Excelsior! The Many Cameos of Marvel's Stan Lee

This comic book bigwig loves to ham it up on the silver screen. From the first X-Men movie to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, spotting the Stan Lee cameo has become part of the fun of watching a Marvel movie. Enjoy, true believers!

Stan Lee's official big-screen debut was in this loopy B-movie. Eric Roberts stars as a comic book artist searching for a missing woman. Lee appears in several scenes as himself.

Most of Stan Lee's cameos don't give him time to flex his acting chops, so you might be surprised by his warm performance in Kevin Smith's Mallrats, where he offers Jason Scott Lee (no relation) relationship advice.

Marvel's first major Stan Lee cameo is for sharp-eyed fans only: As a mutated Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) walks across a crowded beach, Lee, as a hot dog vendor, is just one of several astonished onlookers.

A Macy Gray concert is disrupted by a bomb-throwing Green Goblin, and Stan the Man turns up in a blink-and-you-missed it insert shot as a horrified audience member.

Lee plays a New Yorker so engrossed in his newspaper – curiously, not the Daily Bugle – that he almost steps out into traffic. Fortunately for him, a little blind boy stops him with his cane.

"Security ought to be beefed up a lot more in a place like this." Lee gets his first lines in a Marvel film, as a security guard sharing his concerns with a colleague (Lou Ferrigno, TV's original Hulk).

While Spidey is fighting Dr. Octopus high above, Stan Lee, in a blurry moment, saves a woman from debris falling from the building. This time he's only given one line of dialogue: "Look out!"

We're not exactly sure how or why Stan Lee made it into this Disney movie – several years before Disney bought Marvel – as a Spanish-accented wedding guest with a fondness for the Three Stooges. But there he is.

This marks Lee's first role as an actual Marvel Universe character: Willie Lumpkin, the dependable mailman at the Baxter Building. Stan Lee and cartoonist Dan DeCarlo actually invented Willie way back in 1959.

In a flashback that opens the film, Lee pops up as the neighbor of a young Jean Grey, astonished to find his watering hose responding to her telekinetic abilities.

As Peter Parker quietly reflects on Spider-Man's popularity, Stan the Man walks up to him and says, "You know, I guess one person can make a difference." He then closes with his signature line: "'Nuff said."

In the comics king's funniest cameo, he shows up at the posh wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, insisting that he's Stan Lee and that he must be on the guest list. But security doesn't buy it, and Lee is ushered away.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes his way through the throngs outside a charity event. He spots an older gentleman and yells out, "Lookin' great, Hef!" Indeed, it is Stan Lee who's sporting Hugh Hefner's pipe and smoking jacket.

This time Lee's cameo actually serves the plot, as he plays a doomed Milwaukee resident who innocently downs a bottle of Brazilian soda that's been tainted by Bruce Banner's irradiated blood.

Although he's officially credited as just plain "Stan Lee," in this film he bears more than a passing resemblance to television host Larry King. In fact, this is what Tony Stark calls him.

Here Marvel's former editor-in-chief plays a New Mexican trying to yank Thor's hammer out of the ground with a chain and a pick-up truck. When his truck breaks in two, he sweetly asks, "Did it work?"

In this sequence set in the 1940s, Captain America is a no-show for his Medal of Valor award ceremony. Stan Lee, playing an Army General, mistakes an aide for the absent supersoldier and says, "I thought he'd be taller."

Lee's cameo was originally meant for a deleted scene centered around Steve Rogers. But he still shows up in the final cut, grousing in a news clip at the end of the film: "Superheroes in New York? Give me a break!"

Nothing can interrupt the reverie of Stan Lee, high school librarian, as he enjoys his classical music – not even the knock-down, drag-out fight between Spider-Man and The Lizard in the background.

During the Miss Chattanooga Pageant, Tony Stark sneaks into a satellite news van in order to hack into a computer network. A monitor in the van reveals Lee to be particularly impressed with one of the contestants.