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Movies The Internet

'90s-Style 'Captain Marvel' Website Will Have You Nostalgic for Dial-Up (movieweb.com) 137

An anonymous reader quotes MovieWeb: The official Captain Marvel website is a blast from the past... Marvel Studios is preparing its final promotional push for the project. This includes TV spots, various forms of merchandise, posters, and in this case, a perfect retro website, tailor made to take us all back to a time when the internet was a whole lot simpler.

Instead of flashy high resolution images, we are treated to pixelated versions, which perfectly reimagines the 1990s websites. There's a lot of Word art, a ticker to count how many unique views that the site gets, a guest book, and even a game that lets fans spot the Kree. Instead of the trailers coming through YouTube, they are played using the "Kree Player," which is take on the old Real Player.

MovieWeb writes that the site "also gives younger Marvel Cinematic Universe fans a chance to see what the internet looked like back in the day...."

And though the movie's slogan is "Higher, further, faster," they argue that "The only thing that could have made the Captain Marvel site even better is slow page loading, just to give it a real touch of what it was like surfing the net in the dark ages."
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'90s-Style 'Captain Marvel' Website Will Have You Nostalgic for Dial-Up

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  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:09PM (#58096770)

    That many animated GIFs, at those sizes, are hard even for my old Core 2 Duo CPU with 16GB of RAM. I can't imagine a computer from the 1990's able to display that webpage.

    • by ChromeAeonuim ( 1026946 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:42PM (#58096902)
      And I can't even see it without allowing scripts. I use NoScript and I see nothing, and since I don't feel like allowing whatever script is apparently necessary to display basic HTML, I'm not going to see anything either. Scripts are not needed to display basic text and images. Calling this site '90's style' is like calling a bacon falafel burger with cheese 'authentic Jewish food'.

      I hope this is an ad, because if it isn't, that means people are actually impressed by this.
      • by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:52PM (#58097086) Homepage

        You beat me to to. This is a stylized "retro" web site not a '90s style web site.

      • by kackle ( 910159 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @10:00PM (#58097270)
        Bah; I usually try to use my 6-year old Opera 12 web browser on a site first (I don't like change), and with it, the page wouldn't load at all.
      • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09, 2019 @10:51PM (#58097390)

        ...it is still funny.

        It made me laugh. Did it make you laugh too? Or are you only capable of negativity?

      • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @11:29PM (#58097484)

        Over heavy Javascript wasn't that uncommon back then, although sometimes it was vbScript (Which i rarely saw since Netscape Navigator didnt support it)..

        The major things that jump out to me.
        1) The JS was almost always inline (I still actually do this. Honestly sometimes throwing the glue script at the end just makes more sense).
        2) Div layouts. Back then Table layouts where the norm. Partly because after netscape introduced Div layers, the implementation was confusing as hell and inconsistent across versions
        3) CSS. CSS was rare as hell. Things mostly used inline attributes.
        4) Wheres the Marquee and Blink tags!!?
        5) Needs more jeffk!!!!!!111one

        The gif stuff actually was pretty common, and generally irritating as hell, and lead to some stupidly long load times. You kind of developed a habit of learning to read a page as it loaded then.

        But yeah, ,the design, rings pretty true to me. I'm getting a giggle out of it, so mission accomplished.

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by grasshoppa ( 657393 )

        How far does your purity crusade go? Do you want it running on legitimate 90s hardware too?

        The *style* is what's important here, not the technology.

        Bunch of literal minded, wanna be autistic fucks...

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Well the style of 90s web sites didn't require JavaScript just to display. This one does or you get a big blank.

          Web developers nowadays are fucking idiots. They don't realise that text and images can be displayed without scripting.

      • by Barny ( 103770 )

        Like the others, I was here to say this. Using a script blocker, and all I got was a plain background. Not even a single image or warning would load without JS.

      • Yeah, unless I whitelist it in Purify on my iPad... I see nothing.

        And after whitelisting it, I basically see an imitation of a GeoCities site. Whoop de doo.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I use NoScript and I see nothing

        Same here.

        Out of morbid curiosity, I enabled scripts from the host site, marvel.com - and I still saw nothing. I then also enabled scripts from annihil.us - and I got a NoScript warning about XSS from doubleclick.com to google ad services.

        After *that*, I get something vaguely visually similar to ye olde Geocities sites.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          It's pathetic how addicted today's developers have become to heavy JavaScript crap.

          Content is content, the browser shouldn't need executable logic just to show you some text and pictures!!

      • Calling this site '90's style' is like calling a bacon falafel burger with cheese 'authentic Jewish food'.

