First appearance of the comic book store.
This is the first episode where the scene transition wipes of atoms also appear at the beginning of the episode. It stays for the rest of the series, only absent in the next episode.
First appearance in the series of Kevin Sussman playing Stuart Bloom, the morose owner of the comic book store.
Howard (Simon Helberg)'s calculations of potential women that they could pick up is based on the Drake Equation, which attempts to calculate odds of finding intelligent alien life in the Milky Way galaxy. Dr. Frank Drake came up with an equation to examine factors of: the rate of star formation (R), the number of stars with planets(fp), the number of planets per solar system suitable for life(ne), the number of those with ACTUAL life(fl), the number of those with INTELLIGENT life(fi), the number of those whose activities emit detectible signs of their life into space where we could find it (fc), and the length of time that those signals are emitted (L).