Harold Lauder loves chocolate Pay Day bars, which didn't exist when the novel was first published in 1978. By the time of the expanded re-release in 1990, Sara Lee (which owned the brand at the time) had started to produce chocolate-covered Pay Day bars on a limited basis. Ultimately averted in 2020 when Hershey (the current owner) permanently added them to the product line.
It is off-handedly mentioned that a group of workers in a lab are sprawled dead at lunch beside spilled bottles of Coca-Cola and... Bubble-Up, a lemon-lime soda similar to 7-Up that was popular in The '70s. It is not as widely known or popular now, and was thus changed to Sprite in the expanded 1990 re-release.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the book, while Larry and Rita leave New York City, they come across a man in only his shorts laying on top of an abandoned car. When they think he's dead, he sits up and waves at them, they wave back at him, and he goes back to sunbathing. Not only does this feel out of place in the story, but it's also never brought up again.
Cry for the Devil: The things General Starkey does during the superflu outbreak are terrible but he is presented as a broadly sympathetic figure trying to cope with an absolutely impossible situation. In the novel his son-in-law, realizing that they're all doomed, commits suicide during the opening stages of the superflu epidemic, adding further to Starkey's anguish.
The first-edition cover (seen on the main page) depicts an angelic figure battling a demonic birdlike figure who could easily be a Taheen from the The Dark Tower series. Though considering the Dark Tower mythos' strong ties to The Stand, it might not be a coincidence...
In the novel, Larry's mother tells him his singing makes him sound black, and several others who hear the song think this to the point that it's a running gag in his first chapter. Larry is being played by Jovan Adepo, who is black, in the second miniseries.
Stu and Tom rig up a projector and watch a film called "Rambo IV: The Firefight", which from its brief description sounds a lot like the actual fifth film in the series, Rambo: Last Blood.
Iron Woobie: Lloyd Henreid. He's a criminal, but he's not a psychopath and Flagg has given him the first taste of real respect anyone has ever given him. Even more woobie-ish at the end, where Lloyd knows that Flagg's empire is crumbling and won't be around much longer, but refuses to abandon the man who saved his life (though he allows some of his friends to make a run for it).
Memetic Mutation: Many fans took to calling the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic "Captain Trumps" after the book's Captain Tripps. King, never a fan of Trump, gave his full approval. (Though he did also firmly remind people that for all the misery it's caused, COVID-19 is still not nearly as bad as Captain Tripps.)
When Randall Flagg rapes Nadine, many readers found the description of his cold, cold semen to be more funny than horrifying.
The intro scene that shows all the dead staff at Project Blue is extremely eerie and effective, except for one guard who died while playing ping pong, but his dead body is positioned in a way that comically defies gravity. Some of the dead scientists also look like they're just taking a nap from the way they're sitting in their chairs.
Bob Palmer leads an armed expulsion of the soldiers, locking down his television station, then goes on the air while his cohorts guard the door and reveals everything that's really been going on (and about how he only made his previous broadcasts at gunpoint).
Ray Flowers locks himself in his radio booth when he's the only employee to show up for work, then urges anyone with a story about Captain Trips to dial his number, broadcasts their stories over the air and won't budge when soldiers start breaking down his door.
Small-town newspaperman James Horgliss, with information about the origin of Captain Trips, drives around town leaving newspapers outside of houses he isn't sure anyone is left alive in as he succumbs to the final stages of the virus himself.
George McDougal, a survivor who lost all eleven of his children to the flu and can't bring himself to do anything but numbly jog around town in depression. The jogging-induced heart attack that kills him comes to him as sweet relief.
Paranoia Fuel: The best way to read this book is when you are sick in bed. Or during a flu season. You will wince when you hear somebody cough in your presence.
King actually lived in Boulder for a time, so all of the street names and locations he mentions in the book actually existed. And some still do, even decades after the original novel's release. You can be driving around town, then suddenly realize, "Oh, there's the church where Harold and his crew retrieved all those bodies."
Realism-Induced Horror: Whenever there's a major wave of sickness going around (such as SARS or the Coronavirus), the beginning part of The Stand with a disease killing 99% of the population starts seeming much scarier (and more plausible) than Randall Flagg's supernatural menace.
We learn a lot of information about Harold's lack of a sex life throughout the book.
In the book, King graphically describes Harold and Nadine's sexual relationship. This includes a short paragraph of him sodomizing her.
In the full-length version of the book, the Trashcan Man is sodomized with a pistol barrel.
