Captain Marvel’s official site dials up some 1990s web design

I don’t know if it’s too soon to call a film set in the 1990s a “period piece,” but Captain Marvel’s marketers are doing their damndest to earn that label with a Comic Sans-tastic throwback website that recalls the days of Adobe PageMill and HTML 1.0.

It’s slam full of ultra-dated features, my favorite being the crummy RealMedia player embed (OK, so it’s “KREE PLAYER 1.0”) showing the official trailer at a 14.4-killing 310x175 pixels. Play the “Kree or Skull?” multimedia game and remember a time when advertising on the web was a ridiculous novelty, not the all-consuming life force that will destroy all of our jobs and herald the coming of the machines.

Rainbow typefaces, 3D text, clip art backgrounds, .gifs that are animated in name only and, yes, a visit counter round out the dial-up motif. The only thing I didn’t see was that “NeW!” header for all of those updates made five months ago.

The site is either an homage to or a ripoff of Warner Bros. still-extant Space Jam official page, which is old enough to rent a car. You figure whoever sloshed this thing together knew they’d be obligating Marvel.com to host it for the next quarter-century so, well played my dudes.

Space Jam, incidentally, is getting a sequel courtesy of LeBron James and Ryan Coogler, sometime soon. Captain Marvel is more imminent, releasing in theaters on March 8. Or you can wait for it to show up on Primestar.

Correction: Astoundingly, a post whose sole purpose was to send people to a website failed to include that website’s address. That was super effective, Owen. So, officially, it is https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel — or AOL keyword KREE. We now return to “Mr. T Ate My Balls,” already in progress.