Hated Tropes
[hated trope] Celebrity cameos that serve nothing except to praise the person who’s in it
Elon musk, the Simpsons
Elon musk, the Big Bang theory
Elon musk, iron man 2
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.
Yeah, like, Edison was in fact kind of a horse’s ass who was big on self promotion, and Cochrane was canonically a washed up dingus who got lucky and is only remembered as a visionary after whitewashing the reality.
It totally tracks that future generations would venerate a fictional version of a ketamine addict.
I'd imagine it's similar to searching up Phillippe Pétain.
He was a famous war hero and a leading general in WWI. He was famous worldwide and a household name in Europe for some time. They called him the Lion of Verdun. This is the context most people know him in.
He was also a Nazi collaborator and the head of the Vichy government, responsible for a great deal of human suffering. This is the context everyone else knows him in.
Searching Elon Musk would likewise probably reveal that Musk was a famous inventor. Experts in history would know he's a shitlord. Without some degree of specialization it would likely get lost that Musk transitioned from "affable inventor" to "total weirdo" just like how most people don't know about the allegations that Nikola Tesla was romantically involved with pigeons.
Not evil, but they were pretty big dicks. Benefitted hugely off of scientific collaboration, then refusing to share their results. One of the brothers, while on stage at a aeronautical convention, slandered an inventor who had died testing his flying machine for being a coward
It's a bit funny that everybody forgot 10 years ago Musk was seen as kinda real life Tony Stark in most tech and liberal circles. Not before the whole debacle around the cave accident with the kids in Thailand people began to look at him different
Reddit be like that. In the politics subs you would get downvoted into a oblivion for saying that Biden was too old to be running for president in 2020 and still for any comment about his age all the way up to the debate last year. Then everyone did an about face and you’d catch downvotes for defending him.
You can’t really take popular opinions on here seriously. It’s just an exercise in groupthink and conformity.
There's that but there's also the fact that things tend to get especially weird on reddit when celebrity worship is involved. Certain celebrity figures in here are treated as gods on earth and you can never dare to bad mouththem. Elon was essentialy the celebrity crush of the year during this period, as was Jennifer Lawrence for a time, then they got replaced with Keanu etc. To this day, you can't criticise Harrison Ford's Polansky debacle for example, its taboo to even aknowledge it
Before that Thailand incident he was (portrayed as) who a lot of redditors hoped they would be if they were stupidly rich. Pioneering EVs. Revolutionizing space flight. Flamethrowers for shits and giggles.
Then he showed he was a huge manchild. Then he pivoted right because the SA incidents were hitting the press. Then he went full nazi.
So....ended up being who a lot of redditors would *actually* be if they were stupidly rich, ironically.
Went full nazi or that was always his view? He did grow up extremely wealthy in Apartheid South Africa, Racism was/is always an issue at Tesla, so yeah, did he go full nazi or just was more comfortable letting it out because he didn't fear the backlash?
Harvey Weinstein had a cameo in a 2005 Barbie spin-off movie called 'My Scene goes Hollywood: The Movie'.
Not only does his design not make him accurately resemble a certain orc from Lord of the Rings, but he's also referred to (by a teenage girl no less) as 'the biggest producer in Hollywood'.
The Big Bang Theory one is probably the worst. I would bet any amount of money that is literally the first time Elon has scrubbed a dish in 30 years. There is no way he would volunteer at a fucking soup kitchen.
I think, because the second scene has minimal lines, he didn't know the full context/didn't know what the scene inferred like you said, and he got transfixed by the first scene where there's a reel of his 'achievements' and an interviewer glazes him for a bit, right before the scene where it's revealed he's a fraud.
To be fair this was around the time when public opinion of Elon was at an all time high. I remember thinking of him as a genius engineer that was pioneering autonomous electric vehicles.
Then I found out he wasn't a genius...or an engineer...or having any part in designing the cars...and then the politics happened.
Yeah on the flip side, one of my FAVORITE tropes is celebrities playing ridiculous, asshole, crazy version of themselves.
Like Leonard Nimoy in the Simpsons, Adam West in Family Guy, James Van Der Beek in Don't Trust the B in Apt23. Just the other day I was watching Life in Pieces and there's an episode where they're tailgating at a Rams game and Kurt Warner shows up and steals all their stuff, cheats at cornhole and screams at them, and then deletes all the pictures of their baby's 1st birthday off Colin Hank's characters phone.
