In 1948 there was a Superman serial that starred Kirk Allyn as Clark Kent and Noel Neill as Lois Lane.
Then in 1978 the first of the Superman films was released and had Allyn and Neill make a cameo as Lois Lane's parents.
It has been suggested that this may be the first time starring actors were used as cameos in a remake of the same property. Is this true?
An example that comes slightly after Superman, but is still comparable, is Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which ran from 1979–1981. The second episode, “Planet of the Slave Girls,”* features Buster Crabbe, the original Buck Rogers (and Flash Gordon) from the 1930s film serials. Crabbe plays an older fighter pilot (named Gordon) recalled to emergency duty, with lots of allusions to his older role in his lines: “It’s good to be back,” “We’re from different times,” etc.
*The first two episodes of the show were feature length. The first was a recut version of the pilot theatrical film, making “Planet of the Slave Girls” the first episode made entirely for television. For subsequent showings (including syndication and the versions of the shows that are now freely available from NBC’s Web site), the two-hour episodes were split in half into two one-hour episodes each.
Not sure if this was just before or just after the 1978 Superman, but the same year Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released as a remake of the one from 1956. In one of the early scenes, the star of the first film, Kevin McCarthy, appeared as an unnamed man running out of the hills, sprawling across the hood of the new protagonists' car and screaming about "Pod people".
From comments, it appears that this actually released a matter of days after the first Christopher Reeves appearance as Superman, which would make Superman the first -- but they were surely in production side by side, as it were.
It's a bit more than a cameo, and it's not a movie, but ...
Keye Luke played Charlie Chan's Number One Son in several movies in the 1930's.
In the 1972 cartoon series The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan he voiced Chan.
The cartoon is Sci-Fi, it has a shape-changing van.
I think a cameo requires a certain level of intentionality. So I can't be certain Filmation deliberately hired this fellow as a homage to his previous work or he was just a professional getting another job that happened to be the same DC comics genre.
From the wikipedia article on the Adventures of Superman Radio series 1940-1951
Jackson Beck - "That well-known signature opening, one of the most famous in radio history, was delivered by Jackson Beck, the announcer-narrator for the program from 1943 to 1950. He also had recurring roles, voicing an occasional tough guy and also portraying Beany Martin, the Daily Planet's teenage copy boy. On Superman episodes featuring Batman, he played Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred Pennyworth. Decades later, Beck portrayed Perry White, Clark Kent's boss, in Filmation's The New Adventures of Superman (1966–70), in addition to serving as the show's narrator."
