In the beginning the song The Marriage of Figaro is playing. This is the same song from the Shawshank Redemption that Andy was playing over the loudspeakers.
The scene in which Chuck Norris is staked out, spread-eagle style, to be tortured by scorpions has two antecedents. In the 1959 "Timbuktu," a bare-chested Victor Mature is staked out in similar fashion, only his torture is to be administered by a venomous tarantula. Just as Norris is eventually rescued by his horse, so too was a bare-chested Richard Boone rescued by his horse after he'd been staked out and left to die by Indians in a 1957 episode of "Have Gun Will Travel" titled "The Yuma Treasure."
This episode Marks Wayne Pere's second of four appearances in Walker Texas Ranger.