Sandbox / Creator Cameo Stan Lee

He didn't even create him, though...

Stan has always enjoyed this trope, both in the comics themselves and elsewhere. He has contractually-obliged cameos in almost every movie based on one of his works, and usually appears in Marvel movies he isn't contractually obliged to get cameos in. As for his cameos: It's been joked that he has the superpower to appear in any media. Observe:

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Stan Lee has many cameos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

• Iron Man: He plays a person who was mistaken for Hugh Hefner by Tony.
• The Incredible Hulk: The civilian who is poisoned by Bruce Banner's irradiated blood in the beginning. Considering how his The Simpsons persona is a Cloud Cuckoolander who thinks he can actually turn into Hulk like described below, it's amusing to think him actually doing so in the movie as well.
• Iron Man 2: He is mistaken for Larry King. Whether he is actually supposed to be these people is unknown.
• Thor: He plays a New Mexico local with a truck trying to pull Mjölnir from its spot. Credited as Stan the Man.
• Captain America: The First Avenger: He plays an Army general in a crowd who loses the opportunity to see Rogers because he left on another mission, but mistakes the messenger for Capt. "I thought he'd be taller." This is a semi-exception as, while Lee didn't create the character, he did serve as Timely Comics' editor during the Golden Age, not to mention introducing Cap to the Silver Age and creating Cap's trademark move of throwing his shield.
• The Avengers: Near the end of the film, Stan shows up as a man playing chess in the park, who is interviewed by a news crew regarding the events of the movie's finale. His character believes it all to be a hoax. He also pops up in one of the deleted scenes as a guy at a cafe who alerts Cap to the waitress's interest.
• Iron Man 3: He appears in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment as the judge for the Beauty Contest on one of the screens in the news van that Tony temporarily hijacks.
• Thor: The Dark World: As a patient at a mental institute with Dr. Erik Selvig. Credited as himself.
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier: As a Smithsonian guard who fears that he's going to be fired (we don't know if he ended up being fired or not) upon discovering that Cap stole his outfit back.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): He pops up as a Xandarian flirting with a lady. Credited as the "Xandarian Lady's Man".
• Avengers: Age of Ultron: He is a WWII vet who attends the party at Avengers tower and gets stupor drunk after taking a sip of Thor's Asgardian mead (Lee himself served as a communications repairman and instructional film producer during the war, never actually seeing combat).
• Ant-Man: He's one of the friends who talked to one of the friends of one of Luis' friends about Scott and his fight with the Falcon.
• Captain America: Civil War: He's a FedEx driver delivering a package to Tony Stark, mispronouncing his name as "Tony Stank."
• Doctor Strange (2016): He's a passenger inside a bus that Strange and Mordo smack into. He's reading the book The Doors of Perception and laughing himself silly.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: He's in a spacesuit telling the Watchers about his many adventures, in homage to the fan theory that Lee is actually playing the Watcher in all his cameos. He even mentions his role as the Fed-Ex deliveryman in Civil War, hinting that all of his roles really are the same person. The Watchers eventually get bored and leave him, causing him to protest that they were supposed to be his ride home.
• Spider-Man: Homecoming: He's one of the neighbors chastising Spider-Man after Peter webs a guy who locked himself out of his own car and was trying to pick the lock, thinking he was stealing it. Stan then flirts with one of the other neighbors. He also appears in "Tony Stark's Party", a commercial for the film.
• In Thor: Ragnarok, he cameos as Thor's barber on Sakaar.
• As an aside, his cameos in Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Spider-Man: Homecoming were all filmed at the same time (and directed by James Gunn), due to his advanced age.
  • Agent Carter: He gets his shoes shined next to Howard Stark, and asks for the sports section of his newspaper.
• Daredevil (2015) is particularly devious, with him appearing in a photograph in the background and out of focus in the Season 1 finale. The same picture also serves as his cameo for Jessica Jones (2015). The motif continues in Luke Cage (2016) and Iron Fist (2017) as he appears on a poster urging people to report crimes to the police.
• He appears in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "T.R.A.C.K.S." as a passenger on the train that the team is infiltrating.

Fantastic Four

• In Fantastic Four, he showed up at the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm with Jack Kirby — only to be denied entry!
• Fantastic Four (2005): Willie Lumpkin, the Baxter Building's mailman. This marks the only time he's actually played one of his own characters. In Rise of the Silver Surfer, he plays himself trying to get into the wedding, a Call-Back to the same thing in the actual comics.
• Averted in Fantastic Four (2015), where he makes no appearance because of its Troubled Production, and has joked this was the reason it was a Box Office Bomb.

Hulk

• His first cameo came in the The Incredible Hulk movie The Trial of The Incredible Hulk, the second of three reunion movies based on the series. Stan plays a jury foreman in a nightmare David Banner has that causes him to Hulk out.
• Hulk: A security guard getting into an elevator with Lou Ferrigno. Notable for being his first speaking appearance in a theatrical Marvel film.

