We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.

Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.

Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.

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Let’s talk about my insatiable appetite for pre-postmodern horror. I don’t care about sorority girls getting slaughtered because they ran the wrong way up the stairs; I basically don’t care about anything that’s not in black and white. I like stuff that takes place in creepy laboratories, where some desperate soul is trying to violate the natural boundaries between life and death. The Universal monster movies of the 30s, the Val Lewton stuff of the 40s, the nuclear panic stuff of the late 50s/early 60s. So it’s a given that my favorite part about the weeks leading up to Halloween is that Turner Classic Movies floods their schedule with ancient, half-forgotten horror films. Halloween itself is kind of a letdown, because it means the well of stuff I love is about to dry up.

But as usual, YouTube makes it all better. As a child of the 80s, I think I always had some awareness of of the Boris Karloff films, particularly Bride of Frankenstein, but it was filtered through Young Frankenstein, Elvira and “Weird Science” (the Oingo Boingo song, which I definitely heard years before I saw the movie). Above, you’ll find a clip of the creation of the bride from the 1935 sequel to Frankenstein; below the jump, the various cultural detritus that led me to it. Happy Halloween!

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