Shonky graphics, confusing menus, weird picture galleries … the film websites from the internet’s early days haven’t aged well. So why are they still there?

You’ve Got Mail has dated horribly in the 19 years since it was released. It isn’t just the haircuts that have aged, or the music, or even the fact that it’s about a battle between small bookstores (which don’t exist any more) and big bookstores (which don’t exist any more) over who gets to sell the most books (which nobody reads any more).

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No, the thing that dates You’ve Got Mail more than anything else is its website. Never taken down, it really goes in hard on what the internet was like in the days before anyone really had the internet. There’s a “Buy the video” link, and a link to the You’ve Got Mail soundtrack CD. There’s downloadable desktop wallpaper that strobes violently like a Japanese cartoon, and instructions on how to download it to Windows 95. There are RealAudio files of New York street drummers. Most grievously of all, the website contains the text “Sure, computers aren’t really the end of Western Civilization as we know it, but they’re full of great ways to waste a little time”, which of course has since been proved wrong on two counts now that Twitter exists.

Obviously, You’ve Got Mail isn’t alone here. In the late 90s and early 00s, Hollywood became slightly too confident about what the internet could offer moviegoers. Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World created its very own InGen site, full of menus and submenus that lead to emails where two non-film characters describe last night’s dreams to each other in excruciating detail. Space Jam basically has a GeoCities page where if you click around enough, you’ll be presented with a list of radio stations that are “currently playing the first single from the Space Jam Soundtrack, Seal - Fly Like An Eagle”. Steampunk western Wild Wild West’s site has a page where, if you must, you can perv on impractically small photographs of the film’s “lovelies” (its female cast members) in various provocative poses.



It goes on. Saving Private Ryan has full-width white-on-black text that was presumably designed to make the reading experience as traumatic as the Normandy landings. The Mallrats site is largely a vessel for Kevin Smith’s excitement about a potential laserdisc release.

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The Mortal Kombat: Annihilation site contains an embarrassingly needy plea for fan feedback that in part reads: “Did you notice Sindel’s sonic blast? It destroyed a whole canyon of ancient temples. Did you get this? How about Nightwolf’s animality or the green glow on his ax. Did you see the Shadow Priests in Kahn’s fortress? Did you know that the girl who plays Mileena is an Olympic Gold medalist in Tae Kwon Doe? That’s so the mudfight will be exciting and realistic. Was it for you?”

It’s easy to laugh at sites like these, but really their only crime is still being accessible. They were made at the birth of a technology by people who thought a website could enrich the moviegoing experience. I’d rather take that over what we have now, where an underpaid graduate sits in a room and glumly retweets every last bit of praise that Logan ever gets to keep their cackling paylord happy.

Luckily, the practice hasn’t died out completely. One can only assume that it’ll be less than 19 years before someone finds the La La Land website and spends a day laughing uproariously at its annoying autoplay songs and gif creators and links to official La La Land iPhone stickers (featuring, of course, one where Ryan Gosling stands in front of the word “HONNNNNK!!!”. And that’s La La Land, for crying out loud. That’s a website for a critical darling. Imagine the atrocities we’d have to put up with if Space Jam was made today.

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