Stan Lee is far from the only person to make a Marvel cameo.
In fact, many of the most interesting MCU cameos come from people whom casual moviegoers
may never have heard of or expected to see in a superhero movie.
Avengers: Endgame is a massive film packed with details everywhere you look, but some
of its most exciting tidbits and Easter eggs arrive not with the big action spectacles,
but with the quiet moments.
Early in the film, Steve Rogers AKA Captain America is in New York City, attending a support
group for people still struggling to find a way to move on after Thanos wiped out half
of all life.
The scene mostly revolves around a man, played by Endgame co-director Joe Russo, explaining
a recent date he had, but if you look at the other people sitting in that circle, you'll
notice a bald man with a goatee.
That's Jim Starlin, an extremely influential comic book writer and artist who's best known
as the creator of Thanos as well as Drax and Gamora, among many others and the author of
the most important Thanos story, The Infinity Gauntlet, the tale in which Thanos first snaps
his fingers to wipe out half of everyone.
So Thanos' snap did not erase the man who dreamed him into existence.
Every Marvel Cinematic Universe film is packed with Easter eggs, callbacks, cameos, and other
details you can't possibly absorb on the first watch, but the Guardians of the Galaxy films
are particularly packed, even when compared with other MCU releases.
Writer/director James Gunn is particularly committed to his Easter eggs and cameos, and,
as a result, the Guardians flicks are full of them.
Some, like Nathan Fillion's appearance as a prisoner in the first Guardians film, are
fairly well known.
Others are less so, in part because they often take the form of seemingly random voices.
In a post-credits scene from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the Ravager leader Stakar
is looking to reform his old team, which is made up of members of the original Guardians
of the Galaxy, whose Marvel Comics origins date back to 1969.
Among them is a robotic head named Mainframe, who is voiced by none other than Miley Cyrus.
"I missed you guys so much!"
Miley Cyrus isn't the only music star to cameo in the Guardians of the Galaxy universe.
In the first film, we hear a voice on the Ravagers' ship dubbed the "Ravager Navigator."
"Ronan's fleet has been spotted and will arrive in t-minus 15 minutes."
That voice could have been anyone, including some random member of the crew, but since
this is a James Gunn movie, he managed to use the voice of one of his friends.
This time around, it was rock star and director of House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects,
Rob Zombie.
Gunn explained:
"Rob's a friend, and he appeared in my first movie, Slither, so now it's become my signature.
But I love putting a lot of stuff in my movies for fans.
In Slither, every street sign referenced a classic horror film.
There were hundreds of them.
I'm in service to those people who want to watch a movie again and again."
Zombie also made a cameo as an "Unseen Ravager" in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Sentinel inventor Bolivar Trask appears before a congressional
committee to discuss his solutions to the perceived issues stemming from the mutant
population.
The congressmen are divided in their opinions, with some believing mutants are largely peaceful
and others claiming they're a legitimate threat.
One of the congressmen arguing for peace is Chris Claremont, the undisputed most important
X-Men writer ever.
"We have very real enemies out there the Russians, the Chinese."
Claremont took over Uncanny X-Men in 1975 and remained the series' writer throughout
the rest of the 1970s and '80s, while also co-creating various spinoff series and standalone
graphic novels along the way.
Many of the greatest X-Men storylines ever, including "Days of Future Past," "God Loves,
Man Kills," and "The Dark Phoenix Saga," were his creation, and he co-created X-Men characters
ranging from Mystique to Gambit to Jubilee.
He also made a cameo as a man mowing his lawn in X-Men: The Last Stand, but in Days of Future
Past, he actually gets some dialogue.
Claremont's not the only major figure from superhero comics to appear in Days of Future
Past.
He's not even the only major figure from superhero comics to appear in that congressional hearing
scene.
One of the other congressmen, who at one point argues with Claremont's character, is none
other than Len Wein, another pivotal figure in the history of the X-Men and in superhero
comics as a whole.
"We haven't had an incident in ten years."
"After what happened in Cuba?"
"That was never confirmed."
Wein is a key figure in the histories of both Marvel and DC Comics.
He was Marvel's editor in chief for a brief period in the mid-'70s, and in 1975 he was
the writer tasked with reviving the X-Men, a team that had been relegated to reprints
for several years at that point.
Working with artist Dave Cockrum, Wein devised a strategy to bring the team back with a new
group of international members.
He soon handed writing duties over to Claremont, but Wein's jolt of energy at this pivotal
time in X-Men history was critical.
He was also a vital character influence on the makeup of the eventual core team, having
co-created Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and more.
For a very long time in the world of comic books, James Buchanan “Bucky" Barnes was
a character you could count on to stay dead, alongside former Robin Jason Todd and Peter
Parker's Uncle Ben.
He was Captain America's World War II pal, but Cap had to move on without him as he tried
to exist in a new era.
Then, in 2005, Bucky returned as the Winter Soldier, a Soviet assassin with a metal arm.
