Matt Damon Once Played Himself On A Wildly Popular Kids’ Cartoon

Matt Damon appeared as himself on a 2007 episode of the PBS children’s series “Arthur” — and it was far from a typical cameo. In Season 11, Episode 6, “The Making of Arthur,” he appears in the episode’s main storyline. The plot revolves around Arthur and his friends making videos for a contest being held by Damon where he searches for the “best film.”

Arthur and his pals have various degrees of success, and while the aardvark doesn’t win the contest (the title goes to George), Damon ends up loving Arthur’s video so much that, by the end of the episode, he decides to produce a whole television show based on it.

Damon’s contest was titled “Postcards from You,” which was also the name of the interstitial video submissions that aired between segments of “Arthur” from Seasons 11-13. By centering “The Making of Arthur” on the contest, the episode encouraged young viewers to submit their own clips. “As we were thinking of possible guests, Matt Damon made sense,” executive producer Pierre Valette told the Associated Press.

Damon had ties to “Arthur” even before his appearance on the animated series. Peter K. Hirsch, the head writer on “Arthur,” was a classmate of the actor at Harvard. What’s more, designing Damon’s animated counterpart became something of a family affair. As creator Marc Brown told Assignment X, “We have wonderful experts that advise us on technically how to craft a story that’s going to be right for our age group.” In this case, the expert was Damon’s mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood educator. The result? Turning the star into a bear-like version of himself.

Though this was Damon’s only on-screen appearance on “Arthur,” that doesn’t mean he was forgotten about within the show’s canon. In fact, he’s mentioned in three more episodes throughout the run of the series: the B-story of Season 12, Episode 5, “On This Spot,” the A-story of Season 17, Episode 8, “The Director’s Cut,” and the A-story of Season 20, Episode 2, “Fern’s Flight of Fancy.” 

Damon is far from the only celebrity who has guest-starred on the series. Joan Rivers, the Backstreet Boys, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman have appeared in the young aardvark’s world, among others. The kids’ series concluded in 2022 after 25 seasons, with a finale that revealed the characters’ full-circle futures.