Spider Man

• Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • In Spider-Man, he's a heroic bystander who saves a kid from falling debris.
  • In Spider-Man 2, he's another bystander.
  • In Spider-Man 3, he's a bystander who poetically muses about Spider-Man to Peter in the beginning.
• He appears as himself in the series finale of Spider-Man: The Animated Series when Madame Web brings together several Spider-Mans from alternate universes, one of whom is an actor who plays him in the real world. His wife Joan Lee voiced Madame Web, and the animated Stan asks, "Who is that exotic lady?" when he sees her. In turn, Madame Web tells Spider-Man that Stan is a special person.
• He voices a dock worker who's also modeled after him in The Spectacular Spider-Man.
• He plays Stan the Janitor in Ultimate Spider-Man (2012)
• In Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, he voices a hallucination urging Peter to forsake Spider-Man.
• The Amazing Spider-Man:
  • During Spidey and the Lizard's fight in the rist movei, he plays an oblivious librarian who listens to classical music with noise-cancellation headphones while the fight goes on behind him. He reprises the cameo in How It Should Have Ended's episode on the movie where he blames the Avengers for the mess and warns them he's got his eyes on them.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man 2: One of the audience members of Peter's high school graduation. He spots Peter coming in while wearing his Spider-Man mask and exclaims "He knows that guy!" (He also appears in an ad for the U.S. Mail as a projectionist for ASM2's premiere, who is saved when Spidey helps deliver the film cannister.).
• In Marvel's Spider-Man, he's the cameraman/interviewer for So You Want To Be a Wrestler.

X-Men

Cameoes from the X-Men Film Series

• In the first film, he's a random beachgoer who watches Senator Kelly emerging from the ocean.
• In X-Men: The Last Stand, he appears in the prologue as a neighbor of a young Jean Grey watering his lawn (a scene in which fellow X-Men writer Chris Claremont also cameos).
• As an aside, he couldn't make a cameo in The Wolverine because of the movie's overseas filming in Australia and Japan, and deliberately sacrificed a cameo in X-Men: Days of Future Past (filmed in Montreal, Canada) so that he could attend the Fan Expo 2013 in Toronto, Canada.
• For X-Men: Apocalypse, he and his wife are one of the many shots of frightened citizens watching the nuclear missiles launch into space.
• Deadpool (2016): He's the M.C. at a strip club. Notable for being a rare cameo in a Marvel film not based off a character Stan created, since he had nothing to do with Deadpool. His appearance in the movie is jokingly referred to as "A Gratuitous Cameo" in the opening credits, and apparently he was disappointed that they were green-screening him in and didn't use a real club.
• It gets even more gratuitous in Deadpool: No Good Deed, where he appears out of nowhere to comment on Deadpool's suit, only for Deadpool to stop and shout, "Zip it, Stan Lee!"
• In the pilot episode of The Gifted (2017), he walks out of a bar as Reed Strucker goes in for his first meeting with the Mutant Underground.

Video Games

• He's the narrator for Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Several LEGO games have a mechanic where the player can rescue someone in peril as a level objective. In the Marvel game, that "someone" is always Stan. Perform all the rescues and he's unlocked as a playable character.

Others

• Daredevil: A man reading a newspaper who almost walks out into traffic only to be stopped by the blind kid Matt Murdock.
• In 1997, almost every Marvel Comics series had a special issue as part of a campaign called Marvel Flashbacks. Stan appeared in each story as the Narrator.
• A series of 2006 one-shots called Stan Lee Meets (e.g. Stan Lee Meets the Thing, Stan Lee Meets Doctor Doom, etc.) was built around this trope.
• Shows in Vol 1 of Marvel Mangaverse along with fellow creator Jack Kirby as one of Captain Marvel's neighbors.
• Big Hero 6: He appears in Fred's family portrait and then a post-credits sequence voicing Fred's often-absent father. He will reprise this role in the upcoming Disney XD TV series.

Non Marvel

• Also showed up in Mallrats. One of the first few times he did a cameo in a movie that wasn't based on a Marvel property.
• Eureka episode Glimpse has a cameo for him, who provides a Shout-Out to the Hulk. He appears as Dr. Lee, specializing in the effects of gamma radiation, you can call him Generalissimo, and "Don't make me angry, you won't like me when I'm angry."
• In the first episode of Lucky Man he is seen as himself signing autographs in London's Forbidden Planet comic store.
• He appeared twice on the game show To Tell the Truth- once in 1971, and again in 2000.
• He appeared as a bus driver in Heroes.
• He cameos in Heroman, an anime that somewhat involved him.
• In Ultimo he's actually the Big Bad!
• Stan showed up (with artist Stan Goldberg) in one Millie the Model story, as the creators of a comic book starring Millie.

Parodies

• He appears in every Marvel-themed episode of Bad Days, and eventually starts making cameos in episodes focused on characters not created by Marvel.
• A Robot Chicken sketch about a musical starring the Avengers has him play the piano, and also share a fact that adds a touch of irony to shipping Black Widow and Hawkeye.
• He was also in the Phineas and Ferb crossover special, Mission Marvel as a hot dog vendor. Of course, the stand was labeled "Excelsior Hot Dogs".
• In Super Power Beat Down, he is a man in an apartment who hears Spider-Man and Darth Maul fighting on the floor above his. He yells at the "neighbors" to keep it down.

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