        This is awesome! Do you mind if I use it a bit? (with changes of course, I doubt I will ever discuss this particular website with anyone)

    • by Zehsi ( 5630632 )
      hold on, booting up my 386 SX 33...
    • We were more patient then. Loading a page back in the 1990's a 1 minute wait for the page to load was considered acceptable. Also we had screens closer to 640x480 so such gif files were smaller,

      This was a 90's style page, but not for a professional site, it looks like a armature built geocities page. The professional pages back then, were actually much better made. They were mostly styled off magazines, and news print.

      Some of the biggest issues, was the lack of Anti-Aliasing text, speed of downloading,

    • That doesn't mean they didn't exist at the time, just that they loaded verrrrrry slowwwwwly.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It has external scripts, where's the embedded shitty js of the 90s?

    • by tsa ( 15680 )

      Dial-up always sucked so no, whatever the website I don't get nostalgic for dial-up. That's one of the things that are fine where they are: in the past.

  • Unconvincing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roskakori ( 447739 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:20PM (#58096812)
    uBlock rejects 14 data collecting nasties. Didn't have those in the mid nineties.
  • by ChoGGi ( 522069 ) <slashdot @ c h o g g i.org> on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:21PM (#58096818) Homepage

    Where's the under construction sign?

  • That site is so fast, it loads before I even click the mouse button. And no "subscribe to our spamletter" or "please fill out a survery when you're done" popups in the middle of scrolling, "please let us pollute your notification centre" permission requests, or other such modern things.

    • by Barny ( 103770 )

      I know! It loaded instantly for me. Shame that it absolutely requires scripting to do anything, but the blank page loaded instantly!

      • Well, now I *KNOW* it's not a 90's web page. I would have had to wait 5 minutes to see a blank page over dial-up!
  • by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:27PM (#58096834)

    The style looks about right! The guest book was a nice touch. Though I don't remember guestbook needing "sign in", they usually just let you post whatever, sometime required manual moderation.

    But, that's a lot of javascript for the 90's. And that "one page" format is very modern. All these things would have been on different pages.

    Where is the "webring" banner?

    • by Barny ( 103770 )

      They're doing fake-retro, not actual retro. The thing doesn't even load a single piece of text without scripting.

    • The webring banner was really what I was hoping for as well, along with a list of meaningless site awards.

      It is kind of amusing to see how similar the Marvel page looks to an old cheesy website, and then look at the actual html underneath that looks absolutely nothing like an older page.

  • Requires Javascript (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:28PM (#58096840)

    Requires Javascript without any sort of backup to a non-script version, which is certainly not what a 90s web page would have done (mostly). Further, the page clocks in at 8.8MB. That means at 5KB/s (which btw, is incredibly generous since that didn't come out and be generally available until the late of the 90s), it'd take 30 minutes to fully load. Aka, utter shit I'd avoid.

    So, I guess if the point was the "nostalgia" of movie studios who don't get the internet, then they really nailed it.

  • by Leslie43 ( 1592315 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:31PM (#58096852)
    and having to list that on your body of work.

    Or the guy who had to justify paying for that.
    • Why would you 'have to list [it] on your body of work"?

      You know that a portfolio is a catalogue of content that you're proud to show off, right, and it's entirely up to you what goes into the portfolio?

  • by TheRealQuestor ( 1750940 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:37PM (#58096870)
    not sure why but it's kind of satisfying to keep punching the old lady [kree] that keeps poping up all over the page. And the little Stan Lee at the very bottom of the page is kind of sad but a nice little tribute none the less.
  • An essential tag for a retro site, though you could poorly simulate it with a GIF.

  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:46PM (#58096916)
    For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities [wikipedia.org]. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)

    Try Philip Greenspun's website [greenspun.com] for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.
    • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      Early Myspace pages were WAY worse than anything ever put on Geocities. Most Geocities pages weren't that bad.

    • by Joosy ( 787747 )

      For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s.

      There were plenty that looked just like this. As soon as the page came up I laughed in recognition.

      Try Philip Greenspun's website [greenspun.com] for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s.

      Yes, there were plenty of single-guy-hobbyist sites that looked like that. But websites promoting a movie or music or was trying to be hip ... any site that was pulling out all the stops ... would not have looked

    • You must be the hit of all the parties.

    • by qubezz ( 520511 )
      Key obsolete features were abused early on, defining the 90's web. A web page divided into frames. Server-side image maps. CGI-BIN. Tables with the 3D borders. The ubiquitous single banner at the top of the page.

