this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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I just think they're neat!
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The big turning point for me was when the guest celebrities were no longer characters on the show and just played themselves. Just small ads for celebrity du jour.
Celebrities are the worst part of any media.
Every time a celebrity isn't on-screen, everyone should be saying where's celebrity?
? There were many Simpson celebrities in the 90's that played themselves. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Wade Boggs, Bob Hope, Leonard Nemoy...
they didn't use their real names of course but you could tell it was them
Pretty sure they used their real names...
Not every time. Those mentioned were mostly the exceptions. Tons of people were on the show not as themselves. Daniel Radcliffe wasn’t himself or Harry Potter on the show. He played a character that was a parody of Twilight. It had a somewhat decent enough joke and wasn’t just hey look at this famous person we got. Look how cool they are. Ooohhhhh ahhhhhhh
It does depend on how they are written into the show. Leonard Nimoy in the Monorsil episode is a caricature of himself and it works well.
They weren't the centerpiece of the episode, like Jack Black as the new comic guy
And those were the exceptions and not an every episode occurrence. Some of those also had good points to make like Lisa going vegan. Very much not how the modern cameos go.
Somewhere around the point of Lady Gaga driving into Springfield on a magical train it became celebrity ads.
Exception? Wiki shows 221 "himself" and 37 herself in the first 20 seasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Simpsons_guest_stars_(seasons_1%E2%80%9320)
I think I recall the Alex Baldwin and Kim Basinger being the first episode that pushed me off the Simpsons .. it felt like celebrity pandering or something and I just stopped watching
Absolutely. I was watching the series sequentially for the first time in ages and that episode stood out as a definite turning point. The celebrity appearances just got more frequent and more insufferable from then on.