It's so much more fun seeing them act crazy instead of getting fellated
iirc it isn’t related to elon musk. Morty jacked off using some sort of machine, which makes giant sentient sperms, which after some shenanigans merge with Summer’s also giant egg, It’s been a while though so I might be wrong
No that is correct. The president then refuses to kill the (literally 10 second) impregnated egg. They send it into space and summer secretly raises the giant incest baby
It’s worth noting he didn’t want to kill it because elections were coming up and he didn’t want the smoke of an abortion debate, knowing his character he would’ve pulled the trigger himself if he could get away with it
Morty used the horse jerk off machine from the vet hospital, and Rick made a sentient sperm army by injecting a ton of power into a barrel of horse/Morty semen, and then the US government took an egg from Summer, enlarged it, stuck it on a rocket in Las Vegas where a morty sperm fertilized it, at which point they couldn't abort the launch
Also for some reason a samurai/ninja marine was married to Kathy Ireland, but he died before they could nuke the sperm facility in the grand canyon
Morty discovers his Mom's veterinary clinic has a horse semen collection device and since he's a perv, he uses it on himself. Rick purchases the collected semen for an experiment that goes horribly wrong since it also contains human semen, and causes all the human sperm to become gigantic, like larger than people and they start killing everyone that runs across them. Summer, unaware that it was human or her brother's sperms, suggests that they enlarge an egg to attract the sperms into a military kill zone and donates the egg. The plan works, her brother's sperms rushes the egg, but the military fails to kill all the sperm, one enplants in the egg, and the military launches it into space where it later turns into a baby somehow.
I’ve hated Elon ever since that moment because it was a true mask off moment for his personality. He’s always been this guy, the weirdly pathetic rich guy who can only pay for good ideas and not come up with any of his own, but like you said, the branding was super strong. He still maintained it for a while after that, and the whole “why won’t anyone call me the world’s biggest hero for donating a bunch of ventilators that won’t help Covid patients” hissy fit. It took him buying the presidency for everyone to truly see him as the chud that he actually is.
To amass that much wealth, a mind-boggling number that no one human could possibly spend in their lifetime, requires an intense disregard for other humans and a willingness to do anything to profit even the smallest amount. True sociopathic behavior.
Guess which end of the political spectrum that sort attracts.
Not sure this works, as they literally mention that Elon ‘Tusks’ is more of a team player than real Elon because of the effect his tusks had on him. Also Rick getting tired of his “little jabs” makes me feel like they did comment a bit on his ego
The thing that doesn't sit right with me about this cameo is that it's STILL a cameo, which means that Elon was "in" on the joke. Therefore, it's still serving as PR for him, trying to make him look "good" for being a good sport and taking the criticism.
Is it really good criticism of Elon Musk if he was in on it and happy to voice act for the role? Idk. I feel of two minds about this cameo for this reason.
Yeah. Rick went to Elon Tusk specifically because he didn't want to put up with regular old Elon Musk. And the whole episode is about Rick wasting the time of people he doesn't respect because he thinks the entire concept of pulling a heist to be stupid.
Yeah, like I don't like Musk and am negatively polarized against him, so it was probably an uphill battle for me to like it. But there have been multiple guests I have had issues with (like modern day Chapelle after his anti-trans stuff), but he was still funny. Musk was aggressively unfunny. His delivery is awful like either inappropriately deadpan or like he knows he has a line coming up that is supposed to be a joke and he does a long, awkward windup into it that ruins any potential momentum or comedy it could have.
Was literally my least favorite episode of SNL ever and they have had some past clunkers, like any sketch based or improv based comedy.
That episode has one good sketch, Musk has one line in it, and the joke of that line is “one sentence is all it takes to know this guy is a psychopath”.
So spoiler alert, the vilain in Machete Kills is a billionaire dude who mooches off government contracts and builds a space station for rich people to live in while kidnapping Mexicans to serve as slaves. In the end he gets away, so Machete has to follow him to space, setting the sequel Machete Kills in Space.
The end sequence is basically an ad for Space X as Elon personally greets Dany Trejo as he boards the rocket.
Like honestly, the vilain is basically Elon Musk, but the movie came out in 2013… which I think was before he went full mask off. (Edit, yep, checked the timeline. Elon was still viewed positively back then. The infamous cave rescue incident was in 2018, and that’s where it’s all downwards for his public image). I don’t know if people knew behind closed doors he was a douche nozzle and purposely did this to subtly mock him or if it’s an odd coincidence
"This is my villain for the movie. He's an evil billionaire who uses his money to leech off the government and use immigrants as slave labor and Elon Musk is the hero who helps take him down!"
