bit of Dutchness crept into international media!
I have only been able to find four of these Easter Eggs so far, but I am sure there are many more. Have you ever noticed a bit of Dutchness (or Flemishness!) in the background of a movie, series, game, or other type of media? Let me know!!
(Note: Of course, some films and series have an explicit Dutch theme. The Fault in Our Stars, for example, is set partly in Amsterdam. In Friends, bartender Gunther was supposed to be Dutch. Ted Lasso features a romance with a Dutchman on a houseboat. This article is meant for the unmentioned, secret little nods to the Netherlands and Flanders.)
Rien Poortvliet in “The Big Bang Theory”
A scene in a book shop in the popular comedy series Big Bang Theory has the 1976 Dutch classic Gnomes (Leven en werken van de kabouter) in the background. This book, illustrated by Rien Poortvliet, was a huge international success when it came out. A nerd-book avant la lettre, the book illustrates the life and habitat of gnomes much like a serious biology book would. Anyone who knows the themes and humour of The Big Bang Theory will agree with me that the book’s placement is probably not a coincidence.
Praat in Arrival
The major 2016 motion picture Arrival, about aliens coming to Earth and the linguists tasked with finding a way to communicate with them, was a joy to watch for professional linguists all over the world due to its many accurate elements about the daily work in the field of linguistics.
One such element is the fact that scientists in the background can be seen working with the software Praat, which is used for the analysis of speech sounds.
This open-source software was developed at the University of Amsterdam by two Dutch academics and has been going strong as the software of choice for linguists the world over since 1995.
Febo in Mass Effect
The popular 2007 video game Mass Effect, set far in the future, included images of a futuristic Febo; the Dutch fast-food restaurant where customers can famously put a coin in a slot to take a hamburger, kroket or bamischijf “out of the wall”.
Contributors on Reddit theorise that a Dutch developer must have added this Easter egg. Apparently later versions of the game no longer have it, because the image had not been cleared with Febo.
Dutch Nee/Ja stickers in Sleeping Dogs
It’s a little tricky to see in this picture, but the letterboxes in the scene above have Dutch stickers on them alerting deliverers to the fact that the owner of the letterbox does not want any unaddressed junk mail. These stickers are ubiquitous in the Netherlands and very recognisable.
A Redditor noticed this in the 2012 computer game Sleeping Dogs, and the consensus seems to be that there must have been some stock photos of Dutch scenes in the media packages that game designers use to build so-called “textures” (3D backgrounds in computer games).
In the same thread, another Redditor noted that some of the roads in a game called C&C Generals looked like this:
These were all the Easter Eggs I was able to find so far. If you know of any more, let me know in the comments or on social media!
Heddwen Newton teaches English and Dutch, and is also a translator and a linguist. Her newsletter
English and the Dutch is about all the funny and interesting ways Dutch and English overlap.
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