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Captain Marvel's 1990s-themed website is a nostalgic goldmine

If you didn't miss blinking rainbow text, hit counters and Comic Sans, welcome to your nightmare -- now complete with a Stan Lee cameo!

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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Punch the old-lady Skrull as she pops in to the Captain Marvel official webpage.

Screenshot by Morgan Little/CNET

Remember the websites of the 1990s? Rainbow text! Flashing lights! Blinking text and Comic Sans! Guestbooks and hit counters and dancing babies! Slip back into the era of slap bracelets and clear cola when you visit the official Marvel website for the upcoming Captain Marvel feature film.

The movie, about Carol Danvers and her super-powered alter ego, is set in the 1990s, in part because Marvel's never done that before. "It allows us to play in an area that we have never played in before, and tapping into a '90s action genre was fun for us," Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige told the Toronto Sun.

So the website perfectly executes the theme, looking like a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper threw up on it. Scroll down and play the "guess the Skrull game." Watch for the shape-shifting old-lady bus passenger from the trailer to show up and see if you can punch her. Read through the oh-so-'90s guestbook, which is filled with decade-appropriate mentions of dancing babies, Y2K and even an "all your base are belong to us" mention. (Youngsters, ask the nearest old person.)

Update, Sunday 8:50 a.m. PT: There's a hidden Stan Lee cameo in the mound of black at the bottom! To find him, move your cursor around about 2 inches or so from the bottom of the page and he'll appear in all his glory.

mini-stan-lee
Marvel/Screenshot by CNET

Captain Marvel  stars Brie Larson, Jude Law and Samuel L. Jackson and is due out March 8 in the US and UK, and March 7 in Australia.

Flip through 32 Marvel-ous images from this super exhibit

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