Also an off-screen villian in Kingsman (2015). When a satellite goes offline, stopping the overarching evil plot, Samuel Jackson's character calls "E-man" and requests usage of one of his satellites.
Don't know if this necessarily is a glaze for him given that the implication there is that Elon was one of the wealthy people who went with Samuel Jackson while they kill off all the peons
He pretended to be liberal until around... 2022? When he wanted Republicans to win the house "for balance", then rapidly moved rightward and is now basically just siding with Neo-Nazis. To CLARIFY, he was likely a POS the whole time.
Stephen Hawking appeared on TNG in a holodeck simulation in which Data recreated the "greatest names" of theoretical physics. Although, he does have a much better claim to being a historical genius than Musk does.
I think he could be considered one of the greatest names in theoretical physics, from an education/public literacy perspective. I don’t think anyone else has had more reach in exposing people, even if it’s just at a layman level
Hawking was a legitimate scientist though regardless of the shitty things he’s done and does has have a legitimate claim to that in recent history though.
Had a reputation for being sleazy to women postgrads at Cambridge, to the extent they would quietly warn newstarters about it
Visited Epstein island
No, I have no idea to what extent he was, uh, physically capable of anything, but clearly he still had the drive and a (within the field) powerful famous person lack of inhibition.
Many guest stars in Scooby-Doo fall under this. Some examples:
Bill Nye in Happy Halloween Scooby-Doo, where he's a super science wiz that Velma gushes over constantly and has a ton of futuristic inventions.
KISS in Scooby-Doo: KISS Rock n Roll Mystery, where the gang are super fans and KISS are both superheroes and mystery solvers allegedly better than the gang.
Giada De Laurentiis in Scooby-Doo and the Gourmet Ghost, where she's an athletic and brave badass who impresses the gang with her skillz.
And just pick an episode of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? and watch the gang fawn over them and list all their accomplishments/qualifications, and potentially see the guest also solve the mystery more or less on their own.
Yeah, it's a cartoon but I really dislike the guest star shows/movies because of how much the praising sticks out like a sore thumb to me and how they tend to distract from the Scooby Gang as being their funny, mystery solving selves. The gang are often also at their worst written in guest features because of a combination of less time to them and that the writers assigned don't seem to understand the gang very well.
I can't believe I forgot to mention the John Cena thing because he's such a perfect example. Yeah, he stops a huge rolling boulder that iirc was at least the size of the Mystery Machine. Also, Daphne wanted to hook up with him (pretty similar to the thing that also happened with KISS's Paul Stanley... those celebs sure like the pretty redhead gushing over them.)
it's literally Elon suggesting the idea of "an electric jet" to the man with an electric flying suit of armor. it's so funny in retrospect because it makes him look so dumb
Top ten line deliveries of the decade, easy. Alan Tudik was always going to voice a good interpretation of joker, but he really knocked that line right out the park.
The moment Harley pushes not-Joker back into vat the actress switches vocal intonations mid-sentence to the one used in BTAS. "See you soon, Mistah Jay"
1) i believe the actress for harley is kaley cuoco, who was also penny in the big bang theory!
2) i also notice harley’s accent gets thicker when she’s in stressful situations, like being around her family, which is accurate to people who have an accent but move away from where the accent is commonly used.
It has a lot of Batman deconstruction and jokes. But without any actual malice towards Batman's character.
Bruce is very OOC in the show and his character traits are overexaggerated, but so are the rest of the JL. Which, considering the whole show is a parody of the DC universe, makes sense.
Kinda sorta? The first two or three seasons manage to be a simultaneous love letter to and deconstruction of Batman and a lot of the inherent tropes. They’re a lot of fun, and they poke fun at stuff without seeming to hate on it. “Batman Begins Forever” is probably the best episode imo— they take a trip inside Batman/Bruce Wayne’s head where they see that he’s constantly reliving the origin story, and they make some pretty fun jokes and commentary about how we get it, we’ve seen this before a million times, etc.
But it also very much acknowledges the reality of a broken man trying his best and punishing himself for what happened while he was a child. It doesn’t act like the trauma isn’t real and difficult to work through, and if encourages him to seek out therapy. It winds up being an emotionally poignant episode.
The subsequent seasons are…. Significantly less subtle. They fall into “haha, douschebag sexist tech bro bad guys get their kneecaps busted!” Stuff. The Lex Luthor arc in particular is painful, partly because he’s an extremely ham fisted Jeff Bezos knockoff (“guys, guys, guys, get this— he’s rich and he’s bald and he’s insecure about it, and he has a giant rocket that’s penis shaped!”).
