Sometimes a celebrity is offered their 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. For the Internet-age, fanmade equivalent, see Real-Person Fic. See also Band Toon.
Examples (sorted alphabetically by last name):
- I am the Greatest! The Adventures of Muhammad Ali, with Muhammad 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 was the executive producer, and she did voice Rosey in the TV special The Rosey & Buddy Show, which also featured her then-husband Tom Arnold as Buddy.
- Secret Millionaires Club with Warren Buffett.
- Cartoon Network's Class of 3000, created by Andre "3000" Benjamin and starring him as the voice of a celebrity-turned-music teacher of a Wacky Homeroom.
- Camp Candy with John Candy as the head counsellor at a summer camp.
- Jackie Chan Adventures, which featured a fictional Jackie Chan as a Humble Hero who insisted that he was merely an archaeologist. Jackie didn't voice himself, but he did participate in the Q&A sessions at the end and appeared as himself in a few scenes in the opening.
- The Gary Coleman Show is an especially strange case, as it was actually based on Gary 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) wrote 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 as the series creator and the voice of the title character.
- 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.
- Comedian Bill Dana (of Jose Jimenez fame) voiced himself as a cartoon twice, first in a mid-60s Paramount cartoon and then in 1966 in Hanna-Barbera's take on Alice In Wonderland (which he also scripted).
- Brazilian singer Larissa de Macedo (better known as Anitta) got her own Animesque animated series Clube da Anittinha, starring a Super-Deformed version of herself.
- 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.
- Kirarin☆Revolution with Koharu Kusumi.
- Bobby's World with Howie Mandel (who not only appeared as himself in live-action against animated bookends but also voiced the title character and the title character's dad, Howard).
- Click & Clack's As the Wrench Turns with Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk fame as Ink Suit Actors.
- Hammerman, a socially conscious superhero toon with MC Hammer.
- Garfield and Friends featured a pig version of comedian Kevin Meaney named Aloysius, who works for the network and for the animation studio, who complains about problems in the show.
- Rick Moranis in Gravedale High, where he plays Max Schneider, the Token Human teacher at the eponymous high school full of monsters. Another odd case as then-rising-star Ricki Lake (the star of Hairspray and later the host of her own talk show) was the voice of Cleofatra, one of Schneider's students.
- 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 Norris' voice but also has him in live action segments at the beginning and end, as did Mister T (interestingly, both were from Ruby-Spears).
- Mary Kate and Ashley in Action! starred the Olsen twins.
- The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley starred Martin Short as a cartoon version of one of his most famous Saturday Night Live/SCTV characters.
- Sgt. Slaughter in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. NFL star William Perry aka "The Fridge" also had his own figure, but never actually appeared in the animated series.
- Rick Springfield played himself in Mission: Magic!. Unusually, this was before he actually became famous in the United States.
- 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!
- Enhanced by the fact that the title character's CG persona when talking to his employers was a pretty obvious Bruce Willis look-alike.
- 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, co-created by Arnold Schwarzenegger and starring him as a crime-fighting superhero. However, it was cancelled before the first episode premiered due to a scandal around Arnold occurring at the same time, though a trailer and a comic series were produced.
- My Dad the Rock Star. Though Gene Simmons didn't voice Rock Zilla, he was the series' creator and executive producer while Rock Zilla shared a number of his signature traits.
- However, Haim Saban was once in talks with Gene Simmons for a KISS cartoon in the 90s. Then Saban made the big mistake in insulting Gene in Hebrew... and Gene replied back in the same tongue.
- There was an upcoming KISS Hello Kitty cartoon, but it was cancelled very quickly.
- French Big Fun singer Yvan-Chrysostome Dolto, better known as "Carlos", had a series called Les Aventures de Carlos in 1992, which was broadcast in the Club Dorothée show. The cartoon was localized for a Western audience by Saban Entertainment and broadcast in the USA in first-run syndication in the early 1990s as part of Bohbot Entertainment's "Amazin' Adventures" package under the name Around the World in Eighty Dreams.
- The Mighty B!: Amy Poehler co-created the show and voices the main character.
- Wild Kratts: Created by and starring the Kratt Brothers.
- Zeroman stars Leslie Nielsen as the voice of the eponymous character, an elderly superhero who bears a strong resemblance to his voice actor and has the secret identity of Les Mutton.
- Rey Mysterio Versus La Oscuridad is a 2023 Genre Throwback, with Rey Mysterio Jr. as both a main character and the show's executive producer.
- Mike Tyson Mysteries is a parody of this concept. Obviously making fun of the cheesy 80 and 90's tropes when toons like these were prevalent, albeit with a more adult humor bent.
- ToddWorld with Todd Parr.
- Non-Animated Example: Inside Woody Allen with Woody Allen, a daily newspaper comic strip starring the film director.
- Big Mouth is a modernized take on Nick Kroll's childhood.
- Kuu Kuu Harajuku for Gwen Stefani, whose character is called G in the show.
- Little Ellen with Ellen DeGeneres (a 7-year-old version of her, more precisely).
- Wolf Rock TV, a 1984 cartoon starring radio DJ Wolfman Jack. It was cut short at seven episodes in its original airing and very little footage survives.
Group Examples (sorted alphabetically by title)
- Abunai Sisters stars the Japanese celebrity duo Mika and Kyoko Kano.
- 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."
- In The Beatles Anthology documentary special, Harrison says the time they went to visit Elvis Presley in Beverly Hills and couldn't find The King's house was like "a scene out of a Beatles cartoon".
- The Brady Kids was this for its first season but subsequent installments became Not Quite Starring for three of the six, as Greg, Peter, and Marsha were recast.
- Averted in Father of the Pride, which "features" Siegfried and Roy as supporting characters.
- Incidentially, 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, based on Japanese pop duo Puffy AmiYumi. It stars two characters who barely resemble their real-life counterparts (the characters' manager apparently resembles their real-life manager more than the two leads resemble the singers) and who may or may not be a lesbian couple. The real singers appear in interstitials.
- Two 1970's sibling singing groups, The Jackson 5 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 mocked so much 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.)
- Pretty Rhythm: Dear My Future is this for the Idol Singer groups Prizmmy and Puretty. In an odd case of this trope, the former has both their singing and speaking voices provided by different people despite being based on a real group, while the latter uses the idol group they are based off as their singing voices.
- ProStars, 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 United Kingdom 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 among teenagers. Especially when it came to the students (Older musicians popular with the demographic's parents were typically cast as teachers).
- There were plans in 2003 for a t.A.T.u. anime film, but it seems to have been shelved.
- The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan's Planet. The Gilligan's Island stars all voiced themselves, save Tina Louise, who was off pouting somewhere, and Dawn Wells, who was unavailable at the time; Ginger and Mary-Anne were played by Filmation staple Jane Webb. Wells kindly returned, as well as doing serious double-duty in Louise's old role, on Planet.
