Film

Here’s All The ‘Captain Marvel’ Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed

What's the deal with the cat? Why doesn't Nick Fury like diagonal toast? And more!

by Patrick Lenton  13 March 2019
Captain Marvel Easter Eggs that you may have missed

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Carol Danver’s debut into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Captain Marvel is pretty much a confirmed hit — kicking goals at the box-office, destroying man-babies everywhere, winning our hearts and minds.

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Captain Marvel is also a fairly dense sandwich of a movie, for a couple of reasons — it bridges the gap between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: End Game, which as we know by now, is a fairly tense and climactic situation. It’s also set in the nineties, making it a kind of prequel to the main Avengers films. And, Captain Marvel is a beloved and complex comic book character, with a long storied history, much of which is nodded to in the film.

All this means the film is PACKED with references and clues and tips.

Let’s go through as many Easter Eggs as we possibly can.

Blockbuster Video

Vers crash lands through the roof of a Blockbuster Video store. Blockbuster Video (RIP) was one of the largest chains of video stores in the nineties! Stores were things that people went to before the internet. Videos were things that people watched before the internet!

The scenes were actually shot using the last Blockbuster Video store in America.

One of the first things she does inside the Blockbuster is shoot the head off an Arnold Schwarzenegger cardboard standee, which was advertising the (excellent) film True Lies (1994), which also stars Jamie Lee Curtis. Based on this advertising, we can assume it’s somewhere VERY close to 1994.

True Lies features a very famous fighter jet scene, and that same jet prop would eventually wind up being repainted for use in The Avengers (2012), cushioning the Hulk’s fall while battling Thor.

After blowing stuff up, she passes by a copy of Hook (1991) and then picks up a VHS of The Right Stuff (1983), which just coincidentally is a movie chronicling the first years of America’s space program. Little sly wink there, because Carol is an Air Force pilot who lives in space!

It’s The Nineties, Baby!

This movie is a giant nostalgic wink towards the nineties, and they did a great job of packing it full of convincing references to that one decade.

There’s so many! Let’s go through some of them.

  • The bar where Carol and Nick Fury hang out has a vintage Street Fighter II arcade machine, which is extremely nineties.
  • Nick Fury says that “grunge suits” Carol — it’s the flannel, the Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, the boots. It’s all convincingly grunge, which was a very common fashion in the nineties.

  • Monica Rambeau (the one human child in the film) makes a quip about “staying home to watch The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air“. This is a famous Will Smith show that was on during the nineties. This is all checking out! I’m convinced!

  • There’s also: Troll Dolls, pinball machines, Space Invaders, the Nerf Gun that Minn-Erva uses to shoot Carol with, a disc-man… somebody was trawling eBay for nineties ephemera.

Alta Vista

Before we had Google, we had Alta Vista. Or sometimes Ask Jeeves.

Anyway, Captain Marvel featured some beautiful throwbacks to the dire state of dialup internet in the nineties, featuring a comically slow computer, and some Alta Vista search action.

Movie References!

There are a bunch of sneaky movie references in Captain Marvel.

As this Twitter user noticed, there are two Pulp Fiction references, which make sense because it’s a 1994 film starring Samuel L. Jackson — get it?

But also there’s probably some cool Star Wars references — when Nicky Fury asks Maria to join them because “they need good pilots like you”, it echoes Luke Skywalker’s entreaty to Han. References!

Stan Lee

First off, we get an entire tribute section to Stan that replaces the usual Marvel intro. This is because he is famously and recently dead.

We also get the regular Stan Lee Marvel film cameo (his last one ever). However, in this one, he is unusually playing himself in this movie, reading a script for the 1995 Kevin Smith movie Mallrats, in which he also played himself.

Kelly Sue DeConnick

More like Kelly Sue De-Iconic! When Carol Danvers is down in the subway, she makes significant eye contact with a red-haired woman. That woman? Grew up to be comic writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, who helped with the creation of the current run of Captain Marvel comics.

