Stan Lee’s non-Marvel movie cameos are a schlocky window into his psyche

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loydLloyd Kaufman was shocked at how easy it was to convince Stan Lee of anything. By the tail end of the 1960s, Lee had become a cult icon as the face of Marvel Comics over the course of the decade.

He was written of lovingly in trendy media outlets like The Village Voice and New York magazine. He regularly spoke to auditoriums full of rapt college students. He hadn’t quite assumed the look, speaking style, or place in mainstream culture that he eventually came to be known for, but his voice and face were ubiquitous if you were a Marvelhead — and Kaufman was very much one of those.

He’d just graduated from Yale (“The only thing I learned there, aside from drugs and a smattering of Chinese Studies, which was my major, were comic books,” he says) and wanted to make it in motion pictures. So when he had the wild idea to combine his interests and see if Lee would do a movie with him, he looked up Marvel in the phone book and rolled the dice. “I called up and then he got on the phone,” Kaufman recalled to me. “I said, ‘I’m a big fan. I wanna make movies.’” In Kaufman’s recollection, Stan’s reply was swift: “Come on over.”

As I learned while researching my book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Stan long dreamed of becoming an actor. He’d grown up gawking at Errol Flynn flicks in the 1930s at the many movie houses in his Bronx neighborhood. As a teen, he participated in a WPA theatrical group. After Spider-Man got big, he’d half-joke about wanting to play Spidey’s blowhard boss, J. Jonah Jameson, in a film adaptation. And when he finally started to brush up against Hollywood after achieving comic-book fame, he said yes to just about any opportunity to make his presence felt in the world of cinema.

Within months of first making contact, Stan and Kaufman were hammering out a screenplay for a movie about a vengeful sorceress called Night of the Witch, though it never got produced. They then spoke of other movies, none of which materialized. But their friendship endured through the decades, as Stan became a world-famous cultural icon and Kaufman became one of the great pioneers of defiantly schlocky cinema at his studio, Troma Entertainment. And that’s why, if you look in the right place, you can see Stan make cameos in movies with titles like Return to Nuke ’Em High Volume 1, The Toxic Avenger IV: Citizen Toxie, and Return to Return to Nuke ’Em High AKA Vol. 2 [sic].

Stan Lee in Return to Nuke ’Em High Volume 1 (2013)

That willingness to appear in just about any kind of flick eventually led to his globally beloved cameos in Marvel movies and other high-profile filmed fiction. But it also led to a lot of bizarre appearances in B- and Z-grade movies that have been largely forgotten, if they were even noticed in the first place. Indeed, his final cameo was not, as is popularly assumed, in Avengers: Endgame, but rather in a friend of a friend’s micro-budget indie outing.

These cameos, far from being peripheral to our understanding of Stan, are in fact a key to interpreting his psyche, his endless pursuit of recognition, and his often-depressing place in the vicious food chain of the entertainment industry.

Source URL: https://www.polygon.com/movies/22289175/stan-lee-cameos-non-marvel-movies