🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
There’s a lot going on in They Cloned Tyrone. In fact, you could call it a gonzo mash-up of sci-fi, mystery, comedy, and social commentary which just happens to turn a bumbling trio of misfits –– Fontaine (John Boyega), Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), and Slick Charles (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) –– into heroes after they uncover a massive conspiracy. Yet in the same way that director Juel Taylor depicts a vast, shadowy world operating beneath the surface of the trio’s fictional ’hood, the film itself is jam-packed with things hiding in plain sight, too. Densely layered with references to Blaxploitation, hip-hop, and dystopian literature, They Cloned Tyrone scatters Easter eggs everywhere you look, which pretty much means that you might have to watch it again and again to truly appreciate it. Here are some of the film’s coolest hidden gems.
Some of Tyrone’s most heady buried treasures pop up in the film’s first few seconds. Signs in the window and on the door of The Glen Food Mart advertise Somaah!, a carbonated beverage, with the tagline “Keep ’Em Smiling!” — a reference to Aldous Huxley’s seminal future-shock novel Brave New World. “It’s a derivative of Soma,” Taylor told Netflix in June, referring to the name of the mood-altering drug given to citizens to keep them docile and controlled in Huxley’s prescient 1932 book. “So you drink that and you enjoy yourself –– you feel unnaturally happy. It’s a product that made it nationwide if we’re really getting into the weeds, but some of these products have been designed, tested, and presumably the first versions of Somaah probably were trial-tested in neighborhoods like The Glen before they got the ‘FDA approval,’ so to speak, and [were] shipped off to the masses.”
Another nugget hidden in the opening scene? The appearance of a mysterious woman who remains a constant, silent presence throughout the film. “She pulls up to the store at the beginning, and she is next seen underground. She’s been abducted, having some Clockwork Orange–esque things happen to her,” Taylor said, alluding to the 1972 Stanley Kubrick classic. “We see her face on a ‘missing’ poster. There’s a lot of missing people posters peppered throughout, but we focus on this one because we’ve seen her. And at the end when [Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick] are storming the castle, they free her and we see her on the news reuniting with her family at the end.”
Somaah isn’t the only mind-altering drink popular in The Glen. Shortly after we meet Fontaine, we see him sipping on a 40-ounce of Anaconda malt liquor. It can be spotted on the shelves of the liquor store too. But the name isn’t random. “That’s from Black Dynamite,” Taylor said, referring to the 2009 Blaxploitation action-comedy. “Shout out to Michael Jai White. He was gracious enough to just let me 100 percent steal that brand because I love that movie so much. And so when thinking about products, the first one that came to mind was Anaconda. I just jokingly wrote it into the script and said, ‘Well, maybe….’ And somehow it ended up in the movie.”
While Tyrone’s trio of merry misfits are busy blowing the whole conspiracy wide open. another story takes place right under our noses: the romantic saga of Keisha and Daquan. “We see it at a few points,” Taylor said, pointing to the moment when Fontaine wakes up just after we saw him getting shot in cold blood. “We hear a couple arguing in the background. It seems like the guy is in trouble. He seems to have made his significant other pretty upset. We see this carried through, if you listen closely, three extra times. At the midpoint of the relationship, when they’re underground, we hear Keisha having a conversation with a friend and kind of bemoaning the state of their relationship. It’s being listened in on by the people underground. If you pause it and read what the fellow is writing, he’s doing a little editorializing. The implication is that this guy’s been listening to him so much that he actually doesn’t believe she’s gonna dump him. He thinks she’s gonna take him back. Later in the movie — it’s kind of hard to hear if you don’t listen closely for it –– they’re arguing. He’s saying, ‘Keisha, we’re gonna be late to the barbecue.’ The implication being they got back together and now they’re about to go do something. She was done with him; now suddenly we’re gonna be late to the barbecue. And if you listen to the soundtrack, the story is concluded. Keisha appears in a couple of the songs on the soundtrack, and that reaches a resolution in the second-to-last song.”
Even in a film packed with indelible images, the sight of Slick Charles atop a tricked-out lowrider, leading his gun-toting calvary to storm the underground lair, stands out as one of the best of the best. That’s partially due to the iconic getup that Jamie Foxx is rocking: a brown leather coat with a fur collar, each of his fingers blinged out with a fortune in rings. If the ensemble looks familiar, that’s absolutely intentional. “That’s the Ron O’Neal,” Taylor said, referring to the star of 1972’s inner-city action classic Super Fly. “That’s an homage to a classic Blaxploitation outfit.”
Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles learn what they’re up against when they first sneak into the underground bunker before quickly high-tailing it out of there. When they leave, they find themselves inside the dressing room of a strip club, entering through what initially looked like doors to instead face a set of lockers. Did you catch the names on those locker room doors by chance? They come from a deep cut by one of Taylor’s favorite rappers. “Growing up, I listened to a lot of Raheem the Dream. And these are two of the working ladies referenced in one of his songs. When I was thinking of names, they were the first that came to mind.”
When Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles escape the club and run out into the street, they soon discover they’re surrounded by clubbers who, as Slick puts it, turn the scene into a “whole goddamn ‘Thriller’ video.” But there’s more going on in that moment than we even see or hear: Morse code, to be exact. Said Taylor, “We decided to mess around with this super-low Morse code that basically starts to say, ‘Everybody stop and surround them; stop and subdue.’ And when they are set free from the spell, so to speak, it’s actually basically saying, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ As soon as they hear that, they carry on and go back to what they were doing. It’s so hard to hear, but it’s there. Shout out to our sound editors for sourcing the Morse code. It’s actually not specifically, ‘Keep calm and carry on,’ because that was too long. It’s something like, ‘Carry on’ or ‘As you were,’ something like that.”
Finally, there’s one last Easter egg to end all Easter eggs: a rework of Erykah Badu’s Grammy-nominated hit ballad “Tyrone” from 1997. “If you make it to the credits, stay if you like Erykah Badu,” Taylor said. “She re-recorded ‘Tyrone’ for us. Some of the lyrics within the verses have been edited ever so slightly to allude to mind control and whatnot. She doesn’t say, ‘Call Tyrone’ — she's saying, ‘They cloned Tyrone.’ She was very gracious. Probably my favorite of the Easter eggs.”
They Cloned Tyrone is now streaming on Netflix.
