An Introduction to Homestar Runner (and this blog)

Dear Bikdip,

When are you going to start that thing where you revist all the Homestar cartoons and do a little mini-review of them? I was looking forward to that.

Crapfully yours,

Your Youtube fanbase.

a>    Well, fandumb, I suppose I'll get around to it once you guys pay a vist to your old friend, Spellcheck.

Seriously though folks, welcome to “Bikdip Watches Homestar Runner”, or as it will be referred to from now on, “Homestar Rerunner”. Get it? Don’t let the name fool you, though. This isn’t just meant as a way for old fans of the series to take another look at everything and remember all the good times, but also, my attempt to introduce the cartoons to a new audience. So if you’re confused by the letter format of this opening, then don’t worry, all will become clear eventually.

So before I jump into things here, I should lay down some expectations, mainly for my own benefit, so I can try and get through this project in a somewhat organized way. My eventual goal here is to address every cartoon, game, and even menu on the website… and probably some stuff that isn’t on the website at all. Counting only the toons, that’s nearly 400 “episodes” to cover, hence why I used the word “address” and not necessarily “review”. That’s probably what the majority of them are going to end up as, but I imagine that there will be a few that amount to little more than “well… this certainly exists.” And again, I say “episodes” in quotes because let’s be honest here – this isn’t a TV show, or even anything like one. Your typical toon could be anywhere between 30 seconds or five minutes long, and the non-emails aren’t really presented in any kind of coherent order.

And so that’s where I come in. The beginning of this project is going to start out a bit chaotically for reasons I’ll get into in just a minute, but for the most part, I plan on going through all the website’s material in order of release date. For those unfamiliar with the body of work, this is probably the most helpful thing I could possibly do for you. Because while it is possible to just pull up a random page on the website and probably enjoy at least part of it, there is a HUGE amount of self-referential humor that would be missed out on by watching things out of order, and some concepts that would make very little sense out of context.

Now, for those of you who don’t know anything about Homestar, or have only vaguely heard of it or seen a couple minutes of it here and there, here’s a short description of it. Homestar Runner is a Flash cartoon made by two brothers – Mike and Matt Chapman – between the years of 2000 and 2010. Born in an era where the majority of original videos online were short Flash animations (remember, Youtube wasn’t around yet), Homestar stood out as one that didn’t rely on excessive violence, swearing, or other Family Guy-esque humor in order to be funny. It’s always been a very kid-friendly series, with the occasional dip into PG territory. It is also important to emphasize that the humor of this series is based primarily on character interactions; there is no overarching story or plot to speak of. Homestar toons have very little, if any, continuity with each other, and the only reason it’s important to watch them in the proper order is because of established jokes, characters, etc. I like to think of it as a modern-day Looney Toons sort of thing, but in this case, some offhand comment that Daffy Duck makes in an early episode could eventually spawn a completely new recurring character or show-within-a-show.

With all that out of the way, I think it’s best to dive right into this thing. Now, as I said earlier, the beginning of this project isn’t going to strictly follow the order that the material was released in. The main reason I’m doing this is because when I first learned of homestarrunner.com, I didn’t start from the earliest material and work upwards. I imagine that barely anyone did, unless they had discovered the website back in its infancy in the year 2000, and let’s be honest – even the most dedicated fans probably first learned of it from the Trogdor popularity boom of ’03. (if you don’t know what Trogdor is, then congrats, you’ve avoided one of the biggest parts of internet culture ever.) Personally, I had been enjoying it since summer 2002, about eight months before that email came out, but even I had my doubts about it at the start, for one simple reason:

A lot of the early Homestar material isn’t all that funny.

Now before you start throwing full wine bottles at your computer screens, let me explain. Before I had ever found Homestar, I had been exposed to two very different types of Flash cartoons. The first is the kind found on websites like Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep. Basically, the products of teenagers who found offensive humor to be funny. Not that I’m badmouthing those sorts of things - I still find stuff like The Demented Cartoon Movie, Drawn Dream, and Boy and Robot to be hilarious. And that’s not even getting into animutation, which is a highly underrated genre, in my opinion. But anyway, the second type of Flash cartoons were the ones intended for really young kids. If you don’t have younger siblings and/or were not raised on the internet, you might not be terribly familiar with these, but basically, I’m talking about the stuff you’d see on the websites for PBS, Nickelodeon, etc. One example that will always stand out in my mind was called “Alfy”, which thankfully doesn’t seem to exist anymore. God, I hated that website. My brother Jordan would spend hours on there watching the same terrible cartoons over and over.

