Harry Flashman. For the win.
Then there was the fine documentary film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I still catch myself mentally pronouncing Socrates as “so crates”
In The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyers, Sherlock & Watson meet Sigmund Freud. In the sequel The West End Horrors they meet George Bernard Shaw (who is amazed that Holmes can tell where someone is from just by talking to them), Bram Stoker & Oscar Wilde.
Holmes also mentions, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, “the little affair of the Vatican cameos,” and refers to his “anxiety to oblige the Pope.” The Pope at that time would have been Leo XIII.
Twain also was a guest on the Enterprise D.
I think Dumas could give Fraser a run for his money.
A significant proportion of historical novels would fit the bill, if I understand the criteria right. Thinking just about the works of Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe met the future Duke of Wellington, Napoleon, and various other historical personages. In the Saxon Chronicles, Uhtred met Alfred the Great and other English kings.
Sounds good, Mr. The Kid.
Phil Farmer’s Riverworld series of books-Everybody is a character in those stories.
You can add a couple hundred muppets to your list, as the entire roster regularly met celebrities on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and their various spin-off TV shows and movies.
The characters of MAS*H once had a drive-through encounter with General Douglas McArthur. And Charles Winchester in particular had a date with Audrey Hepburn, his family was neighbors with the Kennedy family on Martha’s Vineyard (which cause the old-money Winchesters to flee those unsophisticated nouveau riche) and his father knew Harry Truman (he didn’t like him, but he knew him).
See the first sentence of the OP.
Both mentioned in the OP.
Yes, that’s the kind of thing I’m going for.
Thanks, all.
There are also two collections of Riverworld stories written by other writers, not to mentio lots of Riverworld fan fiction, some on Farmer’s site.
One of the more interesting characters meeting historical characters is Cyrus Spitama in Gore Vidal’s novel Creation. He gets to meet Zoroaster, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Gautama Siddhartha, Mahavira, Lao Tze, and Confucius. Vidal takes some liberties (like the fact that a lot of people don’t think Lao Tze even existed), but it is remarkable that so many of these influential philosophers lived at bout the same time.
In a weird reversal of this, you have series where real life people are characters in the show; Baa Baa Black Sheep (Pappy Boyington), Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David), Dave’s World (Dave Barry), Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 (James Van Der Beek), Mike Tyson Mysteries (Mike Tyson), Scorpion (Walter O’Brien), Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld), The Untouchables (Eliot Ness), and others. On these shows, all of the fictional characters in the series have met a famous real life person.
How about the Simpsons? How many real life people have they met in the last thirty years?
Going really really obscure, in The Great Brain series, the character Tom brags a few times that he took boxing lessons from John L Sullivan
First thing I thought of- Uhtred has met pretty much every notable in England during the latter half of the 9th century.
I had to admit that Cornwell’s device for explaining Uhtred’s lack of historicity was clever- he made enemies with Bishop Asser, the guy whose chronicle of the time period around Alfred the Great’s reign is the main source. So Asser basically wrote Uhtred out of history.
Parks and rechas had a huge number of Cameo, including a number of prominent politicians such a Newt Gingrich, Madeleine Albright, Michelle Obama, and John McCaine.
Daisy Moses (“Granny”) meets John Wayne on the Beverly Hillbillies, Season 5, Episode 20, The Indians are Coming.
Many episodes of* I Love Lucy*.
Silent Movie (1976)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Zombieland (2009)