The late Stan Lee served as Marvel’s ambassador to the world, which eventually extended into a beloved series of cameos in adaptations of his company’s comics. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe flourished, an appearance by Lee became mandatory, and his smiling mustachioed face showed up everywhere, from parties at Avengers headquarters to the far side of the galaxy. It’s difficult to imagine the MCU without them, though the practice extends back a great deal farther, including the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises of the 2000s.
Captain Marvel found a clever way to honor that in its retro-90s storyline. Its Lee cameo is quieter than many of the others, certainly in light of the far-flung space opera plot. But in its own way, it’s particularly special because of how it taps into Lee’s own history. The MCU was far from his only onscreen cameo, and indeed, such appearances go all the way back to the era Captain Marvel portrays.
The cameo appears early in the film, as Carol Danvers is still an amnesiac in the service of the Kree. She arrives on Earth in 1995 and pursues a Skrull fugitive onto a public train in Los Angeles. As she checks the passengers one by one, she finds Lee with his nose buried in a script. She tips the pages back to look him in the face, only to have him give her a big smile before she moves on.
It’s brief and typical of the kind of charm Lee exuded almost effortlessly. But the joke lies less in the cameo itself than the specific script he’s reading: Mallrats, written and directed by Kevin Smith. That film was released in the same year, 1995, serving as Smith’s follow-up to his breakout hit Clerks and set in the same universe as many of his films -- later dubbed the “Askewniverse.” The film flopped initially, though it has since gained a cult following. More pertinent to Captain Marvel, the movie contains a cameo from Lee, who gives one of the protagonists advice on his love life and discusses the more intimate aspects of superhero anatomy.
The Mallrats script makes an obvious nod in Captain Marvel, with Lee presumably playing himself studying his lines before the movie was shot. As a time capsule, it’s rather brilliant in keeping with Carol's crash landing through a Blockbuster video rental store a few minutes earlier in the film. Smith’s movies helped define the rise of independent studios that defined that era of moviemaking, and a copy of Clerks would likely be among the VHS videos at that Blockbuster.
But it’s also a time capsule of sorts for Lee and for Marvel itself, which was in a far less exalted place in 1995. Rival DC had one of that year’s biggest commercial hits in Batman Forever, while Marvel’s own movie prospects were exceedingly dim. The first Marvel breakout hit, Blade, was still three years away, with the first X-Men movie another two years after that. Lee himself was far less well known in 1995, to the point where Mallrats included dialogue to explain who he was. Indeed, the gag involves him comparing a seemingly happy nearby couple to Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, with Stacy’s infamous death left as an unspoken irony. Though legendary among comics fans, it wasn’t well known to the general public, who had yet to be exposed to Marvel’s characters the way they would in subsequent decades.
Mallrats was Lee’s first movie cameo as himself, though he had served as the voice-over narrator for several animated Marvel series in the 1980s. One of the sad codas about Captain Marvel was that it marked the first of his cameos to appear after his death in November 2018, and while he had one more in Avengers: Endgame a few months after Captain Marvel opened, this was the first time fans had to process his loss. It was strangely fitting to have it call back to his first onscreen appearance. It’s a reminder not only of his longevity but that he was Marvel’s ambassador to the world long before A-list blockbusters were part of the equation.