Tag Archives: Stan Lee

Alfred Hitchcock’s Cameos

So in Rear Window, I noticed something kind of cool: Alfred Hitchcock was in the apartment of the songwriter kind of early in the movie. It looked like he was doing something with the clock in the apartment, but that’s not important. Take a look at the picture below.

That’s Hitchcock on a train right next to Carey Grant, aka C. K. Dexter Haven (we seem to see a lot of the same faces in this class). Apparently, it was a whole thing that Hitchcock would appear in his own movies. In 39 of his major films, he makes an appearance. Once he moved to Hollywood, he appeared in every movie he made. The funny part is that he had to adjust his cameos because of how much people loved him. Apparently, people spent so much time looking for him that no one paid attention to the movie. As a result, Hitchcock made it so that he always appeared in the first thirty minutes of the movie specifically so that people could see him and then go back to watching the movie.

There are two modern occurrences I could compare this to. The first is obviously Stan Lee. He created or helped create many of the comic book characters that have been absolutely dominating the box office for the last few years. This video has all of them as of 2014, so there are definitely several more since then. It’s pretty cool, and everyone always goes nuts at his appearances, and makes sure to look for them specifically. They’re not hidden enough that you wouldn’t see them just watching the movie though, so they aren’t distracting.

The part that is distracting is the thing that really made me want to write this article: The Psych Pineapples. In every single episode of the (underrated) show Psych, there is a pineapple hidden somewhere. Sometimes it’s just on a shelf in the back and you can see it obviously. Sometimes it’s a keychain on someone’s keys that are only seen for a second in a security footage the investigators have found. It’s crazy, and unlike the Seinfeld Superman, the pineapple is in every episode. So, Hitchcock, you may think you’re distracting your audiences, but there are episodes of Psych where I don’t even know what the plot was, but I remember where the pineapple is.