Fans love a great cameo.
Some of the more coveted cameos celebrities crave are in big franchises like the MCU or Star Wars franchises. Everyone wants to be on those sets because they're larger than life. Everyone wants to be a Storm Trooper or just some random alien with a small encounter in Guardians of the Galaxy. Remember Ed Sheeran's Game of Thrones cameo? Or how about Stan Lee's 37 cameos in virtually every Marvel film ever?
Sometimes cameos are very obvious, allowing fans to catch them before they disappear; others are so secretive and hidden that not even the loyal fan could spot them.
We've watched Steven Spielberg's Hook a thousand times throughout our childhoods and into our adulthoods that we broke our VHS machines and later scratched our DVDs. Yet we never spotted Glen Close's cameo. How you may ask? We're scratching our heads too. It all boils down to a very realistic disguise.
The Makeup Department Should Have Won An Award For Concealing Close So Well
In a speech hyping up the fact that he's finally going to get to kill Peter Pan, Hook asks his loyal followers who among them didn't believe in him. He points to the crowd and asks who, just as the camera pans to a disguised Peter.
Hook points and says, "You!" and we think he's talking to Peter, but he walks over to a pirate called Gutless.
"You bet against me bringing Pan back here, didn't ya?" Hook says.
"No," Gutless mutters. "Tell your captain the truth," Hook taunts. Gutless begins to cry.
"Awww... say it... say it," Hook says, and the pirate admits it.
"Yes... you made a boo boo..." Hook croons. "I did... I did it..." Gutless tries to butter him up.
"The boo box," Hook announces to the dismay of Gutless, who pleads no. They take him, and he screams. Watching it back, you can kind of tell that Gutless has a feminine voice, but that makeup was spot on. In the end, Gutless gets stuffed into a huge person-sized chest that has a little opening where they drop in a couple of scorpions.
You'd never really know it's Close, but once you do know, the eyes and nose are unmistakable. This was before she earned her Academy Award nomination for Albert Nobbs, but we think she could have easily raked in another nomination just for this short performance.
We don't know what she did exactly to prepare for the small cameo, but we're betting getting turned into a male pirate helped her get into character. The beard and hair are just so realistic it's unbelievable. Along with Close, Genesis's drummer and lead singer, Phil Collins also makes a small cameo as a police inspector, as does Dustin Hoffman's son during the baseball scene.
The Boo Box Scarred Us For Life
We might have watched Hook a thousand times as kids, but that doesn't mean we weren't scarred by the Boo Box every time we watched it. It continues to scare us, in fact.
Allie Gemmill of Collider wrote about their experience rewatching Hook as an adult and what they thought seeing the Boo Box scenes again; it resonates so hard with us.
"It's one of the most harrowing scenes I watched as a child," they wrote. "It's a scene that always registered as screwy and left a pit in my stomach. An object meant serve as a symbol of Hook's total power and terrible mean streak, the boo box lives in infamy for me — and plenty of other Millennials, I wager."
"A dark, cramped chest only whipped out for the most yellow-bellied of pirates, the boo box is the kind of punishment that gets burned into your impressionable child brain if you, like me, watched Hook as an elementary school-sized human.
"As a kid, generally speaking, one of the last things you want to spend your time wrapping your head around is the idea that adults can get scared. Another would be the idea that humans can inflict pain on others. The "boo box" scene not only introduces you to these ideas but also makes damn sure you have a visual example of the kinds of horrors the term "boo box" implies. To this day, no words have haunted me quite like the words "boo" and "box" when placed side-by-side."
We completely agree; it's not even funny. Unfortunately, Spielberg wasn't thrilled with the final product of Hook. He said if he watches it again, maybe he'll like some of it, but we think he'll get a kick out of Close's scene. It's a great cameo, and we're still feeling the effects of it. If we could forget the Boo Box but remember Close's cameo, we would.