While reading White Dwarf a little while ago I skimmed the Golden Demon "Competitors' Guidelines". Some of it makes sense, such as not mixing LotR stuff with anything else as GW don't have the license. The interesting part was the rule on all models:
Competitors' Guidelines wrote:Furthermore, please do not use any real-world references or references to other non-Games Workshop fictional world in your entries.
From GW, that's quite a contradictory statement! The most obvious one I can think of is a Rorke's Drift/Isandlwana (Zulu wars) diorama that was the UK Games Day centre piece in about 1997. It was done with Praetorians and Orks, but the Praetorians were obviously Zulu soldiers anyway.
On top of that, there's also various suggestions in these two threads on Black Library also list a variety of influences/references.
Although the second thread is more dubious in its links, the first has some quite strong similarities like Sly Marbo (Catachan Jungle Fighter special character) being from Rambo, played by Sylvester 'Sly' Stalone. There are also many obvious links in the Guard regiments, the Praetorians even have the same regiment number as the ones that were really wiped out in the first battle of the Zulu wars.
Don't even bother starting to look at the map of the Warhammer world!
So with all of those references to the real-world (some more obvious than others) how are GW managing to say "no real-world references in models"?