'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."
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."
Not exactly 90's-style (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not exactly 90's-style (Score:5, Informative)
More GIFs? Probably. But in those days, animated GIFs were much smaller in both dimensions and filesize and only had a few frames.
Let's check what's on that website:
19 javascript files, for a total of 1,058,266 bytes (yes, one fucking megabyte of javascript on a 1990's-style website... are you kidding me?)
17 GIF images, for a total of 1,149,430 bytes (more than one fucking megabyte)
12 PNG images, for a total of 183,245 bytes (quite normal, although at the time GIF was much more popular even for non-animated images)
6 JPEG images, for a total of 113,833 bytes (again, quite normal)
We won't talk about the 50KB HTML and the 26KB CSS files which are required to display the old-style website on a modern browser. A real 1990's web page would probably have more HTML and less CSS.
Total for everything: 2,795,691 bytes. That's extremely heavy, even for a 2019 website.
I can't imagine anyone waiting to download that monstrosity in the 1990's.
Re:Not exactly 90's-style (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this is an ad, because if it isn't, that means people are actually impressed by this.
Re:Not exactly 90's-style (Score:4, Interesting)
You beat me to to. This is a stylized "retro" web site not a '90s style web site.
Re:Not exactly 90's-style (Score:5, Interesting)
Be that as it may..... (Score:4, Insightful)
...it is still funny.
It made me laugh. Did it make you laugh too? Or are you only capable of negativity?
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, I'm so negative that I'm positive.
Re:Not exactly 90's-style (Score:5, Interesting)
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: Not exactly 90's-style (Score:2)
Wheres the Marquee and Blink tags!!?
The blink tag no longer works on any modern browser. The marquee tag may or may not depending on your browser.
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Chrome's engine is called Blink, yet it doesn't support the blink element. #FalseAdvertising
So anyway, how closely could CSS animation polyfill the blink element?
Re: Not exactly 90's-style (Score:2)
You could do it with CSS or with JavaScript, sure. Just keep that on the DL; don't need to be giving people any ideas ...
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!!
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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)
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386 SX/33... peasant.
Marvel at the power of my 486 DX/40!
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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,
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This was a 90's style page, but not for a professional site, it looks like a armature built geocities page.
Armature [wikipedia.org] is different from amateur [wikipedia.org].
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That doesn't mean they didn't exist at the time, just that they loaded verrrrrry slowwwwwly.
Re:Retarded. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing new. If you looked at retro-80's movies like Hot Tub Time Machine you would think everybody and their mother back then went around wearing all day-glo outfits with pop-star hair. In reality, most people just wore jeans and a t-shirt, same as today. And unless you were a woman or you were in the band Poison, your hair probably wasn't poofed-up too much.
Ironically, I remember my dad laughing at the version of the 1950's shown in Back to the Future (he was particularly amused at Biff's buddy who went around wearing paper 3D glasses for no apparent reason other than "3D movies were big back then, right?"). Now I see the same thing in the way movies portray the 1980's.
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onically, I remember my dad laughing at the version of the 1950's shown in Back to the Future (he was particularly amused at Biff's buddy who went around wearing paper 3D glasses for no apparent reason other than "3D movies were big back then, right?"). Now I see the same thing in the way movies portray the 1980's.
They didn't make their movie to show people what the 50s was like, they made their movie to pretend to be in the 50s, hence they had to conform to what the viewers thought the 50s looked like.
Looked expecting black man white woman pairing (Score:1)
Was not disappointed.
No it isn't (Score:1)
It has external scripts, where's the embedded shitty js of the 90s?
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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)
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Despite widespread belief, using Chrome is not the only way to browse the Internet.
It's missing one (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the under construction sign?
Re: It's missing one (Score:1)
Nothing goes over your head does it? Your reflexes are too fast I see. You would catch it.
So fast (Score:2)
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.
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I know! It loaded instantly for me. Shame that it absolutely requires scripting to do anything, but the blank page loaded instantly!
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Not bad (Score:3)
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?
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They're doing fake-retro, not actual retro. The thing doesn't even load a single piece of text without scripting.
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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)
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.
Imagine being that web designer... (Score:3)
Or the guy who had to justify paying for that.
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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?
old lady punching (Score:4)
Missing ('cuz it's no more) (Score:2)
An essential tag for a retro site, though you could poorly simulate it with a GIF.
Re: Missing ('cuz it's no more) (Score:2)
Heh ... Missing less-than BLINK greater-than. Damn filters!
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No we did not make websites like that in the 1990s (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Early Myspace pages were WAY worse than anything ever put on Geocities. Most Geocities pages weren't that bad.
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There were plenty that looked just like this. As soon as the page came up I laughed in recognition.
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
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You must be the hit of all the parties.
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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]
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For something more relevant, here's a movie site still up from 1996: https://www.spacejam.com/archi... [spacejam.com]
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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.
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You forgot to call him a nazi faggot, Ivan.
Nice try, but not 90's (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Link to a fragment (Score:2)
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.
Frames (Score:2)
Is the comment about slowness a joke? (Score:2)
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.
words (Score:2)
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.
Ugh! (Score:3)
For the real '90s, check out the Space Jam site! (Score:5, Informative)
Reality Carnival (Score:2)
Nostalgic for Dial-Up (Score:2)
Nostalgic for Dial-Up during the BBS days? Yup!
Nostalgic for Dial-Up for Internet access? Hell no!
I miss the 40s Captain Marvel (Score:1)
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
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Oh don't worry, that's coming out this year, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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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.
A 90's Web Site (Score:2)
Where's the Under Construction sign? (Score:2)
Nothing like the 1990s (Score:2)
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.
Shameless plug - this is a 90's site (Score:2)
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.
They were doing so well... (Score:2)
... 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"
Scroll to the end for an easter egg. (Score:1)
Scroll to the end for an easter egg. Nice touch!
What about OS/2 Webexplorer !!! (Score:2)
Looks horrible. (Score:2)
it needed a moose call (Score:2)
The site needed to play a wav file with a modem moose call before it loaded.
Sorry... (Score:2)
I've had fiber to the house for years. Nothing has me nostalgic for dial-up.