Those '90s songs from Captain Marvel are selling higher, faster, further than ever – SYFY WIRE

Anyone who came of age in the 1990s knows that we did indeed have a strong female-led comic book heroine film back then. It was called Tank Girl, it came out in 1995, and it was a whole lot of post apocalyptic punk awesomeness. And, though there need to be much more than two or three (or four or seven) of these films in a person’s lifetime, as kids in the 1980’s we also had Supergirl (1984).

Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel falls about in the middle of these two noble warrior heroes on the punk rock scale: much less punky than Tank Girl but much more punk than Supergirl. And the highlight “Tank Girl moment” for me has to have been Danvers’ third act battle sequence set to “Just a Girl” by No Doubt, a scene that would, in fact, have happened in a ’90s film — unlike the use of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” which, like it or not from today’s standpoint, would definitely not have happened at the time.

Which brings us to today’s news, which can only bode well for blending Marvel flicks into the ’90s: Captain Marvel has followed in the footsteps of another great Earthling-Kidnapped-Into-Space Marvel hero and completely reinvigorated interest in the Earth tunes of her time — though this go-round it’s the 90s tunes of her return to Earth rather than the childhood 70s and 80s songs of Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Starlord.

As Billboard reports, per Nielsen Music, the thirteen tunes featured in Captain Marvel combined posted sales gains of 464% in the four days after the release of the film. 464% gains is a whole lot of celebrity skin in the game, as well as a whole lot of downloads of “Celebrity Skin” by Hole. (In fact, “Celebrity Skin” was both the biggest seller and the greatest gainer of them all, jumping a whopping 2,222% in sales in the days after the film’s release.) Twelve of the film’s thirteen non-score songs are ’90s tunes, though one, “Please Mr. Postman,” by the Marvelettes, dates back to the 1960s.

(However, considering that watching Samuel L. Jackson cruise LA in the ’90s in close proximity to 1960s tunes (see: large swaths of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack) is one of the most ’90s things ever, a case could be made that his singing of this song is the most 1990s moment in the whole film.)

A full official Captain Marvel tracklist, also including songs like “Waterfalls” by TLC, “Whatta Man” by Salt-N-Pepa with En Vogue, and “Crush with Eyeliner” by R.E.M., can be found here. And seeing as Guardians of the Galaxy gave cassette tape formats a bump, maybe Captain Marvel will now bring back the CD Walkman? Who but the most powerful Marvel superhero could do that?

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