The name of Good King Wuncelaus of Applesauce-Lorraine is a spoof of the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas".
The name of the king's tyrannical half-brother François Villain is a spoof of medieval French poet and rogue François Villon, who has been portrayed on screen (in fictionalized accounts of his life) by William Farnum in If I Were King (1920), John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue (1927), Dennis King in The Vagabond King (1930), Ronald Colman in If I Were King (1938), and Oreste Kirkop in The Vagabond King (1956).
François Villain, as ruler of Applesauce-Lorraine, bets 6,000 francs on a rat named Jean Valjean at the rat races in the sewers of Paris. Jean Valjean is the name of the protagonist (a fugitive parolee living under an assumed identity) in Victor Hugo's famous novel "Les Misérables".
In the "Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties" segment ("Mechanical Dudley"), the mechanical Dudley repeats lines from the poem "Tommy" by Rudyard Kipling ("It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot").