'Loki' is the Most '90s Thing Marvel Has Made

In Marvel’s continuing quest to spawn more TV spin-offs than Law & Order and NCIS combined, this week saw the release of the first episode of Loki -- the new show about the misadventures of the alternate timeline version of the God of Mischief, who we last saw in Avengers: Endgame. The critically-acclaimed premiere episode found Loki trapped in the Time Variance Authority, a mysterious temporal law enforcement agency that may have seemed oddly familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1990s. 

Despite the fact that Captain Marvel literally had its hero crash through the roof of a Blockbuster Video and beat up baddies to the sounds of No Doubt, Loki just might be the most ‘90s thing in the MCU; so many of its reference points seem to subtly pull from 25-year-old pieces of pop-culture. Like the TVA’s cartoon mascot, Miss Minutes, is clearly inspired by Jurassic Park’s Mr. DNA, right down to the Southern twang-filled exposition dump.

Not to mention how the show’s focus on time-based policing, which certainly owes a debt to 1994’s Timecop starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ron Silver, and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s elastic crotch muscles.

And the look of Loki seems to have taken a visual cue from the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Terry Gilliam, who each happened to have an influential movie come out in 1995: The City of Lost Children and 12 Monkeys, respectively -- the latter of which, perhaps not coincidentally, is also about a convict who is recruited for an important time travel mission. 

Even more directly, Loki randomly has a scene where the characters drink Josta, Pepsi’s defunct energy drink/inadvertent aphrodisiac from, you guessed it, the mid-’90s.

If this trend continues, we can only imagine that upcoming episodes will find Loki teaming up with Coolio to collect rare Pogs.

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Top Image: Disney