Celebrity Toons

One more reason Muhammed Ali was the greatest: He did his own voice work!

Sometimes a celebrity is offered his or her own cartoon. They are made mostly to showcase the celebrity, and nothing more.

If they don't bother showing up to do the voices—which is quite often the case—it becomes Not Quite Starring. See also Band Toon.

Examples (sorted alphabetically by last name):

• I am the Greatest! The Adventures of Muhammed Ali, with Muhammed Ali.
• Life With Louie with Louie Anderson.
• Pamela Anderson was a stripper at night and fought crime later at night in Stripperella.
• Little Rosey with Roseanne Barr.
  • She didn't voice the title character (although had the show been renewed she would have); but Roseanne did executive produce, and she did voice Rosey in the TV special The Rosey & Buddy Show.
• Class of 3000 with Andre "3000" Benjamin.
• Camp Candy with John Candy.
  • This was named one of People magazine's worst TV shows of 1989.
• Jackie Chan Adventures which wasn't as bad as some other examples in this page. Even though the actor didn't voice himself, but rather the Q&A sessions at the end.
  • Heck the show ran for five seasons. That should tell you something.
• The Gary Coleman Show is an especially strange case, as it was actually based on Coleman's TV movie The Kid with the Broken Halo.
  • Even stranger than it sounds; in his autobiography A Cast Of Friends, William Hanna (yes, this was a Hanna-Barbera Production) writes that the Mexican animators had drawn Andy (Gary Coleman's character, a rare instance in animation where the star of a self-titled show doesn't play him/herself) as WHITE!
• Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids with Bill Cosby.
  • Also Little Bill, whose titular character could be interpreted as Cosby when he was a little kid.
• Wish Kid: Starring Macaulay Culkin, with his sister Quinn Culkin as his baby sister on the show
• Wild Grinders with Rob Dyrdek of Rob and Big "fame", if one can call it that. For this reason, his status as a "celebrity" is dubious at best...
• Kid Notorious with Robert Evans also featured Saul "Slash" Hudson, guitarist for Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver, as himself. One of the rare cases of a Celebrity Toon directed at adult fans.
• Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling was another show of the impersonated-voices-plus-live-action-segments variety. It was expectedly average.
• Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic featured pop-singer-turned-magician Mariko Itakura, a.k.a. Princess Tenko.
• The Lebrons with LeBron James
• Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist - comic Jonathan Katz and plenty of comic patient/guest stars.
• Bobby's World with Howie Mandel (who not only appeared as himself in liveaction against animated bookends but also voiced the title character and the title character's dad, Howard).
• Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns with Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk fame as Ink Suit Actors.
• Hammerman with MC Hammer.
• Rick Moranis in Gravedale High. Another odd case as Ricki Lake (the star of Hairspray and later the host of her own talk show) was the voice of Cleofatra - but she wasn't the star of the show.
  • Yeah, because Rick Moranis was, y'know the guy from the title, and Ricki Lake wasn't much of a celebrity at the time.
• Mister T, where the star of The A-Team ferries a gymnastics team, a young protégé who imitates everything he does, and an enormous mastiff with a spiked collar and a mohawk.
• Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos which not only has Chuck's voice but also has him in live action segments at the beginning and end, as did Mr. T (interestingly, both were from Ruby-Spears).
• Mary Kate and Ashley In Action featured the Olsen twins.
• The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley with Martin Short.
• Sgt. Slaughter in G.I. Joe. NFL star William Perry aka "The Fridge" also had his own figure, but never actually appeared in the animated series.
• Waynehead is more or less based on the childhood of Damon Wayans.
• Bruno the Kid with Bruce Willis.
  • Enhanced by the fact that the title character's CG persona when talking to his employers was a pretty obvious Bruce Willis look-alike.
    • Willis also executive produced and co-wrote and sang the theme song!
• Braceface sorta falls into the category as Alicia Silverstone not only voiced the main character, Sharon, for the first two seasons, but doubled as a producer.
• The Governator with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• My Dad the Rock Star. Though Gene Simmons didn't voice Rock Zilla, he was the executive producer and Rock Zilla shared a number of his signature traits.

Group Examples (sorted alphabetically by title)

• The Beatles had a cartoon series in the 1960s at the height of their fame. The real lads from Liverpool greatly disliked this series because of cheap animation and terrible voices (provided by Paul Frees and Lance Percival, who later was the voice of Old Fred in Yellow Submarine, which is a masterpiece compared to this series).
  • Actually, it was said that when John Lennon stayed home as dad to son Sean, he watched the cartoons. And George Harrison was quoted as saying that the show was "so bad or silly that it was good and maybe the passage of time would make them more fun today."
• Averted in Father of the Pride, which "features" Siegfried and Roy as supporting characters.
  • Incidentally, Siegfried and Roy had their own straight to video animated special, Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible, which was produced by DiC Entertainment and released in 1996.
• The Harlem Globetrotters (later Go-Go Globetrotters, an Animated Anthology with CB Bears, The Herculoids and Space Ghost) applied the same to, well, the Harlem Globetrotters (an "entertainment" basketball team). They later became the Super Globetrotters.
  • These cartoon versions of these spacebound Globetrotters characters later appeared in the Futurama universe where there's an entire Planet Globetrotter.
• Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi is a more recent example, except using a Japanese group who do not know English that well and who are largely unknown in the United States.
  • The real Ami and Yumi do live-action intros to each episode. Their accents are so thick, no wonder they had American actors voice their supposed* cartoon incarnations.
    • • Supposed because Ami and Yumi don't even look Japanese, let alone like the women who supposedly inspired them. Though apparently their real life manager looks close to his cartoon counterpart.
• Two 1970s sibling singing groups, The Jackson Five and the Osmonds, had their own animated shows at the heights of their fame. Unusually, they did their own voices.
• Rap stars Kid (Christopher Reid) and Play (Christopher Martin) voiced themselves in the NBC Saturday morning cartoon, Kid N' Play, or at least their alter egos did.
• In-universe example: Limozeen: But They're in Space! in the Homestar Runner universe.
• New Kids on the Block had an animated series which also suffered this fate, and is such Snark Bait that it can almost be taken as a Stealth Parody of Band Toons. One member of the group said, "California guys couldn't do Boston accents!"
  • Their manager Dick Scott claimed the group couldn't voice their animated alter egos because "it's too complicated." (Ironically, Donnie Wahlberg is now making quite a good living as an actor.)
• Pro Stars, where Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky use sports-themed gadgets to fight evil. No, seriously.
• Top Of The Pops Saturday, a children's spin-off of music show Top of the Pops, often featured short animated skits under the name of Pop School. The premise was Exactly What It Says on the Tin; a school where both teachers and students happened to be musicians who were popular in the UK at the time, such as Busted, Girls Aloud and even Ozzy Osbourne. Although it mostly parodied the celebrities, it could also be considered a showcase for certain topics and artists who were (or aimed to be) popular amongst teenagers. Especially when it came to the students (Older musicians popular with the demographic's parents were typically cast as teachers)