The storyline became one of the most popular and acclaimed Marvel Comics runs of the 2000s,
and ultimately made the leap to the big screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
These days, Bucky Barnes is one of the MCU fandom's favorite characters, so it's only
fitting that at least one of his creators should get a little nod on the big screen.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, during one of the scenes in the Hydra lab, you'll
see writer Ed Brubaker, who co-created the Winter Soldier with artist Steve Epting, helping
to work on Bucky as Alexander Pierce interrogates him.
Marvel Studios' first Thor film was teased at the end of Iron Man 2 with a post-credits
sequence that featured Agent Phil Coulson finding the God of Thunder's hammer embedded
in a crater in the New Mexico desert.
That crater creates an interesting bit of chaos in Thor, as the locals find the hammer
and start taking turns trying to pull it out of the ground before S.H.I.E.L.D. manages
to quarantine it.
This, of course, culminates in the moment when a man played by Stan Lee himself tries
to yank the thing loose with a truck.
It doesn't work.
"Did it work?"
Before Lee's truck antics, though, another key Thor writer attempts to pry the hammer
out of the ground: J. Michael Straczynski, author of an acclaimed and influential run
on the main Thor title in the late 2000s, making him one of the biggest names associated
with the character around the time the film was made.
Straczynski isn't the only major Thor writer to make a cameo in the MCU.
Later in the first Thor film, after the battle on Midgard is won, Lady Sif and the Warriors
Three are celebrating their victory with a feast in the halls of Asgard.
As Volstagg tells an amusing story about their exploits, the camera cuts to Lady Sif and
an unnamed Asgardian man as they laugh in response.
That man is Walt Simonson, and if anyone has the right to be hanging out in Asgard with
the Warriors Three, it's him.
Simonson is perhaps the most influential and acclaimed Thor writer/artist of all time,
thanks to an epic run on Thor from 1983 to 1987, which introduced many of the series'
most popular supporting characters and storylines, including Beta Ray Bill and that time Thor
got turned into a frog.
His fingerprints are all over the various Thor films, and his impact is still felt in
Thor comics today.
Some Marvel movie cameos happen because the person making the cameo is a recognizable
movie star who might get the crowd excited.
Others serve as tributes to comic book creators without whom the characters and storylines
featured in the films would not exist.
Then there are those blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos that make you look twice because you're
not sure if you saw the seemingly random celebrity or just someone who kinda looks like them.
That's the case with one particular cameo in the MCU movie that started it all, Iron
Man.
As Tony Stark fires up his first ever Iron Man armor to stage his escape from the cave
where he's been kept prisoner, his arc reactor shines onto the face of a seemingly random
terrorist, who is then quickly swatted away.
That early victim of Iron Man was Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello,
who later confirmed his involvement on social media.
In Deadpool 2, Deadpool decides he needs to put together a super team to pull off his
new mission of stopping Cable.
He assembles a group of mutants and a guy named Peter for the job, including Domino,
Shatterstar, Bedlam, and someone called the Vanisher.
The Vanisher is appropriately named, because we almost never see or hear him.
He's just an invisible presence in every scene, until the moment when X-Force's parachute
jump goes horribly wrong and several of the would-be heroes die gruesome deaths.
The Vanisher, still attached to his parachute, flies into some power lines and is electrocuted.
At the moment the electricity touches him, we see that the Vanisher is actually Brad
Pitt.
It's a split-second cameo, but it's one of the biggest surprises in all of superhero
cinema.
How did it happen?
Well, according to screenwriter Paul Wernick, Ryan Reynolds himself reached out to Pitt,
whose kids are Deadpool fans, after they agreed it would be funny to get an extremely difficult-to-book
actor for the cameo.
And the rest, friends, is cinematic history.
“It’s in the movie.
It's just a quarter of a second, it's Brad Pitt, he's the Vanisher, and he unfortunately
dies by electrocution.
Yeah."
Pitt isn't the only A-lister to make a difficult-to-spot cameo in Deadpool 2.
At one point in the film, Cable approaches a pair of locals as they're having a discussion
in the back of their truck about, of all things, toilet paper.
The point of the scene narratively centers around Cable stealing the truck, but it's
also a platform for some hilarious dialogue about the inadequacy of toilet paper.
"Toilet paper is a plenty fine appetizer.
But then…
Huggies Natural Care Wet Wipes.
That's your main course."
One of the men in the conversation is fairly easy to recognize as Firefly star Alan Tudyk.
The other, under heavy makeup, is Matt Damon.
Deadpool 2 director David Leitch later explained how they pulled that off, saying:
"Bill Corso, our makeup artist, he's a master at prosthetics.
He had Matt in the chair for three hours, and a lot of the crew didn't know.
There were some people who had worked with him on movies…
But we didn't even tell the crew, his name wasn't on the call sheet it was a fake name.
Nobody really knew what that scene was about, they were like, 'Why are we shooting these
two rednecks?'
We just didn't tell anybody."
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