I thought one of the best things was that the movie was released soon after Black Sabbath's Born Again tour, which featured an infamously oversized Stonehenge stage set. It was so large, in fact, that they couldn't use about half of it. Supposedly, there was a mistranslation in dimensions, from metric to feet/inches, but it went in the exact opposite direction than the Spinal Tap Stonehenge prop.
Now, you would therefore think that the scene in the movie was inspired by the Black Sabbath debacle but I don't think it could have been. In the first place, I believe I've read that the Stonehenge sequence appears in the demo reel that they made in 81 or 82 to shop the project around to studios before the movie proper was even made. Even besides that, the movie had to have been shot before the Sabbath tour even happened. As I recall it came out in spring of 84, which means it was probably shot winter/spring of 83, and the Sabbath tour was summer of 83. If This Is Spinal Tap had been a Mad Magazine piece, we'd call this an example of "Mad ESP".
The Joe Besser allusion is great too. I never picked up on the other drummers being nicknamed in relation to the other Stooges, but I remember at some point I got the Joe Besser thing, and I thought "I bet nobody even notices that". And in fact, when I tried to explain the joke to someone online (eg both Bessers replaced the guy who replaced the guy who...etc), I couldn't quite get my point across.
Another one would be Nigel's wireless guitar rig going wonky during the Air Force base gig. That actually happened pretty often with early wireless systems. I read an interview with Joe Perry from the late 70's, once, where he was explaining why Aerosmith didn't use wirless systems and he said something like, "you pick up every CB radio in the country". Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead once said he nearly crapped his pants laughing at that scene because the same thing happened to his bass amp at Woodstock (and that was without a wireless system!).
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