Music and Lyrics

Captain Marvel is chock full of extremely good nineties bangers and bops. With the exception of REM and Nirvana, it’s mostly female fronted bands too. Also, there’s a very prominent Smashing Pumpkins poster in one scene, which is a band that could best be described as a “collective nineties fever-dream”.

Nineties songs include:

  • Whatta Man by Salt ‘N’ Pepa feat. En Vogue

  • Just A Girl by No Doubt

  • Celebrity Skin by Hole

  • Only Happy When it Rains by Garbage

  • Waterfalls by TLC

  • Come As You Are by Nirvana

  • Man on the Moon by REM

The Special Shiny Jewel

You thought we’d seen the end of the Infinity Stones, just because Thanos had gathered them all together for his fabulous glove? Nay. Although tbf, that happens many years in the future.

The Tesseract is back — we first saw this special stone, also known as the Space Stone, back in WW2 in Captain America. After that, it popped up and caused trouble in The Avengers. Then, Loki found it in his dad’s vault in Thor: Ragnarok, before Thanos finally got his mitts on it at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War.

Very busy stone! It’s nice that Captain Marvel is also tied in with its whole journey, and also potentially very important that she gained her powers from it — makes her much more of a contender against Thanos.

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Project Pegasus

Project Pegasus is the secret SHIELD initiative dedicated to studying the Tesseract, which we get to find more about in Captain Marvel. It had previously been hinted at in Iron Man 2, and was saw it destroyed by Loki in The Avengers.

Anyway, like most military projects, it was secretive.

The Rambeaus

Carol Danver’s human best friend (and let’s be honest, human lover) is named Maria Rambeau, and her daughter is Monica. In the comics, Monica Rambeau is deeply intertwined with the Captain Marvel mythos, even taking on the mantle of Captain Marvel as an adult.

There are further nods to this whole thing with Maria’s callsign in the airforce being “Photon”, which is the name of Monica’s superhero identity at some point. We’ve already seen that the callsigns are significant, because Nick Fury takes inspiration from Carol’s “Avenger” callsign to create the Avengers Initiative.

Ronan and the Accusers

Why do I feel like this is the name of an Irish boyband?

Anyway — Ronan was previously seen in Guardians of the Galaxy, as the big ol’ villain. Ronan is my least favourite MCU villain, because it’s basically Lee Pace, a very handsome man, painted blue and made unrecognisable. What a waste.

It’s cool to get a little prequel of Ronan the Accuser before he becomes super bad.

Is Nick Fury Dead?

We find out a whole bunch about Nicholas Joseph Fury (including his middle name) in this film, as it was very much a buddy cop format for a while.

Most significantly, we find out what happens to his eye.

But, there’s also a very compelling theory by Nora Dominick over at BuzzFeed, which reckons that Nick Fury in the present day might be dead and impersonated by a Skrull — purely because of how he cuts his sandwich. Long story short, in Age of Ultron, he cuts his sandwich diagonally — and in Captain Marvel he talks about how he can’t cut toast diagonally. It’s very interesting.

The Very Special Pager

In the post-credit scene of Avengers: Infinity War, a rapidly disintegrating Nick Fury pulls out a weird modified pager and sends out a message — Carol Danver’s recognisable coat of arms extremely recognisable. A lot of people immediately theorised that he was summoning Carol to come and help, due to the snap.

And friends, they were correct. That’s exactly what is happening.

Captain Marvel Post Credit’s, Baby!

We get to see what the survivors of The Snap have been up to, and it’s mostly looking pretty stricken and facial hairish. Cap is there.

But, they’ve been monitoring the Very Special Pager, and we get to see that it goddamn works!

Then, the second post-credit is basically just Goose the scary cat vomiting up the Tesseract. Cool!

Oh my god, there’s just so many theories, and 100% there’s more that I’ve missed.

Captain Marvel is currently in cinemas.

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Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.