Mixtape isn’t shy about being set in the 1990s. The movie is full of references to life at the end of the Dot-Com Decade: Its characters are vocally concerned about Y2K, and Vitamin C features prominently on the soundtrack. If you were born after fear of the millennium bug was a distant memory, these references may have gone over your head. So here are a few explanations that will help you keep up with the ’90s kids in your life.

Mixtapes

Compact Disc technology was on the rise in the 1990s, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for a young person like Beverly to hang on to an old Walkman and listen to music on tape instead. The titular mixtape refers to a tape belonging to 12-year-old Beverly’s deceased parents, made by one for the other. Back in the day, someone could create a mixtape simply by putting a cassette tape in a cassette recorder and recording music playing from another source (like a boombox or even another cassette player). A mixtape maker would carefully construct their tape to play a series of songs in a specific order, usually as a way to express their feelings to someone they cared about through music. In a post-playlist era, that sounds incredibly simple, but trust us, there was much more labor and time involved in creating a good mixtape.

Napster

This iconic file-sharing service makes an appearance early in the film, while Beverly and Ellen search for a song from Bev’s parents’ mixtape. In the ’90s, Napster was effectively proto-Spotify; it was a means for music lovers to share MP3 files of songs without having to purchase officially released CDs or tapes. It was a game changer. Unfortunately for Bev and Ellen, it was also a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. After multiple high-profile musicians became aware that their music was circulating online for free, A&M Records filed a lawsuit against Napster, and it was out of business by July 2001. Years later, the company would be acquired by Best Buy and spun off into a (legal) streaming service of its own. Napster paved the way for many of the social media sites and streaming services we use today. Fun fact: The founder of Napster, Sean Parker, later became the first president of Facebook (he’s played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network). 

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves was an early internet search engine. It featured a friendly virtual valet named Jeeves (named after a character in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels) as a mascot. Users could theoretically ask Jeeves questions directly by typing them into the search box. In Mixtape, Ellen asks Jeeves about a particularly tricky-to-find mixtape song. The friendly butler became semi-iconic; he even appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2001. Unfortunately, not even Jeeves’ celebrity could protect him as the search engine landscape became more and more competitive. Jeeves was laid off in 2006, and the site was rebranded Ask.com. 

AltaVista Search 

AltaVista, which the girls use to try to find a song from the mixtape, was a popular online search engine in the early days of the internet. The site was one of the most sophisticated of its kind, but like most other options, it was eventually overtaken by Google. AltaVista’s owners originally devised the site as a means of testing the power of its AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser supercomputer. When more focused tech companies arrived on the scene, AltaVista quickly fell behind. It was acquired by Yahoo in 2003 and shut down in 2013. Its most lasting legacy may be the CAPTCHA test, developed by the site’s research team to prevent bots from adding search results to the engine, which we’re still using to prove that “we are not robots” to this very day.

Village of the Damned

At one point in the film, Bev and Ellen visit Anti’s record store, where he’s passed out in a chair. When he wakes up, he refers to them as the “village of the damned.” Although there have been multiple Village of the Damned films, the setting suggests Anti is probably referring to John Carpenter’s 1995 remake and its horde of demonic children.

Tab Soda

Tab, a diet soda produced by the Coca-Cola company, is all over Mixtape, specifically in Anti’s record store. When the girls hitch a ride with him to the Voyeur, his backseat is covered with cans. Although Tab was only technically discontinued in 2020, its peak of popularity had already long passed by the late ’90s. However, the drink retained a hardcore fanbase; Anti’s Tab habit is more an indicator of his hipster status than it is a marker of the time in which the film is set. 

Y2K

Throughout Mixtape, Beverly’s grandmother Gail is planning for Y2K, stocking their basement with Spam and general doomsday prep supplies. Y2K, or “the Year 2000 Problem,” refers to a hypothetical computer malfunction that would have occurred when the world’s computers (which tracked time based on only the final two digits of the year) entered the 2000s. Some programmers were concerned that this millennium bug would cause computer programs to assume the year was 1900 rather than 2000, shutting down industries that had grown to rely on computing. In reality, very few of these errors actually occurred. At the end of Mixtape, Gail and Bev count down into the New Year, and all that Spam goes to waste.