Strong Bad: Everybody loves him

No point in building this one up at all, it’s time to review a bunch of SBEmails. I don’t have a specific amount planned, just enough to fill roughly three pages in my Word document, hopefully ending on a high note. Ready? Go. This is brianrietta.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail8.html

Eh, this one’s so-so. I’d point out how “awkward” it is to have Strong Bad acknowledging gayness, or how “mature” he handled the situation, but really, I don’t give a crap, and neither should you. The humor of this one isn’t the fact that Brian is gay (or is pretending to be), and Strong Bad rejects his invitation, it’s just the fact that he was so slow on the uptake. It’s good that Strong Bad didn’t make any sort of homophobic comments, but I wouldn’t expect him to. The website is, for the most part, clean and non-bigoted, so this isn’t a surprise. I’m sure there’s a few people out there who have issues with this email, but they probably also have issues with Ernie and Bert sharing the same bed, and are just looking for reasons to make noise. I don’t think this one really stands out in any major way.

However, it would be wrong of me to not mention that this was the start of a new trend in emails. Instead of the old format where Strong Bad’s head was off the side and you could see his mouth move in the reflection, this begins the style where his head kinda waggles all over the place and you don’t see the mouth. This was allegedly done to minimize animating the lip-sync, but it ended up taking way longer to animate, and it looks kinda silly after watching it for a long time. Not sure why they never switched back. Ah well. Anyway, let’s move along and check out i love you. No, it’s not the same exact thing but with a girl this time.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail9.html

This one’s short, but a classic. Fhqwhgads will be seen several times in the future, including a certain music video that may or may not be incredibly catchy, but for right now, let’s just focus on this email, and not what spawned from it later on. I think it’s pretty funny in a hard-to-explain sort of way. Mainly it’s just the fact that Strong Bad doesn’t entirely reject the email as a meaningless piece of garbage. He actually interprets it as a love note from someone with a really freaking long and unpronounceable name, and comes up with an awesomely blunt and accurate response to it. I’m not sure where the idea of painting a guy with a big knife came from, but it was indeed a better use of his time. And that too will show up a few times in the future. Man, this site loves in-jokes.

I guess I’ll address a debate of sorts regarding this email. Some people seem to think that this email was actually a virus, often known as the “i love you” virus, which infected a lot of computers back in 2000. This is most likely false, because I can’t seem to find any proof that the virus would contain random gibberish like fhqwhgads, and this was released two years after that particular virus had gone around. Also, as some people have pointed out, the “name” has a lot of letters grouped together in the same area of a keyboard, so it was most likely just made by some bored person mashing keys. Well, whoever you are, good job starting a nice little running joke. However, I think that trevor the vampire’s email is equally as baffling, and significantly funnier. Let’s take a look.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail10.html

I love this one. A lot of these early episodes focus on “troll” emails (though I hesitate to call them that, because that term is grossly overused and often misused), with the previous two being good examples of that. I think this one is the best of the bunch though. “Baffling” really is the best way to describe it, though I see no reason to believe that the email was actually sent with the ending accidentally cut short. None of the previous emails had the sender’s name and location in part of the main message (as opposed to a standard conclusion), and it seems fishy that this one would happen to do that and just so happen to be cut short mid-sentence. But hey, intentional or not, I still think it’s hilarious, and

http://www.homestarrunner.com/answer6.html

Oh, hey, it’s one of these. Yeah, just because there’s a lot of SBEmails, that doesn’t mean there can’t be other stuff mixed in with them, and I’m going by release date for the order here, so sure, let’s check this one out. It’s not one of the stronger Answering Machines, in my opinion, but it’s not terrible or anything. It’s just not as good as some of the previous ones, I think.

So we start off with Strong Bad’s obligatory prank call, which was kind of … meh. It wasn’t particularly clever or funny, so let’s just move on. Next is the King of Town’s call, which is self-aware, at the very least. Again, I don’t know if I’d consider it funny, but as I’ve mentioned a while back, the best thing about the King is that he’s kind of a useless character, and everyone seems to be aware of this. And now he’s become self-aware of the fact and trying to find ways to improve this. Then we have a call from Kevin, which oddly enough, is probably the highlight of this entire thing. If you’re wondering who Kevin is, well, he’s Craig Zobel. Who’s that? It’s one of Matt and Mike’s friends. Why is he calling Marzipan? I have no freaking idea.

