The death of Marvel creator Stan Lee has hit the fan community hard, resulting in a mixed outpouring of grief and celebration, alike. However, while the big celebrities in camp Marvel (and beyond) are grabbing headlines for their Stan Lee tributes, at the end of the day, “Stan the Man” was truly a man of the people.
Videos by ComicBook.com
In honor of Stan Lee’s truly unique bond with those who appreciated his work, the official Stan Lee Twitter account shared this candid video of Lee being totally open about his connection with, and appreciation of, Marvel fans:
So many wonderful moments with Stan came spontaneously. As we were setting up the camera one day, he casually started talking about his fans. We know how much Stan meant to you, and we thought it would be nice for you to hear how much your support meant to him. pic.twitter.com/WTX8U1afLm
โ stan lee (@TheRealStanLee) November 14, 2018
As you can see in the video above, this wasn’t even the official interview with Stan Lee – this was his natural expression of how he felt, while getting ready to do the interview! It’s clear from his monologue that Stan Lee was all too aware of his own status as an icon – but was somehow the rare case of a celebrity who seemed to truly be humbled by his own fame. Lee gets deep about the realization that to have fans is such fortunate achievement for a person – to have legions of people giving you love in that way. He takes an almost Disney-esque quality when he moves into the real tear-jerking part of the speech: How the real value of his fame was the potential of meeting and connecting with someone from an entirely different walk of life, or an entirely different region of the world, and being able to truly form a bond over shared love of all those Marvel characters.
This video will be bittersweet for all those fans who got to meet Stan Lee over the years, and experience that kind of warm embrace from him, first-hand. For those fans who never got to meet Lee in person, this will be one of the more stripped-down and personal look at who the man was, and why he meant so much to the culture.
R.I.P. Stan Lee: December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018.
Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp are now available as a digital download as well as on Blu-ray and DVD. Upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universemovies include Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, Avengers 4 on May 3, 2019, and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5, 2019.