Martin Lawrence
A shape-shifting comedy force. On Martin he played a Detroit radio DJ—and an entire neighborhood of other characters: Sheneneh, Mama Payne, Jerome, Dragonfly Jones. The show was one of Fox's highest-rated and made him a star; stand-up and movies (Bad Boys, Big Momma's House) carried the run into the 2000s.
Martin Lawrence's sitcom Martin ran on Fox from August 27, 1992 to May 1, 1997—five seasons, 132 episodes, and one of the network's highest-rated shows. Lawrence played Martin Payne, a Detroit radio DJ at WZUP (later the host of a talk show called "Word on the Street"), with Tisha Campbell as his love interest Gina. But the real subject was Lawrence himself: a shape-shifting comedy force who inhabited an entire neighborhood of characters. Sheneneh Jenkins, Edna "Mama" Payne, Jerome, Ol' Otis, Dragonfly Jones—each one a distinct persona and proof of Lawrence's range as a performer. Fans knew every character by name.
Parallel to Martin, he was the original host of HBO's Def Comedy Jam and released the stand-up concert film You So Crazy in 1994. By the mid-1990s, he extended into movies: Detective Marcus Burnett opposite Will Smith in Bad Boys (1995), then Nothing to Lose (1997), Life (1999), and Blue Streak (1999). His reach broadened; he was no longer just a sitcom fixture but a movie-star-in-training.
In August 1999, while preparing for Big Momma's House in 100-degree heat, he collapsed from heat exhaustion and spent three days in a coma. The 2000s saw him recalibrate: Big Momma's House (2000), Black Knight (2001), the stand-up film Runteldat (2002), and Bad Boys II (2003). His heyday, broadly spanning 1992 to 2003, captures the years when his sitcom dominance and movie reinvention held the cultural center.
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Will Smith
Fresh from his Grammy-winning rap career, Will Smith became the biggest movie star of the '90s—charismatic, relatable, and seemingly incapable of releasing a film that didn't top the summer box office. By 1999 he was untouchable.
Bad Boys
The buddy-cop formula that minted a movie star. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami narcotics detectives, propelled by Michael Bay's visual maximalism and the Simpson/Bruckheimer sheen. It started as a vehicle for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz; recast with two sitcom leads, it became something no one expected—a $141 million global hit built on pure chemistry.
Black Knight
The 2001 Martin Lawrence comedy where a modern theme-park worker falls in a moat and wakes up in medieval England, fish-out-of-water antics ensuing. A critical flop that a whole generation still somehow watched on cable a dozen times.
Big Momma's House
Martin Lawrence as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a gun-toting Southern grandmother, prosthetics and fat suit and all. Critics groaned, but the one-joke premise turned into a $170-million summer smash and launched a franchise.