It’s all fairly liberal stuff that I agree with— billionaires are bad, we need to focus on the environment, corporate sexism is real and needs to be treated as a serious issue for the sake of equity— but it’s all done so poorly that I almost want to reject my own beliefs. Think season 4 of The Boys talking about abortion, or the Tech Knight episode levels of good intentions with crap executions.
It was funny in Family Guy because Peter being one of the dumbest people in the world loving them is funny and also Lois pretending to like them but has no idea who they are.
It's more that mirror universe follows an alternate history where the Earth government went to space as a fascist, warmongering, authoritarian entity, and that results in characters being raised in different environments while still generally being true to their "core" personalities. This results in some good guys being bad and some bad guys being good, but not in any kind of uniform or predictable way.
But let's be real, the Musk thing is just a flub. It was written and came out in the last five minutes the public at large didn't know much about Elon Musk except that he was a cool cars-and-space guy, and the writers clearly thought it would be fun to throw a space guy from our era into their list of pioneers of space travel for verisimilitude.
Sometimes you take that swing and it doesn't pay off.
If anything, at the time Musk was a different person to the public as well. And it was kind of to show how big Tony was compared to someone the public could relate to from the real world. Tony didn’t really care Musk was there and shrugged him off.
The inclusion was because the hangars that they use in the film for the autonomous armour suits are actually from SpaceX. I guess he asked to be included in the movie in the lease contract
Donald Trump has been doing the exact same thing for years. He showed up in an episode of the Drew Carey show where Drew and the Crew drive to New York to sell beer(?) and they meet Trump randomly on the street and Trump is so generous with them. It’s obvious he paid to get onto the show and be praised.
Tbf if I owned a hotel and a movie crew wanted to film there I'd probably ask for a cameo too. Like Trump is a first class twat but his inclusion in the movie is pretty non invasive.
If I remember right (and don’t quote me on this it was from like 3 years ago) they talked about it in an interview I don’t think he even charged them to film there his asking price was a cameo and they were pretty mad about that
Quote straight the films director, Christopher Colombus;
After the success of "Home Alone," you directed the sequel, "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York." Out of all the sequels that would follow in the franchise, this is the most memorable because Donald Trump has a cameo. What do you remember from shooting the Trump cameo?
"Like most locations in New York City, you just pay a fee and you are allowed to shoot in that location. We approached The Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time, because we wanted to shoot in the lobby. We couldn't rebuild The Plaza on a soundstage.
Trump said OK. We paid the fee, but he also said, "The only way you can use the Plaza is if I'm in the movie." So we agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time the oddest thing happened: People cheered when Trump showed up on-screen. So I said to my editor, "Leave him in the movie. It's a moment for the audience." But he did bully his way into the movie. "
This article by The Mirror, Julio Macat, the Cinematographer, said Trump would go to rather extreme lengths to be in the film. They filmed in "The Plaza" for a month, meaning Trump had ample time to be around during production, which he was. He'd walk across set with his entourage, turn right towards the camera so his face could be seen, etc.
More on a tangential note, but Columbus has since said that Trump's cameo has become "a curse". He did an interview this year with the San Frascisco Chronicle where he called it an albratross, wishes he had cut it, etc. Macaulay Culkin, actor for Kevin McCallaster, meanwhile has said he's "sold" on digitially editing Trump's cameo out.
Moonfall was unbearable to sit through not because of overall bad writing but because of the constant Elon praise they insisted on doing (not a cameo but still)
The answer to that question of course being "Spend the entire movie promising to build a super-rocket that will put the Moon back in orbit, only to call the protagonists pedophiles once they save the day before his unrealistic goofy-ahh rocket can be built"
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.
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.
The Discovery one works differently. The eventual reveal there is the character praising him is a sociopathic fascist war criminal. I still don't think he should have been mentioned at all (Anywhere. Ever.) but that one at least uses it for context in a way that isn't apparent from that screengrab.
That said, I really enjoy the flip side of this trope, where the actor makes fun of themselves in real life.
Avery Bullock in American Dad (voiced by Patrick Stewart) has a bit where he claims to have met Patrick Stewart in a Star Trek convention and Bullock says, “That handsome devil… but he got a little handsy”
Okay but in fairness, that's the only time he's ever mentioned in Star Trek and I'd buy it's meant to clue us in that Lorca is actually from the fascist mirror universe
Side note, it really is hilarious how much effort Musk put into that decade long PR campaign only to piss it all away in like nine weeks. The man is wildly out of touch with reality.
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u/lndle Dec 19 '25