The “Star Trek” franchise has included Easter eggs for decades. All the way back in the original 1966 series, for example, the Enterprise’s service crawlways were known as “Jefferies tubes” in honor of Matt Jefferies, the art director who designed the ship for the series. Since then, Easter eggs have been a staple of “Trek,” with newer shows like “Strange New Worlds” brimming with references to classic episodes and even other franchises. And in the 2009 reboot film from director J.J. Abrams, there’s an Easter egg many fans didn’t notice: a blink-and-miss-it appearance of Slusho, the same drink that appears in other Abrams projects like “Fringe” and “Cloverfield.”
Slusho is a fictional brand of soft drink that first appeared in the Abrams-created TV series “Alias,” where it was initially called “Slush-O,” its logo paying homage to the real-life “Icee” brand of slushy drinks. It also shows up in the Abrams series “Fringe” on several occasions, and at a convenience store in a scene from his 2011 sci-fi adventure “Super 8.” But most moviegoers probably remember Slusho best from its part in the viral marketing campaign for 2008’s found-footage monster movie “Cloverfield.” From that campaign, we learned that Slusho is the product of a Japanese company that uses a special ingredient called Seabed’s Nectar, which is implied to be connected to the Cloverfield monster that was hibernating under the ocean for years.
In “Star Trek,” Slusho is Cadet Uhura’s drink of choice when she’s seen ordering at a bar on Earth. Whether that means it’s an alcoholic beverage — or a syntheholic beverage — in the future is still very much up for debate.
Star Trek was packed with J.J. Abrams Easter eggs
Slusho isn’t the only Easter egg in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot that pays respect to a different franchise in the director’s filmography. In fact the two “Trek” films he directed are packed with plenty of nods to other Abrams projects, and even a few competing sci-fi properties. For example, legendary droid sidekick R2-D2 appears in a scene full of space debris, and that was years before Abrams himself helmed a pair of “Star Wars” movies. But there’s much more than Easter eggs from a galaxy far, far away.
The big one that’s hard to miss is the name of George Kirk’s (Chris Hemsworth) ship in the first “Star Trek” movie’s opening, the USS Kelvin — it’s named after Abrams’ father, a reference he drops into many of his projects. In fact, the entire reality that those films take place in is now referred to as the Kelvin Timeline, owing to how it was created when the USS Kelvin encountered a Romulan villain from the future. Even Slusho’s parent company, Tagruato, is glimpsed in the future cityscape, another major “Cloverfield” connection.
Though some might argue it’s not quite an Easter egg, the appearance of longtime Abrams collaborator Greg Grunberg could be another: He voices Kirk’s uncle in a scene in the 2009 film, and plays a Starfleet officer in “Star Trek Beyond,” making him one of the few actors to appear in both “Trek” and “Star Wars.”