Slashdot Mirror
'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."
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.
#DeleteFacebook
uBlock rejects 14 data collecting nasties. Didn't have those in the mid nineties.
Where's the under construction sign?
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?
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.
and having to list that on your body of work.
Or the guy who had to justify paying for that.
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.
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. 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 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.
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...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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...
...it is still funny.
It made me laugh. Did it make you laugh too? Or are you only capable of negativity?
I know! It loaded instantly for me. Shame that it absolutely requires scripting to do anything, but the blank page loaded instantly!
...
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.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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/...
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...
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.
For something more relevant, here's a movie site still up from 1996: https://www.spacejam.com/archi...