Marvel’s Captain Marvel Promo Website Is Pleasantly 90s Retro
Kids these days have no idea what the web was like in the early days, back when America On-Line trial CDs littered store counters and instead of Googling, you would Ask Jeeves. They can get a taste what online life was like in the dial-up era, though, in the most awesome of ways—by visiting Marvel's Captain Marvel website.
Let's talk about Captain Marvel for a quick second, and then we will get back to what makes the website such a treat for us nostalgic types. Captain Marvel is an upcoming superhero movie based on Carol Danvers, who is played by Brie Larson. It has been in development since May 2013, and when it hits the silver screen later this year, it will be Marvel's first superhero movie with a female lead.
Importantly, Captain Marvel is set in the 1990s. Why is that so important? Because it gives Marvel liberty to create a wonderfully retro website. It's filled with blocky buttons, rainbow colored 3D text, a website counter, and everything else that was standard fare in the GeoCities days. Heck, there's an even an embedded RealMedia player!
This is a throwback to when multimedia experiences at large began permeating the web. It is a cringe-worthy website by today's standards, but the cringe happens to be spectacular, in that it accurately reimagines the web as it was back when Titanic sunk box office records by being the No. 1 movie and highest grossing film of the time.
It clocks in at 10.0MB. TEN MEGABYTES. In 1995 the fastest widely available modem was 28.8k.
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) February 9, 2019
Imagine the download time. No, don't. pic.twitter.com/0lTr3Tv6SQ
The website is not completely accurate, though. Dieter Bohn at The Verge points out that all of the site's elements add up to 10 megabytes. That would have been a bear on a dial-up modem. As this handy website reveals, it would take longer than 48 minutes to process 10MB of data on a 28.8K modem, and that's a best-case scenario.
Whatever, we can live in the inaccuracy, because the result is awesome. Even better, one of the developers revealed on Twitter that the dev team built the site in FrontPage and hosted it on Angelfire.
Captain Marvel arrives in theaters on March 8, 2019. Until then, hit the link in the Via field below to navigate the flick's retro website.
