This Is the Only Celebrity Who Was Willing to Make Fun of Themselves in ‘The Simpsons’ Darkest New Year’s Episode

While The Simpsons has a number of Christmas-themed episodes, a handful of shows themed around the Fourth of July and at least one episode set during Whacking Day, the series hasn’t observed New Year’s Eve all that much — possibly because acknowledging the passage of time just calls attention to the characters’ unexplained temporal stasis. 

One episode, however, that dared to tell a very specific New Year’s story was “Treehouse of Horror X.” Airing just two months before the dawn of the year 2000, the third segment in 1999’s Halloween show, “Life’s a Glitch, Then You Die,” lampooned the widespread fears around the so-called “Millennium Bug.” In the episode, the programming error causes every electronic device in the world to go full Maximum Overdrive.

The Simpson family attempt to flee the planet via “Operation Exodus,” a rocket ship to Mars containing Earth’s most beloved public figures such as Mark McGwire and Mel Gibson (did we mention this was 1999?). Unfortunately, Bart and Homer end up on a shuttle full of the planet’s most annoying celebrities, bound directly for the sun. 

While The Simpsons is famous for getting high-profile celebrities to voice themselves in episodes, as executive producer Mike Scully pointed out in the DVD commentary for the episode, “Getting celebrities for the second ship was not as easy…”

The opening of the segment featured a cameo from New Year’s Eve stalwart Dick Clark, who gently poked fun at his public image by going along with the suggestion that he was really a Terminator-like cyborg (Clark later told writer Ron Hauge that the episode led to “the biggest response he’s ever gotten from anything he’d ever done”). But, perhaps not surprisingly, big stars weren’t exactly lining up to appear in the part of the episode in which they’re literally condemned to burn to death on the fiery surface of the sun. The doomed spacecraft is full of famous faces like Rosie O’Donnell, Pauly Shore, and Ross Perot, but they’re all played by soundalikes, save for one person: The Kid & I star Tom Arnold.  

The Simpsons staff was quick to praise Arnold for agreeing to the self-deprecating cameo, noting that he was a “real champ” who was “totally in on the joke.” To Arnold’s credit, the show doesn’t hold back at all, giving him some pretty harsh lines about tying up audiences and forcing them to watch his terrible TV shows, and including a bizarre non-sequitur in which Arnold guzzles a can of peaches. 

Hauge recalled that “Tom Arnold really threw himself into it,” although he couldn’t help but make fun of the writers during the recording session. Between line readings he would randomly heckle Hauge, telling him: “You gotta get some sun, man.”

Which is a tad less severe than telling someone that they need to be jettisoned into the sun for the sake of humanity’s future.