It seemed to be some sort of therapy for the serious injury King suffered (he was walking along the side of the road and struck be a car, iirc) but it was definitely weird.
Not that far back but DC editor Julius Schwartz had several comics cameos, from The Flash in 1968 to Ambush Bug in the 1980s (plus some posthumous one-shots in his honor).
No one’s mentioned Bob Newhart on Big Bang Theory, though he played Professor Proton. How about Leonard Nimoy who did a voice over cameo?
Philbin appears as a crazed version of himself in How I Met Your Mother (which also has cameos from Paul Shaffer and Alan Thicke).
You all might enjoy the half dozen cameos appearing in the climatic scene of “Alias Jesse James”
I resemble that remark!
Another celebrity who came off as a bit of a jerk playing himself was Babe Ruth in Pride of the Yankees.
Mark-Linn Baker plays a depressed version of himself on “The Leftovers”, in which he contacts Carrie Coons’ character with some information but she’s never heard of him.
In “The Player”, a pair of scriptwriters insist that if their serious, socially-conscious art project gets mangled and Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis end up getting cast, they will veto the whole deal. At the end, we see a clip of the finished film, and of course it’s Julia and Bruce doing a cheeseball “uplifting” finale, while in the audience the two sellout writers toast their good fortune.
The annoying Glenn Danzig as himself on ATHF.
A somewhat prolonged cameo, perhaps.
Dolly Parton in Miss Congeniality 2.
As the name of the Brady Bunch Episode suggests, Davy Jones in “Getting Davy Jones”.
Another sort of prolonged ATHF cameo, this time with Larry Miller:
(for some reasaon at 0:30 the screen gets considerably darker, but still viewable)
And Desi Arnaz, Jr. in the first season. Marcia got to meet two of her crushes; no wonder Jan hated her! Davy Jones was very relaxed playing himself, charming as heck. I can see why he was a heartthrob. Desi Jr., OTOH, was so stiff and formal, even as a kid I felt bad for him.
Anyway, in The Holiday, Kate Winslet and Jack Black are in a video store (when those places still existed) in L.A. When the scene was being filmed, Dustin Hoffman was coincidentally nearby. Winslet and Black are discussing movies, DH and one of his movies is mentioned, and DH himself, in the next aisle, mumbles, “I can’t go anywhere…”
George Takei on Malcolm in the Middle:
My personal favorite Simpsons cameo is Linda Ronstadt in the “Mr. Plow” episode. I just love how she randomly shows up in Barney’s Plow King commercial, and Barney’s nonchalant reply when Moe asks how he knows Linda Ronstadt.
“It was a six hour bus ride with a lot of stops.” George Takei actually served on the Los Angeles Transit Board, and is very pro public transit.
And that note…
IIRC George Takei turned down a cameo in “Marge vs. the Monorail” because he didn’t want to be in an episode that made public transit look bad. So they got Leonard Nimoy to do it instead. Takei did voice Akira, the Japanese waiter in some other episodes, though.
Thanks for the backstory! It makes more sense now!
Another George Takei playing himself role, he was in an excellent episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, which takes place at a sci-fi convention. ISTR the “family” charging massages to Takei’s room. George is not amused.
Xavier McDaniel in Singles. To describe it would be to ruin one of the most explosively hilarious punchlines in the movie. Eddie Vedder is quite good in the movie as well…three members of Pearl Jam (who I’m pretty sure hadn’t released Ten yet when the movie was filmed) play Matt Dillon’s Citizen Dick bandmates, under their own names.
When LMFAO came out with the video for “I’m Sexy And I Know It”, my teen-aged son comes to my wife and I with “You got to see this video, it’s hillarious! By the way, who’s that disgusting old fat guy?” Um, that’s Ron Jeremy, Porn Star. I’m not sure if he was more taken aback by the fact that the “disgusting old fat guy” was a porn star, or that his parents knew it!
Wasn’t Chris Cornell in the movie Singles as well?