Marvel’s upcoming Captain Marvel, staring Bree Larson and Jude Law, will be released on March 8, 2019 and promo for the movie is already ramping up. As the film is set in the 1990s there will be plenty of period references, from hero Carol Danvers hanging out in a Guns N Roses t-shirts to a 90s-era soundtrack. But in a stroke of marketing genius, the recently-launched website for the movie is a throwback to the earliest days of the web.
Fire up your Netscape Navigator, get your dial-up modem ready, and don’t forget to check the recommended screen resolution — the 90s internet is back.
For a taste of pure web design nostalgia, head over to the Captain Marvel official website, where you can bask in such rarely-seen vintage wonders as animated gif sprites, rainbow marquee lettering, wordart titles, and even a guest book. Lest you imagine that all of this is inauthentic, developed Lori Lombert confirmed in a tweet that “we built this in FrontPage and host it Angelfire.”
Every time we look at the page we find more to enjoy, from the dancing lettering to the hideous color choices to the gently rippling Air Force flag gif. The blue underlined links, the mismatched fonts, and the swirling email gif gave us flashbacks to a world we had done our best to forget. There’s even a hit counter — remember those? The only things missing are a MIDI file playing in the background (with no off switch, of course) and a scrolling status bar message. Oh, and a trailing cursor image, because those were super awesome and not in any way a source of unbearable eyestrain.
If you’ve been pining for a taste of that sweet Geocities web design aesthetic and you’re ready to immerse yourself in 90s nostalgia, you can visit the site yourself and remember what the web used to look like back before we had CSS and an understanding of basic usability.
And just in case you’ve been living under a rock and have missed the promo content for this movie, you can check out the full trailer to see Carol in action and you might also want to view the latest Avengers: Endgame trailer that was shown last week during the Super Bowl.