Trash's skin is melting off from radiation poisoning when he arrives back in Vegas with a leaking nuke. It even sticks to his goggles.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As enormous as the cast is, and as impactful as almost every character is with the role that they do have, there can still be characters who it feels like King could have done more with.
Susan Stern gets a great Action Girl introduction fighting back against men who have spent weeks raping her and later becomes part of the Boulder Free Zone Council, all of which build her up as a promising secondary character. Then she gets little additional plot role or character development beyond being a dog lover. Despite her wearing a Kent State shirt, it's also never mentioned if she was involved in the massive protests against the government coverup that Kent State students threw before the military put it down with mortar fire.
Patty Kroger is one of Susan's companions, The Baby of the Bunch of the rape victims who also fights back against her captors and has a crush on Harold (which could have made him at least consider getting over his toxic obsession with Frannie and Stu), but only has a handful of minor scenes after her introduction,
Mike Childress, one of the men who beats up Nick and then is arrested by him, is never seen again after Nick releases him when, regardless of whether he died of the flu afterward (as it's never indicated that anyone who was symptomatic ever recovers), this could have set up an Ungrateful Bastard or Androcles' Lion moment if he ever encountered Nick again.
Gina, Olivia, and June are three people who Nick, Tom, Ralph, and Mauve Shirt Dr. Dick Ellis encounter and have some briefly-shown Family of Choice dynamics with Nick and the others. They are also among the first people to meet Abigail and arrive in Boulder (which could have given them a certain status in the community), but they quickly fade into the background afterward and have minimal details about their backstories given.
George McDougall, who dies in the "natural selection" chapter, mentions that Patricia, one of his eleven children, almost got better from the flu before dying. Seeing two Boulder survivors from the same family (albeit one that has still undergone a lot of loss) together could have been novel and prompted a lot of dialogue and interesting interactions, even without considering how the immune survivors might have viewed with interest someone who actually beat the flu.
Four-year-old Eva Hodges is one of Stu's neighbors and initially seems to be immune, intriguingly only showing symptoms of the flu much later than anyone else shown getting Captain Trips. Still, she's never mentioned after that point. How her body resisted the flu for so long remains ambiguous when, regardless of her ultimate fate, it felt potentially significant to many readers.
Many of Flagg's followers in Vegas can feel underused due to being Satellite Characters and/or only getting a couple of scenes, such as Ronnie (given his status as one of the sixteen people who were already in Vegas when Flagg came, and someone who becomes disillusioned with Flagg and is planning to abandon him by the final act), shrewd and ruthless but easily flustered intelligence officer Paul Burleson, ex-cop and Punch-Clock Villain Barry Dorgan (who has some of the most characterization of Flagg's faction but only first appears a couple of dozen pages before Flagg's downfall), and rugged Marine veteran and helicopter pilot Carl Hough (who survives Trashcan Man's first rampage, only to die in a redundant second one).
Tough Act to Follow: Bill Fagerbakke's portrayal of Tom Cullen is widely agreed to fit the character so perfectly that any upcoming adaptation will have a hard time topping it.
The book features some "dated" racial politics. The army of monstrous and almost nude black men who sadistically execute an army platoon one by one on live TV is especially uncomfortable.
One of the vignettes about the survivors of Captain Trips features a 17-year-old girl who was pressured by her parents into getting married at the age of 15 to the college-aged man who had impregnated her. Needless to say, in modern-day America this is considered statutory rape and child marriage.
In that same chapter, one character remembers her mother telling her that when she gets married, that gives her husband the right to rape her whenever he wants. This is not true in modern times, as marital rape has been a crime since the 1970s.
In one passage, Frannie is feeling vulnerable as a pregnant woman in a post-apocalyptic world, and is thinking about how much she wants a man who can protect her. Fair enough, though several incidents demonstrate why one man alone wouldn't be enough. She then muses that the age of female independence is over, and could only have existed in the first place in the civilized world that men had built, and that all feminists should have had "Thank you, men" as a major slogan. This is not presented as the personal point-of-view of a traditionalist woman, but rather a previously independent woman realizing some hard truths about the world. Those "truths" have been proven to be anything but in the decades since, and this is now a very uncomfortable passage to read.
Values Resonance: The portrayal of Tom Cullen is far ahead of its time as a positive portrayal of a mentally disabled person, including Nick having distaste for him being called a "retard" long before that word was more publicly recognized as an offensive slur.
