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