Every George Lucas Cameo: From Star Wars to Minions & Monsters
There is a surprising amount of cinephile catnip in Minions & Monsters.
Set in Hollywood during the silent era, there are nods to century-old classics from the likes of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, but there’s also a slightly more contemporary reference at the very start: a cameo from George Lucas.
As Star Wars fans will be well aware, that scene—which is set in a movie museum in the present day and sees an animated Lucas pleading to be let out from his glass display—is not the only time the director has played himself for laughs, or appeared in animated form, but his on screen appearances have been few and far between, defined as much by how rare they are as how seemingly random—iconic documentary-bombing very much included.
In the list below, you’ll find all seven times that the Star Wars creator has appeared in movies and TV shows over the years before Minions & Monsters (I decided to leave out this solid gag from Men in Black, as it’s really just an image). Some of these will require some explaining; others less so, and as usual, there’s all the info you’ll need to find out where to stream them on all the usual platforms.
Twenty-odd years into his filmmaking career, George Lucas apparently decided that it was time to do a movie cameo. This came not in one of his own directorial efforts, but in a franchise he had helped to create with Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones.
The two legendary directors actually appear together in this one, dressed as missionaries in the airport hangar scene early on in Temple of Doom. In this clip, you can just about see them in the background at around the 10-second mark, standing in hats and dark clothes beside a wooden cart—and if the rumours are true, that’s Lucas and Spielberg along with producer Frank Marshal and Kathleen Kennedy.
Lucas’ next screen appearance was also in a Spielberg movie, but this one is a little easier to spot. The movie is Spielberg’s Hook, an originally underappreciated Peter Pan adaptation that most movie fans now agree is a low-key early ‘90s classic.
Robin Williams plays Pan, of course, alongside Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell—who appears in the movie at around the half-hour mark to whisk Peter away to Neverland. It’s during her flight across London that Lucas can be seen kissing a woman (apparently none other than Carrie Fisher) on Westminster Bridge. As Tinkerbell passes them, her magical aura lifts them off the ground. You can see the charming moment here.
With Indy and Hook, Lucas’ cameos were hidden in plain sight—pieces of movie trivia to be shared among filmmakers and fans. In Beverly Hills Cop III, however, he’s kind of impossible to miss.
The scene takes place at around the half-hour mark of the quite bad third instalment of Eddie Murphy’s otherwise hilarious franchise. In it, Murphy’s Axel Foley skips the line at an amusement park called Wonder World, prompting a disgruntled man (guess who) in an ugly sweater to shout “Ayy!” before turning to the woman beside him to say, “C’mon, let’s go.”
This was the first and only instalment of the Beverly Hills Cop series that was directed by John Landis, a filmmaker who often gave cameos to his friends and colleagues—including this famous Spielberg appearance in The Blues Brothers.
In the early ‘00s, Lucas’ cameos started to get even weirder. His first as himself came in the classic TV sitcom Just Shoot Me!—a workplace comedy set in the offices of a popular style magazine. The main character is an up-and-coming writer but the show’s MVP is David Spade’s Finch, a snarky assistant who happens to hold a torch for a certain bearded filmmaker.
In Lucas’ scene, Finch is tricked into surprising his idol with a handful of snakes, prompting Lucas to punch him in the face. This all came about when the series’ creators wrote to Lucas on a whim with no expectation that he'd even respond—but as it turned out, he was a fan.
If you were a teenager at any point in the ‘00s, you were probably religiously watching The O.C. This millennial behemoth was one of the most talked-about shows of its time, and apparently George Lucas’ daughter Katie was a big fan, too. It’s not clear if she egged her dad on to accept showrunner Josh Schwartz’s invitation to appear on the show, but it probably didn’t hurt.
The scene arrives in an episode from Season 2, in which Seth and his friend Zach are trying to pitch their comic book, Atomic County, to Hollywood. Somehow, this leads to a dinner with Lucas and Seth’s publisher, during which Seth, of course, starts to geek out before asking Lucas if he went to prom. It’s actually kind of sweet.
He might have been doing it for some clout with his daughter, but Lucas’ O.C. cameo was mostly seen at the time as a promotional stunt for the upcoming release of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. This was the sixth movie in the Star Wars franchise and the fourth and last that Lucas directed, so it probably makes sense that he decided to take the opportunity to make himself canon, both in front of and behind the camera.
This moment comes early on in the movie, during the scene at the Opera House on Coruscant where Anakin goes to meet with Senator Palpatine. As he enters the Emperor's royal box, you can clearly see two blue-skinned characters speaking to each other outside. One of these, Baron Papanoida, is George Lucas and the other, Chi Eekway, is his daughter Katie.
Pre-Minions & Monsters, Lucas’s most recent cameo also came in animated form in the Robot Chicken universe. Seth Green’s stop-motion show had originally parodied Lucas in a hilarious sketch (see it here) set in a therapist’s office. The man himself agreed to get involved when Green and his team invited him to appear on Robot Chicken: Star Wars—a standalone episode (it eventually became a trilogy) made up entirely of funny homages to Star Wars.
The minute or so in which Lucas appears on screen all takes place at a Star Wars convention, where he basically has to deal with his legions of devoted fans—this involves running away on the back of one dressed as a Ton Ton.
