Allen's use of the fake documentary format has inspired countless filmmakers since Take the Money and Run. A search of the Internet Movie Database reveals more than 300 titles under the descriptions "mockumentary" or "fake/pseudo-documentary," most of them since the 1969 release of Take the Money and Run. Like Allen's film, many of them are humorous and satirical, from Tim Robbins's Bob Roberts (1992), about a corrupt right-wing folksinger who goes into politics, to the horror movie The Blair Witch Project (1999) and all its subsequent comic spoofs and rip-offs, to Sacha Baron Cohen's controversial savaging of American culture and politics in Borat (2006). Actor-filmmaker Christopher Guest has made a career out of the style, using a stock company of actors to create some of the most inventive and funny works in the genre: This Is Spinal Tap (1984, directed by Rob Reiner but written by Guest), Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003), For Your Consideration (2006). The style has also been used successfully on television: The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978), Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999), and both the British and American versions of the series The Office. Allen himself revisited the style, creating perhaps the most complex and artistic example of it in Zelig (1983).

The story, and the reference inherent in the character's name, were inspired in part by Charles Starkweather, a notorious criminal and murderer of the 1950s. His crime and killing spree with his 14-year-old sweetheart Caril Fugate was the loose basis for the movies Badlands (1973), Kalifornia (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994) and also the Bruce Springsteen song "Nebraska." Starkweather was executed in 1959 at the age of 20. Fugate, who claimed at the trial to be Starkweather's hostage and not accomplice, was sentenced to life imprisonment but paroled in 1976. She is still alive and living in Michigan.

In addition to its direct take on the documentary style, Take the Money and Run contains a number of direct and indirect references to aspects of pop culture, from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to The Defiant Ones (1958). Allen expanded that movie's two escaped convicts shackled together to five. He also made a joke on its examination of racism by having Virgil and his four fellow fugitives, one of whom is black, pose as the cousins of an old woman they've taken hostage.

The scenes of Virgil attempting to work in the prison laundry recall Chaplin's satire of man against mechanization in Modern Times (1936). And during a job interview, Woody does a direct parody of the 1950s TV game show What's My Line.

Another possible film reference in Take the Money and Run occurs in the soft-focus sequence of Virgil courting Louise. Scenes like that were becoming a staple in romantic dramas and even in television commercials, thanks to the popularity of such films as Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (1966) and Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan (1967). According to editorial consultant Ralph Rosenblum, however, Allen's intention was not to parody these romances but to utilize their style.

The notorious Depression Era criminal John Dillinger was said to have fled an "escape-proof" Indiana jail by using a fake gun made of wood and blackened with shoe polish to look like the real thing. In this picture, Virgil attempts to escape prison by carving a gun out of a bar of soap and coloring it with shoe polish, but his plans go awry when an unexpected downpour turns his "weapon" to a handful of suds.`

by Rob Nixon