Try to think back to a time when the internet wasn’t a toxic mix of rage and false equivalence. Trick question! It’s always been. But for a few glorious years in the 1990s, it was also glittery and welcoming and amateurish and wonderful and absurd. It was the age of Geocities, and an era Marvel has played pitch-perfect homage to with its recently launched Captain Marvel website.

The latest cinematic superhero caper comes out on March 8, but it takes place in 1995, a fact that its first trailer seized on perhaps too tightly. (Blockbuster Video! Get it?) But the movie’s promotional site doesn’t just wink at the Matchbox Twenty era. It fully inhabits it. Site counter? Check. HTML frames? Check. A discordant yet earnest mix of font sizes, serifs, and colors? Check them all, friends.

There’s so much more, of course; the Captain Marvel site embraces that era’s maximalist ways. The tools were relatively new, the temptation to use them all impossible to resist. It houses most of the functions of a traditional promotional site; you can watch the trailer and flip through promotional frames. But it does so through a ’90s patina so thick you can practically smell the Mr. Sketch Scented Markers. (There’s also a requisite Stan Lee Easter egg that’s more fun to find on your own.)

Marvel

Fortunately, you don’t need to take anyone’s word for how closely it hews to sites of that era. Geocities itself disappeared from the internet proper in 2009 but has lived on thanks to archival efforts. There’s even a search engine for old sites, although many of them are now broken in various ways. Or better yet, look to the shockingly well-preserved site for another movie, Space Jam, an internet time capsule that has famously defied the cruelties of time.

“I give them a huge amount of credit,” says Dara-Lynn Weiss, one of the producers who built the Space Jam site in 1996, of the Captain Marvel throwback. “It is very well done. It is funny, and it is accurate, and it is authentic and not overplaying itself. It really is perfect.”

Marvel’s 2019 tribute to the internet of yesteryear resembles an enthusiast’s page more than what studios produced, even back then. “We never made anything this ugly,” Weiss says. “Clicking through the pictures took me back. The production photos. The flashing text, which we certainly did. The counter was always a little beneath us, but the counter is hilarious.”