Howard Stark's "comic book movie" is based on one of Marvel's old west heroes, Kid Colt.
In the lab scene when Howard Stark is looking for his passport to go to Peru, as Howard moves out of shot the camera focuses on a colored-glass window with a white circle on a red background. The circle is the same design as the miniature arc reactor Howard's son Tony Stark makes for his chest to keep him alive and power his Iron Man suits.
When he is introduced, Howard Stark is seated on a crane on his movie set next to his Director of Photography, played by series cinematographer Edward J. Pei.
Fictional Whitney Frost is credited here with inventing Spread Spectrum transmission, which uses frequency-hopping to conceal classified transmissions. In reality, that technology was invented by an actual Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr. Ms. Lamarr, unlike Ms. Frost, was acting as a patriot in doing so.
One scene shows a movie marquee in the background reading "Whitney Frost in Tales of Suspense." The Whitney Frost character first appeared in the Iron Man story in the Marvel comic Tales of Suspense Vol. 1 No. 98 (February 1968). The cover of the comic features a scene from the Captain America story in that issue: Captain America fighting the Black Panther; a fight between these two superheroes occurred in Captain America: Civil War (2016) .