Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Had A Cameo In This Forgotten Music Video

If you recall '80s and '90s music videos as vividly as I do, you must remember they were big on promoting movies (and their main characters) if the songs were specifically made or used in them. Who could forget Will Smith's banger for "Men in Black" or Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" that helped turn "The Bodyguard" with Kevin Costner into an unlikely hit? Hell, before the internet came around, I often learned about new films by watching MTV and VH1 for hours after school. But those days are long gone; music TV channels aren't really a thing anymore, sadly — YouTube replaced them once and for all.

Music videos that featured scattered scenes from films throughout basically have disappeared entirely. What stuck around to some extent, however, is beloved and big-time Hollywood actors appearing in silly, heartfelt, and sometimes beautifully heartbreaking music videos that often tell a succinct story of their own. One of my all-time favorites is Ben Foster and Margarita Levieva playing a turbulent couple in Chris Stapleton's Southern rock ballad "Fire Away," which ends in a devastating tragedy.

But back in the golden days of the '80s and '90s, actors crossing over from features to music videos while reprising the role of their big screen characters was far more common than it is now.

Don't ask me what the concept was behind Arnold Schwarzenegger walking toward the stage as the Terminator (from James Cameron's epic sequel "Terminator 2: Judgment Day") at a Guns N' Roses concert in the band's "You Could Be Mine" video, but it's a hilarious example of this trend that became embedded in pop culture. Another memorable example is Christopher Lambert teleporting right out of 1986's classic "Highlander" as Connor MacLeod into Queen's music video of their immortal tune "Princes of the Universe" to eventually have a "sword fight" with Freddie Mercury himself. It's absolutely bonkers.

But years before this truly became a sort of trendy phenomenon, Clint Eastwood had done it as his beloved badass character that made him an action star in the early '70s. In 1983, Eastwood turned up as Dirty Harry Callahan (who I believe needs no introduction) in The Enforcers' music video "Sudden Impact," which was clearly made to promote the film of the same name, the fourth installment in the "Dirty Harry" franchise. Cool as a cucumber, Eastwood is shown at the end of the video as Callahan, sitting on a barstool and sipping a beer after spitting the immortal one-liner, "A man's got to know his limitations," from 1973's "Magnum Force." Classic Clint.