In 1988, we first meet our hero, young Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), at the bedside of his dying mother. He clutches his prized possession—a cassette player Walkman, containing a mixtape of his mother’s favorite songs. Unable to cope with his grief, he flees the hospital room, scrambles out into the night…and gets abducted by aliens.

As far as backstories go, Quill’s is pretty wacky—but for him and the rest of his dysfunctional crew, wacky is par for the course. These Guardians of the Galaxy are Marvel’s latest additions to its superhero lineup. But if Iron Man and Captain America are the A-Team, these guys are C-listers at best.

The group, lead by Quill, a thief-for-hire, includes Gamora (Zoe Saldana), an alien assassin with major daddy issues; Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a genetically-altered raccoon and firearms enthusiast; his partner Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), a tree-like being whose vocabulary is limited to the words “I am Groot”; and Drax the Destroyer (pro-wrestler Dave Bautista), a muscle-bound tough with absolutely no sense of irony. “Nothing goes over my head,” he boasts. “My reflexes are too fast—I would catch it.”

You probably don’t know the Guardians of the Galaxy—and neither does anyone else in the movie. It’s a running joke that no one has heard of “Star-Lord”—the codename the adult Peter Quill has given himself. If it sounds a little grandiose, it’s meant to be. Quill is a swaggering, overgrown man-child, who still carries his cassette player loaded with his mother’s mixtape of 1970s hits.

Pratt likens his character to Han Solo or Indiana Jones, but in Quill you might see more of Emmet Brickowski (“The Lego Movie” protagonist voiced by Pratt), or FBI Agent Burt Macklin (the alter-ego of Andy Dwyer, Pratt’s character from NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”). Pratt lends his characters an endearing goofiness and an appealing vulnerability. They’re all big geeks at heart. It’s hard to picture Han Solo lip-synching to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” as Quill does in one of the movie’s opening scenes.

That same giddy sense of joy is apparent throughout the movie. The cast is a winning mix of comic actors, such as Pratt, Cooper and John C. Reilly, combined with sci-fi veterans like Karen Gillan of “Doctor Who,” Diesel from “The Chronicles of Riddick” and Saldana of the new “Star Trek” film franchise. They’re all just having a blast riffing on well-tread territory, and it shows.

Of course, star power alone does not make a movie, and “Guardians of the Galaxy” was a risky project to mount. After debuting in the 1970s with little success, these lesser-known heroes languished in comic book ignominy before Marvel Studios got ahold of them. There would be no large, eager fanbase awaiting this movie, as there had been for the Superman and Spiderman franchises. But relative anonymity, it seems, was a creative blessing for director James Gunn and screenwriter Nicole Perlman, along with the rest of the production team. Since there were no expectations for “Guardians of the Galaxy,” they could actually have some fun with it. No one was going to take this movie seriously, so the movie didn’t have to, either.

It’s the first Marvel movie that is unquestionably a comedy—and probably one of the first superhero comedies in a long time. In the advent of Christopher Nolan and the “Batman” series, every superhero movie has had to be sepia-toned and deadly serious.

When we hear that first “Ooga-chaka, Ooga-ooga, Ooga-chaka,” we’re in the age of Stormtroopers and Klingons, when Christopher Reeve was still the nerdy, loveable Clark Kent and Batman’s punches came with their own title cards—when the good guys could win, and still make us laugh while doing it.

“Guardians,” with its neon-colored palette and wicked sense of humor, takes us back to the golden age of space operas and superheroes, back to a time when superhero movies could be fun.

Yoshi Makishima can be reached at [email protected].