10 Best Nostalgic Mixtape Movie Soundtracks
Slap on some No Doubt and let's go back to 1995 with Captain Marvel.
Captain Marvel is the first runaway box office success of 2019. And, while the movie's plot may hew a little too close to the standard Marvel formula to achieve real classic status, its sweet Blockbuster Video and dial-up internet slice of pure 90s nostalgia has won it plenty of fans.
A big part of that rose-tinted glow of years past is achieved through Marvel's latest borrowing Guardians Of The Galaxy's enormously successful soundtrack-as-mixtape model to give us a superhero adventure backed by some of the decade's best earworms.
It's an approach that has seen the likes of Garbage, Elastica and TLC (not to mention the somewhat less 90s "Please Mr. Postman", the Marvelettes's 1961 number one, which Nick Fury sings in the movie) shooting up the download charts like they haven't in years.
Captain Marvel, though, is far from the first movie to use a well-curated nostalgic soundtrack as the perfect atmospheric way to get its audience into a headspace of a particular time and place, and at the same time produce a mix that is well worth a listen outside its own movie, so let's take a look at some of the other best movie nostalgia mixtapes.
Note: This list is specifically about movies that use a period soundtrack to establish the mood of their retro setting, so don't expect to find any Tarantino-style cool retro soundtracks to contemporary-set pictures here. Also, it would be too easy to fill the list with movies purposefully about musicians, so those are out too.
10. Captain Marvel
Choice cuts: Nirvana - "Come As You Are", No Doubt - "Just A Girl", Hole - "Celebrity Skin"
It feels like we've been stuck on 80s nostalgia for over two decades now, a period stretching from The Wedding Singer in 1998 to the current TV popularity of Stranger Things or The Goldbergs. It was almost like the equivalent tributes to 90s pop culture were just never going to come.
So, Captain Marvel's mix of grunge, female-fronted alt-rock and R&B was like a breath of fresh air for all of us grown up 90s kids waiting for our own nostalgia wave (especially when coupled with this month's Mid90s, which comes with a fresh score from Nine Inch Nails's Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).
To be honest, the soundtrack is not as perfectly integrated into the action as in the way that Guardians Of The Galaxy uses its retro mixes to back its creative visuals, but it would take a hard hearted anti-feminist not to feel a little thrill as Carol rushes into battle with hordes of blue-skinned aliens just as the ska-inflected opening bars of No Doubt's Just A Girl begin to fire up.
Even outside the soundtrack itself, classic 90s music references abound in the movie, from Carol Danvers's NIN shirt to fly-posting for Smashing Pumpkins's ambitious art grunge album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (a US number one album in the autumn of 1995, the year in which the movie takes place).