And so, all things considered, it’s amazing I ever even gave Homestar a chance in the first place. It has an all-Flash website, which is typical of the PBS-style websites (as opposed to a more basic HTML page where you click links to various animations and games). The characters and overall “vibe” of the website seemed pretty childish. And then of course, there’s the very first thing you see when you come to the website. (Remember – this was before the current homepage existed. The one where you have the ability to skip the intro.)

http://www.homestarrunner.com/intro.html

EVERYBODY! NOW BLEED A BEETLE! EVERYBODY! LAW DEED WILL BE DULL! 

… Yeah. That’s pretty much all I have to say about that one. I still don’t really get what the point of that intro is, and it’s probably scared off a fair number of people, as it nearly did to me. After seeing that intro, I was fairly sure that the website was basically going to be something along the lines of Alfy, and therefore, not worth my time. But nobody else was home at the time, so I browsed the site a bit and watched a few cartoons. I’ve gotta be honest, some of those early ones didn’t really change my opinion.

But it was a guilty pleasure, so I kept going. And eventually, I learned to love what I was watching. And here I am, over ten years later, still using my Strong Badia stop sign keyring, (slowly) working on a cross-stitch of a scene of all the characters, and writing all this crap for other people to share my love for the series. So let’s close off this introductory post with the “First Time Here?” cartoon.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/firsttime.html

I’ve been thinking of how I wanted to start out this project for a while now, and it seemed only right to begin with that toon. Other than the intro (which I already covered) and the various Main Pages (which … yeah, I’ll get to those eventually), this is the first thing that most people would watch after going to the website. I hadn’t watched the thing in ages, so I wasn’t sure how good of an impression it would leave upon new viewers. And now after watching it again, I must say that it was way funnier than I remember. Apparently, this particular toon wasn’t made until Spring 2002, so it’s not as old as, say, The Reddest Radish. And it shows, because that cartoon was not funny, and this one is.

I’d say that this is a pretty great way to introduce new viewers to Homestar’s character. He’s really, really dumb, but he’s just so likeable. I’ve always liked the dumb characters from cartoons, like Ed (from Ed Edd n’ Eddy) and Patrick (from Spongebob Squarepants), but the main difference with Homestar is that he can easily fill the “main character” role. A show with Patrick in the lead role would be terrible, because he’s kind of worthless on his own. But Homestar’s constant optimism and unique view of the world around him just make for a really great character. This one short cartoon (basically amounting to little more than some “misread lines” bloopers, but admittedly very funny ones) doesn’t really show that, but it works. Fun fact: each time you watch this toon, the outfit (or lack thereof) that Homestar wears during Take 25 will be randomized. There’s four possible outcomes.

And then of course, Strong Bad comes in at the end to tell everybody that he’s really the driving force behind the website. He doesn’t get a lot of screen time here, but you can already tell how big his ego is, and that’s one of his most notable characteristics. Trust me, we’ll be seeing a LOT of Strong Bad from here on out, so if you’re not sure what this guy’s deal is and why he claims to be the “reason you’re here”, it will become apparent eventually.  I wouldn’t call Strong Bad my favorite character on the website, but I can’t imagine anyone else having as much screen time as he does. For those not aware, Strong Bad does have the highest filmography on the website, and could arguably be called the “main character”, though I still like to think that Homestar holds that title. If anything, Strong Bad is the anti-hero. But I guess we’ll get into that later.

So… where do we go from here? It’s tough to say, really, but I’ve got some ideas. It makes the most sense to start from the beginning and work up from there, but as I said before, some of the older cartoons are sort of lame. Super NES and Marshmallow’s Last Stand are not a great place to begin. But I know we’ll be looking at the original book, and then moving into some of the more tolerable old material. I’d say the series really hits its stride around the 2002 era, so at that point, we can take a look back at the Museum and other old stuff before progressing onwards. I’m looking forward to revisiting the series, and I hope that this will be an interesting experience for everyone.

           
Oh, and one last note to the newbies: If you want to take a look around the website on your own, I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. Like Strong Bad said at the end of the Welcome toon, the Strong Bad Emails are definitely worth checking out. If you want to browse through a few of those (don’t worry about doing them in order or anything just yet), go ahead, but be warned that some of them might not make a lot of sense out of context. A Jorb Well Done is a pretty decent cartoon. I wouldn’t say it’s their best, but this intro was made a pretty long time ago, and they didn’t have as many things to suggest. If you want to give it a watch, go ahead, but I’ll be covering it in the near future anyway. Homestar Talker is basically a soundboard, it’s not much of a game at all. It took a few years for the games on this website to actually start resembling real games that a person might want to play. So yeah, can’t say I recommend that as one of the first things you try, because it gives sort of a bad impression. I guess the one other thing I’d recommend would be the character videos. Just click the “characters” link on the bottom of any page on the website, or the button on any of the Main Pages, and check those out to familiarize yourself with the cast. I’ll be covering those soon enough, but if you want to skip ahead a little bit, that’s fine.