Top 10 Crazy Parks and Recreation Details You Missed

Any time one of the Pawnee City Hall murals is on screen, it’s worth hitting pause in order to take a longer look at exactly what’s going on. Our favorite one is shown briefly in “Harvest Festival”. Leslie is talking about how superstitious Pawnee is, and tells of the time when they burned a magician at the stake after he pulled a rabbit out of his hat. She ends her story with, “The year was 1973”, playing on the fact that the audience would obviously assume this happened hundreds of years ago. Not only that, but when the camera pans to the mural, you can see that the magician wasn’t the only one to be punished.

It’s not often that TV show creators write in jokes so subtle that you have to remember what a character was wearing several seasons earlier in order to understand them. However, that’s exactly what the “Parks and Rec” writers did here! In season four, when Ben is unemployed we see him wearing a T-shirt repping Letters to Cleo, a Boston alt-rock band. It is never actually addressed, but more than two seasons later the band actually appeared on the show and of course Ben showed everyone just what a big fan he was.

Any true fan will know how important Li’l Sebastian was to the entire town of Pawnee, so when news broke of his untimely death, it was a time of mourning for everyone. They of course held him a memorial of epic proportions, and while there were lots of funny moments, there’s something you may not have noticed. Aside from Andy’s performance, there was music in the background throughout, and two songs that can be heard distinctly are Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones and A Horse With No Name by America. Which begs the question, how much of this playlist was horse-themed?

In the ninth episode of the fourth season of “Parks and Rec”, the audience and the characters were surprised to learn that the man they had known as Jerry Gergich wasn’t who they thought he was. It turns out, his real name has been Garry this whole time, but when his boss called him by the wrong name decades ago, he never corrected him. This was understandably shocking, but in fact in the episode before, we saw a quick flash of Jerry’s ID card which has his real name on it!

In the very first episode of the show, when we’re just meeting Leslie Knope for the first time, she encounters a drunk in one of her beloved parks who has wedged himself into a children’s slide. She pokes at him with a broom to get him to leave and he’s never heard from again - or so we thought. In the series finale, the actor came back and seems to have cleaned up his act, because he’s there requesting that a swing be fixed. Perhaps he’s the one who broke it? We’ll probably never know.

Another little easter egg from the series finale comes when a group of trick or treaters show up at Andy and April’s house on Halloween. It’s a brief moment, but you can see that one of the kids is dressed up as Star-Lord from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise. Considering Chris Pratt rose prominently to fame during his time on “Parks and Rec” by playing this very character, it’s a cute nod to the actor’s success. We’re glad these two fictional universes overlap!

Tom Haverford considers himself to be a tech-savvy and cosmopolitan man, so of course, considering the time period in which “Parks and Rec” aired, he’s a Twitter aficionado. In fact, his obsession with the social media platform goes to new heights in season five when he gets into a car accident because he’s tweeting. When we see his Twitter feed though, it seems that he doesn’t exactly have a huge base of followers. In fact, all of his tweets are liked by only one person, and if you look closely, you can see that it’s always his buddy Jean-Ralphio.

This one may be a little bit inside baseball, but there’s no way it wasn’t intentional. While all the other items on our list today are things that you could notice if you’re looking hard enough, this one takes an extra level of knowledge of the show. In season six when Ann and Chris are moving away, Leslie makes a very precise 103 scrapbooks covering her friendship with Ann. It’s no coincidence that this episode happened to be the 103rd and also marked the last time that the actress playing Ann, Rashida Jones, was a series regular.

In season two, Leslie goes on a blind date with an MRI technologist that Ann sets her up with. He ends up being a total creep, but he does manage to foreshadow her future children! When he’s giving her an MRI, he makes some strange comments including saying of her uterus that she "could easily have triplets right off the bat.” It’s an offhand remark, but of course many years later, in season six, we find out that Leslie really is going to have triplets right off the bat!

Spoiler alert: this one is really cute. If you’re watching closely, you may have noticed that the same wooden box makes an appearance at many of the sweetest moments of Leslie and Ben’s relationship. It first appears in the first episode of season four, when Ben presents Leslie with a Knope 2012 pin. Then Leslie gives it back to Ben with a figurine of the Washington Monument inside. The most important appearance however comes in season five when Ben proposes to Leslie by putting her engagement ring in the box. Cue the “awwwwws”.