Why Recreating Captain Marvel’s ’90s Was Harder Than Freaky Tales’ ’80s for the Directors

Recreating the 1990s setting for Captain Marvel was a more challenging task for directors Anna Fleck and Ryan Boden than recreating the 1980s for their new film Freaky Tales. During an interview with ComicBook to promote the upcoming action comedy (due in theaters April 4th), the filmmakers were asked about which period proved to be more difficult to bring to life on-screen. Fleck explained that she found the ’90s to be much harder since it “felt much less distant” to her. Elaborating, she noted how she was still a kid during the ’80s, but she associates the ’90s with graduating from high school and forging her own, independent path.

“I thought that the ’90s was way more challenging because it felt much less distant to me,” Fleck said. “I felt more like an adult in the ’90s … even though I was still a teenager … I also left high school in ’97, so I was feeling independent and on my own. In the ’80s, I was really a kid, and so it felt like the much more distant past to me, and so it felt much easier to make it feel period and nostalgic.”

Released in 2019 shortly before Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel takes place in 1995. The film’s main plot explores Nick Fury’s first encounter with Carol Danvers, establishing how he conceived the Avengers Initiative. Captain Marvel is full of fun ’90s references and details, including the appearance of a Blockbuster store and the Stan Lee cameo showing him practicing his lines for Mallrats. The soundtrack also features plenty of ’90s-era needle drops.

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Boasting a cast that includes Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Jay Ellis, Dominique Thorne, Tom Hanks, and more, Freaky Tales tells four interconnected stories set in 1980s Oakland. The film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it received generally positive reviews. Critics liked the movie’s sense of style and performances.

Fleck’s perspective is understandable; even for people who were kids in the ’90s, Captain Marvel‘s period setting didn’t seem so long ago when the film premiered. Touchstones like Blockbuster and Nerf guns still feel so fresh. However, as hard as this is to believe, when audiences sat down to watch Captain Marvel in theaters, they were seeing a story that took place 24 years in the past. It’s a strange thing for one to wrap their head around because when someone thinks of the term “period piece,” they typically think about a movie or show set in the very distant past (a la a World War II film or a tale like Little Women). But the ’90s can now fit that bill, as the world has changed in many ways over the past few decades.

The ’90s setting benefitted Captain Marvel, making it feel fresh and different when compared to other installments of the Infinity Saga. It was also fun to see how S.H.I.E.L.D. operated long before Nick Fury had any notions of assembling a team of superheroes to protect the Earth. The nostalgia factor may have contributed to Captain Marvel‘s $1 billion worldwide gross; for Millennials in the audience, the film was a blast from the past that brought back a lot of memories. It seems unlikely that Marvel will go back to the ’90s any time soon, but Fleck and Boden did a great job bringing the era to life in Captain Marvel.