Watch Out for that Cameo!

A movie cameo can be awesome for more than just tangible reasons, better than a random celebrity dishing out life lessons or playing an atypical part. What the movie cameo does is serve as a snapsnot of pop culture at that moment in time; when movie executives considered a group of celebrities to offer a five-second spot in a film and went, “That one, that’s the one that best appeals to people today.” When Lance Armstrong did his guest spot in Dodgeball, he had just won like a billion Tour de Frances. When Bob Barker was in Happy Gilmore, he was already old by that point, and old people are hilarious. When Jamie Kennedy took a piss in the bushes in Harold and Kumar, we had just forgotten the Jamie Kennedy Experiment and moved on with our lives.

Those are the savvy cameos, the ones that make sense given a movie, its audience, the role required of them, and so forth. These are cameos that still make sense right now, because their actors are still relatively fresh in American consciousness. But the most pleasantly baffling ones are the cameos that haven’t survived the test of time, that, hell, haven’t even survived more than a few years before being relegated to “Huh?” status upon viewing.

In the first Mighty Ducks movie, the kids are about to practice their hockey skills when they get a little pep talk from none other than Basil McRae and Mike Modano of the Minnesota North Stars and minute NHL fame. Sound familiar? Of course not! Believe it or not, hockey used to be semi-relevant as a public sport, and that cameo made sense at the time. Now, it’s just super dated, and a reminder that Minnesota had its own hockey team before the North Stars hilariously moved to less-cold and less-hockey rabid Dallas in 1993 the year after the stars made their cameo.

My favorite cameo anachronism of all-time comes from 8Mile, when Sarah Stokes of “Da Band” fame makes a split-second appearance in the crowd during the final freestyle battle between B-Rabbit and that guy who’s playing Diddy in the upcoming Notorious B.I.G. movie. Remember her? She was the token singer on the first iteration of Diddy’s “Making the Band” series, the one who was always conniving with her way older husband to get more famous than her bandmates despite having the least amount of talent, as amazing of a statement as that is. Still not ringing a bell? Well, she’s got a prime spot in the center of the camera as Rabbit is spitting hot fire, bouncing her arm up and down and hoping, just hoping that Eminem would take her to his trailer after the shoot to let off steam so she could get, or rather, give a stroke of genius to a marginal genius. It makes no sense. Even at the time, Stokes was a D-level star; right now, she’s somewhere between “In-store appearance at the local dollar store” and “Missing” on the Celebrity Fame Scale.

Years from now, our children will watch 8Mile (uh, I guess) and when the camera is so obviously focused on Ms. Stokes (you can clearly see her face, unlike anyone else in the crowd) they’ll go, “Who is that? Someone important?” Even better, they won’t notice her at all, which means when we’re educating our kids about early 21^st century culture, we can get them up to date on all of the Diddy projects that will no doubt be 100% forgotten except to human memory (and Wikipedia) by 2020.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The original article mentioned that Lance Armstrong was in Wedding Crashers, when in reality he was in Dodgeball.  The writer is an idiot and was thinking of the wrong Vince Vaughan comedy vehicle.  Taintbrush regrets the error.)