Let’s just ignore that, and move on to Strong Bad’s second message, which is at least somewhat better than his previous one. As I mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of Strong Bad trying to act like he’s a ladies’ man, but this attempt was tolerable, mainly because he did a really bad job of it. And I’m not entirely sure why he’s calling Marzipan about this in the first place. It’s not like he has anything to benefit from getting her to think he actually does have a girlfriend (unless it’s done to make her jealous, and he’s never been shown to have an interest in her, so probably not). Oh well, it at least makes for a decent lead into Homestar’s call, which is pretty funny. I don’t have anything in particular to say about it; it’s Homestar up to his usual cluelessness, which is always enjoyable. I kinda wish the other calls were as good as his, but oh well, they can’t all be winners. Time for more SBEmails – the next one is called i rule.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail11.html

Oh man, this is a really, really short one. And not all that funny, either, but it does introduce us to Strong Badia, which is a location we will see many, many times in the future. I guess it had to be established at some point. And I’ve never really given it that much thought, but it does fit Strong Bad’s personality perfectly to have a little area like this that he can consider his “domain”. It may not be much to look at, but it makes for a decent little hangout spot. And who never had a little area that they claimed as their own (or would have liked to, at the very least) while growing up? Strong Bad does have a tendency to act like an overgrown kid quite often, so it makes perfect sense that he’d claim ownership of some random plot of land somewhere. But here I am overthinking things again. Is the next email any better? *Checks list* Ah, credit card. It’s not too bad, I s’pose.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail12.html

This one’s got a decent enough concept behind it. It could have ended by just having Strong Bad taunt the people who sent the email by being all like “oh sure, like I’d really fall for that one, guys,” and then basically leave it at that, but nope, he goes the extra step to send the email to someone who legitimately does fall for it. I must say, the Tandy has some pretty advanced features for a terrible old monochrome, command-prompt-based computer. Not only can it load websites, but it can do so without you typing in a url, it displays a mouse cursor, and it knew exactly who to forward the email to without actually typing in their address.

I do have to also point out that “The Coolest Stuff Ever” used to be an old fan site back in the day, which is worth taking a peek at. You can find an archive of it here. The best part of this is definitely the “bag of money” that you could buy. For some reason, when I was a kid, I was convinced that there were stores where you could buy a bag of money that cost less money than the bag actually contained. I’m not sure where this thought came from, but it totally needs to be a thing that exists. And for those who have played my game, Bikdip’s Adventure 2, you may remember the part where you can buy 50 Rupees for 49 Rupees. That was indeed a reference to this old idea of mine. Anyways, the next email on our list is kind of a hybrid of two others that I just reviewed. So take a minute to watch i she be and see if can you guess which two I’m thinking of.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail13.html

This one’s totally just a combination of i love you and credit card. We’ve got the terrible, meaningless love letter from someone who probably shouldn’t even be allowed to operate a computer, and then once again, Strong Bad forwards the email to someone who could make better use of it. And then in a way, The Cheat sort of does the same thing by putting Strong Mad into a weird situation at the end. It’s kind of a weird reoccurring trend in these past two emails, and you could kind of count depressio in that number too.

And no, I’m not complaining about this, it’s just an observation. I think this one was pretty funny, even though the material wasn’t really anything we hadn’t seen before, it was still done well enough, and I like the little AIM scene at the end. Ok, just one more for today, and while it’s not as funny as trevor the vampire, it’s quite good in its own way. So let’s finish out with duck pond.

http://www.hrwiki.org/mirror/20020217_sbemail14.html

Now, the url on that one was different for a reason, and I’ll get to that in a minute. As for the email itself here, I’m not sure what to say. The whole thing is rather random. I’m not sure why Ron Kiwi would ask Strong Bad about this, or what sort of funny response he was hoping for. What he did get was Strong Bad having an odd little moment of tranquility, just enjoying feeding the green blocky ducks on his screen. With a simulator that he just happened to have.

The meat of this one, of course, is the fact that you can actually play the Duck Pond game by clicking The Paper at the end. Not that there’s much to it, but Strong Bad has a point. It is oddly relaxing to watch the ducks dart around the screen and eat the little squares you throw at them. Not enough to want to play it for longer than a couple minutes, but that’s all you need. Because once one of the ducks eats 10 pieces of bread, you unlock the Atari 2600 version of the game. And this is why I had to give a different url to this email – for some reason that I can’t find any information on, the second version of the game is no longer playable on the actual website. Instead, it just shows it for a few seconds and then the email loops back to the beginning.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but the Atari version actually has a few Easter eggs in it. First, press “8”. Then press “A”, a few times if you like. And then lastly, press “Y”. I’m not going to say what these buttons do, because I’d rather have it be a surprise. But yeah, I don’t get why they’d bother to code in these extra little things that very few people would ever discover, only to remove the playable version of the game later on. I didn’t even realize that it was ever taken off until I went back to play it again just now. Weird.

Alright, folks, that’s it for today. Next time, there’s actually a couple non-SBEmail toons (and no, they’re not Answering Machines either). And tomorrow, I might actually start the blog that you’re currently reading. Yes, I really have written this far in advance without posting any of them anywhere. I’m currently on page 40 of my Word Document, and apparently this is the 10th article. So I guess it’s about time that I stop being lazy and actually like, do something with all this material that I’ve written. So, see you next time! Literally. Kind of.