Original books and some early toons

Last time on Homestar Rerunner, I took some time to introduce the website’s general concept, how I personally came to learn about it, and then went over the first parts of the website that a typical viewer would come across. If you’ve survived through the weirdness that is the intro animation, then you’re off to a good start.

I’ve said a few times now that we’re going to be jumping around a bit at the beginning, not necessarily viewing everything in the order that it was created. If I wanted to be really strict about that, then I’d be subjecting new viewers to a bunch of weird practice animations and old menus. Not really the most thrilling thing to start out with. But I feel that it does make sense to see where exactly Homestar Runner began – a children’s book. Not one that was ever published, mind you, but still, this is where the concept originated. It’s kinda like how my Bikdip’s Adventure games sort of evolved out of the Bargo the Bikdip stories I helped write, but the difference here is that the original Homestar book isn’t completely terrible. Since this was the origin of the series, and there will be several references to it in later material, it’s definitely worth a look. So without further ado, The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/firstbook.swf

It’s a cute little story, with a “cheaters never prosper” sort of moral to it. None of the characters really have any personality yet, but I don’t fault it for that. At this point, it’s pretty much just “the main character”, “the best friend”, “the villain”, and “the villain’s lackey”, and I wouldn’t expect anything else from it. Plus some supporting cast that may or may not ever be seen again. (Spoilers – they will, but not very often). According to interviews with the Chapman brothers, this story was written in the summer of 1996, photocopied a few times, and handed out to friends. It was a result of boredom and a desire to poke fun at kids’ books, and at the time, there were no plans to go anywhere else with the idea.

POINTLESS SIDE STORY TIME. When I was in elementary school, we had a thing called the Young Authors program, where every student was expected to write a short story and illustrate it. I think we had about a month to work on these. The story I came up with was called “The Penguin Who Couldn’t Swim”, starring Frankor the penguin. I’m not exactly sure what I was ripping off, but the plot was basically that Frankor was the only penguin who didn’t know how to swim, because he was afraid of the water. One day, a baby penguin fell into the ocean, and Frankor dove in to save the baby without hesitation, learning that the water wasn’t that scary after all. The end. Of course, it was a little more padded out than that, but you get the idea. My story was actually voted the best in the class, and I spawned several ill-inspired sequels to it for the following years.

Like I said, this was a pointless little thing I wanted to bring up that doesn’t really have anything to do with the subject, but the two stories share a couple similarities – the weirdest one being that both Frankor and Homestar were given their names due to mishearing something. Frankor was a name I had come up with a while back, due to this picture we had hanging in our bathroom. There were a bunch of penguins waving at one that was drifting away on an ice floe, and one was holding a sign that was blank for some reason. I asked my mom why it was blank, and she said that maybe you were supposed to write what you want on it, like “Goodbye, Frank”, or whatever you wanted to name it. I managed to mishear this as “Goodbye, Frankor”, and the name stuck. As for Homestar Runner, that name apparently came from… well, I’ll just put the quote here. Perhaps it will explain why the name “Lemke” shows up now and then on the website. 

...there was an old local grocery store commercial, and we live in Atlanta, and it advertised the Atlanta Braves. It was like, "the Atlanta Braves hit home runs, and you can hit a home run with savings here!" And so there was this player named Mark Lemke, and they said something like "All star second baseman for the Braves." And our friend knows nothing about sports, and so he would always do his old timey radio impression of this guy, and not knowing any positions in baseball or whatever, he'd just be like, "Homestar Runner for the Braves." And we were just like, "Homestar Runner? That's the best thing we've ever heard!"

UMFM Interview - 20 May 2003

 

There was eventually a second book written, called Where My Hat Is At?, and … well, it’s short, so why not give it a quick look. It’s not as good as the first, mainly because it doesn’t really have much of a purpose, but it’s weird and almost kind of funny in a stupid way. And that pretty much describes a lot of the early Homestar material, so just shut up and read the dang book already.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/wheremyhatisat.swf

Wasn’t that thrilling? I guess it’s worth mentioning that this was the first appearance of Coach Z and Bubs, and since I forgot to mention them earlier, the first book established Pom Pom and The Cheat. We’ll get to see them in non-useless roles soon enough (well, except for maybe Pom Pom, but I digress), so get used to those characters. And the fact that the other characters (Mr. Bland, the Umpire, etc) basically never reappear after this is somewhat of an inside joke, so they’ve got that going for them, I guess. Other than that, the only thing I can really mention about this thing is that it reminds me of a bit from an old U.S. Acres cartoon. The bunny rabbits is coming! … Don’t you mean the bunny rabbits are coming? 

