On the ship from NZ to LA, one evening the film "Broken Barrier" is screened. Bert asks whether Jane Russell is in it. They are referring to the 1952 version, because the film is set in the early 1960's.
Roger Donaldson directed a short television documentary about Burt Munro. The World's Fastest Indian (2005) uses some of the dialogue from this film verbatim, and includes many of the same images from the film. Both movies are about the same character. In one scene in the Fastest Indian, a character states a line of dialogue that is verbatim the same phrase as one of the lines of dialogue in this film.