      The biggest differentiator when you go back to handwritten HTML pages from before the dotcom bubble popped - ones you would have seen using Mosaic on Windows 3.11 even - they were formatted for 640x480 screens and are relatively tiny today.

      https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/... [cnn.com]
    • For something more relevant, here's a movie site still up from 1996: https://www.spacejam.com/archi... [spacejam.com]

    • Frankly, I wish more web sites still looked & worked like Greenspun's. They load instantly, and you can use ctrl-F to find & hit links of interest very quickly.

  • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:06PM (#58096980) Homepage

    Eh, apart from the fact that it uses js, clicking on links scrolls you "down" to a different background and doesn't leave any "back" navigation. Definitely not 90's style behavior, web designers nowadays don't know how to make something basic & old school even if they tried...

    • clicking on links scrolls you "down" to a different background

      Links to a fragment of the same document (e.g. <a href="#section name">link text</a> ) have been around since the 1990s.

  • It better have frames!
  • Just throw in 5 copies of jscript and 30 trackers, that'll slow it right down. You know, like every other modern site.

    I pine for the days when the slowness was because of _my_ end of the connection. At least that had a straight-forward fix.

  • I'm sure the masses will be delighted to quip about this left and right. Hell, this submission is an example. Gotta tell everyone about that new fauxretro that's mostly comic sans, primary colors, and synthetic ugly.

    Oh wait, if that's original and novel then SBAHJ [mspaintadventures.com] is a screaming display of creative brilliance that would drown out Ragnarok.

  • by imperious_rex ( 845595 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:38PM (#58097210)
    Back in the 90s, many amateur web sites (I'm looking at YOU GeoCities) really were garish and suffered from their creators' poor sense of design and taste. But sites by professional web design studios looked pretty good (just more primitive JavaScript and almost no CSS at the time) despite severely optimizing their pages for 56K dial-up speeds, and were far better looking than this gaudy Captain Marvel parody of 90s web design sensibility. No 90s pro web designer in their right mind would have abused animated GIFs and fonts (Comic Sans??? WTF?) like this. Using just strictly HTML 3.0 and a sprinkle of basic JavaScript for mouse rollover effects, any web designer could make a tasteful Captain Marvel home page that would be well under 500K in total size.
  • by ToTheStars ( 4807725 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @10:45PM (#58097372)
    Others have remarked on the use of Javascript, YouTube videos, and other technology that didn't exist or wasn't widely used until after then '90s, but the original Space Jam movie website is still up in its 1996 glory: https://www.warnerbros.com/arc... [warnerbros.com]
  • This is why I like Clifford Pickover's Reality Carnival website.
  • Nostalgic for Dial-Up during the BBS days? Yup!

    Nostalgic for Dial-Up for Internet access? Hell no!

  • I'm barely old enough to remember the original version of Captain Marvel, with Billy Batson who would say "Shazam!" and turn in to Captain Marvel. As an adult I did eventually read one of the stories in the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, and thought it was the best story in the collection. It was "Captain Marvel Battles The Plot Against The Universe" from Captain Marvel Adventures No 100, September 1949. Also, there was a movie serial made of Captain Marvel that is considered among the best movie

    • by Kargan ( 250092 )

      Oh don't worry, that's coming out this year, too:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • I got that series on disc. One of the things I really like was that CM was joyous in his dispatching, like watching the bad guy he tossed off the building land and laughing.
      • by shoor ( 33382 )

        The guy who played Captain Marvel in that serial, stage name Tom Tyler, was an amateur weightlifter before the movies. According to the wikipedia, he could do a right hand clean and jerk of 213 pounds. Pretty impressive. I would never have guessed it from the way he looks in his movies, as I'm so used to the modern body builder types.

  • using CSS... unbelievable.
  • Also, where's the blink tag?
  • It even requires JavaScript to load. In the 1990s that would have mean that nobody saw your page. Today it increasingly means that people won't see your pages as virtually everybody who is able to uses NoScript or some other form of disabling Javascript.

  • So, one of my first websites survives on the quake wiki & whilst it wasn't exactly popular, the code and the graphics reflects what sites were like back then.

    https://www.quakewiki.net/arch... [quakewiki.net]

    This marvel site is just a poor reflection of the reality, as the code behind it, the reliance on javascript, the sheer weight of all the assets, is totally out of place with the era.

  • ... but then they blew it right back to 2019 on the very last row of the page:

    "This film is not yet rated Filmratings.com MPAA Terms of Use Privacy Policy Your California Privacy Rights Children's Online Privacy Policy License Agreement Interest-Based Ads Marvel Insider Term"

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Scroll to the end for an easter egg. Nice touch!

  • That's all. Looks like crap. Nostalgic for capri pants as well?
  • The site needed to play a wav file with a modem moose call before it loaded.

  • I've had fiber to the house for years. Nothing has me nostalgic for dial-up.

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