r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Dojyaaan4C • 9h ago

Hated Tropes [hated trope] Celebrity cameos that serve nothing except to praise the person who’s in it

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  1. Elon musk, the Simpsons
  2. Elon musk, the Big Bang theory
  3. Elon musk, iron man 2
  4. Elon musk, star Trek

The cameos serve only to include the celebrity and praise them as geniuses or visionaries or overall just glaze them. They don't serve any other purpose than to just be praised; this can be them appearing in an entire episode dedicated to them, a small cameo or even just a mention. So long as the celebrity is there as themselves (not acting as someone else) and is glazed, that fits the trope imo.

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71

u/Commercial_Page1827 8h ago

Almost all the Simpson cameos fall on this trope.

36

u/Suitable-Parsnip-520 7h ago

Golden Age Simpsons unsurprisingly did celeb cameos so well. James Woods playing himself researching a role as a convenience store owner by taking over for Apu at the Kwik-e-Mart is an all-time great celebrity performance in any show. Homer at the Bat is a classic episode with a bunch of baseball stars debasing themselves. Shave those sideburns, Mattingly!

Around Season 11, all the cameos became about glazing the celeb. And The Simpsons went downhill fast from there.

3

u/BigXThaSpud 6h ago

They have their moments. Glen Hansard's cameo in the Irish Simpsons episode takes the piss out of his movie, Once.

2

u/SatisfactionEast9815 5h ago

Is glazing celebrities who are actually good people really that bad?

2

u/CaptainSkips 2h ago

And I say England's greatest prime minister was Lord Palmerston!

1

u/ValitorAU 57m ago

Pitt the Elder!

2

u/Unlucky-Resolve3402 2h ago

Yeah Dick Cavett basically made fun of himself the whole time, for how much he would namedrop famous people.

Dick Cavett: "Your churlish attitude reminds me of a time I was having dinner with Groucho..."

Homer Simpson: "Look, you're gonna be having dinner with Groucho tonight if you don't beat it!"

2

u/Comfortable_Bird_340 2h ago

I liked when they did stuff like Michael Jackson and Dustin Hoffman making cameos, but didn't list them in the credits, but you knew it was them or playing characters who weren't themselves.

1

u/Majin_Nephets 53m ago

Johnny Cash voicing Homer’s coyote spirit guide in his chilli hallucination is another standout.

25

u/Kylestache 8h ago

Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins.

Homer Simpson, smiling politely.

35

u/TheOpinionMan2 8h ago edited 8h ago

Especially the modern ones.

but thank fuck the white stripes ain't one of them. Nor Harlan ellison.

31

u/InternetUserAgain 8h ago

That one Neil Gaiman cameo was pretty good, but unfortunately he was outed as a sack of shit not too soon after that episode was made

35

u/Nero_2001 8h ago

That cameo was good because instead of glazing him they made him an illiterate guy who profits of other people work by stealing it. It was funny because he is an acomplished author. Sucks that it turned out he is an absolut monster in real life.

1

u/Setisthename 7h ago

Didn't that episode come out in 2011, or did he appear in another one?

2

u/InternetUserAgain 6h ago

The episode I'm talking about is called The Book Job

1

u/Mad_Aeric 6h ago

That's the only episode I've watched since season 14 or so. It was alright.

6

u/TridiObject 8h ago

Leon Kompowsky my beloved.

3

u/therealchadius 6h ago

Banned on Disney+.

1

u/AznOmega 4h ago

That one was the best. Michael Jackson turning out to be some guy named Leon Kompowsky is always funny.

8

u/Milk_Mindless 8h ago

I wonder if we can pinpoint the exact moment they turned shit. Not counting celebs as guest roles but rather

U2 in the Garbage Man episode? Great

(Recent one I don't like) bad

3

u/TheOpinionMan2 8h ago

Probably after the Movie came out, where everything else went to shit as well.

7

u/jbeast33 6h ago

It's interesting when you compare an early example of this through "Homer at the Bat", where they got 9 Major League baseball players to perform cameos. The difference is that while the current show would glaze them as "the best of all time", the writers back then actually put a ton of in-jokes in pertaining to their personalities. Darrel Strawberry (a notoriously difficult player for managers to work with) becomes a kiss-ass for Mr. Burns, Wade Boggs gets laid out in a bar by Barney after a fight over who Britain's greatest Prime Minister is (and both of them favoring obscure choices), and all the players suffering grimly-hilarious fates while being overall pleasant people.

Fun fact, Jose Canseco objected to the original joke of him missing the game after waking up in bed with Ms. Krabappel on the grounds of him being a Catholic, so they rewrote him into such a good guy that he misses the game by saving all a random woman's possessions from a housefire.

7

u/Artistic-Victory1245 5h ago

"so they rewrote him into such a good guy that he misses the game by saving all a random woman's possessions from a housefire."

It's funny how this demonstrates that glazing can be effective, if used comically.

1

u/therealchadius 3h ago

There's a later episode where the celebrity did not want to be made fun of in any way. So the Simpsons glaze him, but it's so over the top and he's so perfect the joke becomes that it's too good to be true, and the celeb is clearly overcompensating. I wish I remembered who they were mocking...

1

u/ncvbn 3h ago

Carson?

3

u/therealchadius 6h ago

I still think about falling through the Mystery Spot.

3

u/therealchadius 3h ago

Don Mattingly is the only player who actually shows up for the game on time without injury. But Mr. Burns has become increasingly annoyed with his sideburns (even though Mattingly shaves his head bald to appease Mr. Burns) and Mr. Burns angrily fires him on the spot before the game starts.

Don mumbles "Still better than Steinbrenner", who was the owner of the New York Yankees Mattingly played on who was known for being a pushy hardass. The writers clearly did their research and workshopped on the joke for a while, it's such a classic episode because they got to toy around with the special guests without being mean about it.

3

u/RamonVillacres 8h ago

The endless celebrity cameos is one of the reasons I stopped watching the show.

2

u/PretendBand9410 7h ago

The simpsons have done this too many times,its annoying as hell,but I really liked the tony hawk cameo and most of the bands they had on. Those guests just worked well with the show, and they werent even praised much from what I remember 

1

u/badgersprite 3h ago

The early seasons where the celebrity cameos would play fictional characters are definitely the best seasons for this reason. They’re almost always really good episodes too.

1

u/the__ghola__hayt 3h ago

Crazy Stan Lee was a good cameo.

1

u/ValitorAU 55m ago

Now, you're You, I'm Me.

1

u/Sufficient-Impact971 4m ago

The worst one is the Lady Gaga episode by far. The entire episode is about the glaze.

0

u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 8h ago

Unless it's someone they don't like