Yeah, I dunno. I think it’s about time to view something more substantial than a kids’ book, though, so let’s take a look at an old toon. Let’s wait a while before we go back to the very first couple things released, since I already subjected you all to Where My Hat Is At?, and the newbies are probably waiting for things to get funny, so instead, I present A Jumping Jack Contest. There’s a reason I chose this one in particular, and it will probably become apparent a couple minutes into the cartoon.

http://www.hrwiki.org/mirror/jumpinjacks2.html

I can’t say this is among the Chapman brothers’ finest work, but it did get a few laughs out of me if only for the sheer stupidity of what was going on. Now, as you probably guessed, I decided to show this one as my example for the old-style cartoons because of its huge similarities to the original book. If you switch Homestar and Pom Pom’s roles, you’ve basically got the exact same story here, but fleshed out a bit more, and with some actual humor and personality thrown in. I guess I should probably address the fact that the animation style is pretty different from the First Time Here? cartoon, and the voices are still sort of being worked on (Strong Bad in particular sounds a lot more Hispanic in the older toons, and Homestar has sort of a Southern drawl that eventually disappears), but it’s just a case of early installment weirdness, which is present in most animated shows. 

Going purely by the material that I’m covering here, and not actual release dates, this is also the first appearance of Strong Bad’s brothers, Strong Sad and Strong Mad. Before anyone asks, no, I have no idea why their “family name” is Strong, or why the family name comes first (rather than Bad Strong, etc), other than the fact that Strong Bad’s name came from Pro Wrestling for the NES, and the other two are just simple variations on it. Strong Mad gave a fairly decent performance in this cartoon. He does gain a bit more personality later on, but you can pretty much expect more of the same for the future. Strong Sad, on the other hand, didn’t make particularly great use of his 10 seconds of screen time. Trust me, this character will improve over time, as will Bubs, who also didn’t do very much here. I’ll get a bit more in-depth a little later on when we go through the character videos. 

Now, this cartoon has a bit of weird history behind it. It was uploaded sometime in 2000, but there’s no record of what month it was made. The intro credits call it a “new” toon, and based on a couple other bits of evidence, I imagine it was released at least halfway through the year, with about three or four toons preceding it. The very first full-length toon, Marshmallow’s Last Stand, was at one point taken out of the Toons menu and relocated to the Museum section of the website after some early site rehauls, mainly because the Brothers Chaps considered it to be lacking in quality and humor. I think it’s interesting in a historical sort of way, but otherwise I agree with them – it’s not something a casual viewer would want to watch. 

At some point in 2002 (I think – it may have been later than this),  Marshmallow’s Last Stand was completely removed from the website, and so was A Jumping Jack Contest. That’s why the link I provided to it is actually hosted on the Homestar Wiki and not the main site. The true reason for these being removed has never been disclosed. I can understand why MLS was taken off, even though it makes certain later toons (I’m looking at you, lady…ing) completely nonsensical because the material those toons are referring to don’t even exist on the website anymore. But A Jumping Jack Contest isn’t all that bad. It’s been suggested that maybe it was taken off because of the peeing scene, but again, the actual reason has never been disclosed. 

I think this is a pretty good place to stop for this entry, but only one cartoon was actually covered today, and another short one couldn’t hurt. Let’s go for the ever-irrelevant Strong Bad Sings. It’s from 2000, but it’s actually really funny, so if you still have a bad taste in your mouth from “A-gooood, now go, and win us thees COMP-OH-TIH-SHUN”, this should be able to repair some of the damage. 

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

Does anything even need to be said about this? Everyone’s seen commercials like this, and I think this parody captures their essence spot-on, while making it infinitely funnier with Strong Bad’s terrible singing and deliberately insulting lyrics. How can anyone not love “You’ve Got an Ugly and Stupid Butt”? But it’s not just the songs that I find funny here. There’s a lot of fake commercials in the Homestar body of work, and I think they’re among the funniest material on the website. As far as I’m concerned, the bit about it being available on thirty 8-track tapes and the ludicrous bait-and-switch with the pricing is pure genius. I’ve been saying that the older cartoons aren’t as funny as the newer ones, and this is the exception that proves the rule. 



Trivia Time: originally, the phone number at the end of the toon was 1800-BAD-SONG, which was apparently a real number that would call a limousine service in New York, and it was changed because they kept getting calls from Homestar fans. I’m not going to bother listing any of the other trivia for this one, even though there are a few other things that could be said about it, so if you want to see more, check out its page on the Wiki. The reason I’m mentioning the BAD SONG thing and nothing else is because I actually knew that happened without having to read the wiki entry. That’s probably how I’ll judge if something is worth mentioning or not. 

Next time, I think we’ll be checking out the toons that got the “DVD” treatment. Not sure what I mean by that? Then stick around and you’ll find out. I think it’s also as good a time as any to make some brief comments on the original set of main pages. It shouldn’t take very long, because there’s not much to say about them, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.