The Cheat gets some attention. And Strong Bad is not funny.

In this, my 11th article and the first one being posted after the blog was actually created, I will be looking at … nothing. Sorry everyone, I decided there’s too much to review, and I’ve just given up.

Yeah, not really. Today is a cheatday of sorts, because I’ll be starting out with a couple of The Cheat-related toons, beginning with The Cheat Theme Song. Let’s give it a look before I say anything further.

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

Remember Main Page 15? Yeah, this is where that originally came from, and it’s not the last you’ll be seeing of it either. This particular animation style is called “Powered By The Cheat”. For some reason or another, it ends up getting its own category on the Toons page and everything, even though some other types of toons don’t get that special treatment. I’m not sure why this is, but my guess is that some people have expressed dislike for it in the past because of the extremely crude animation, and they try to keep it isolated from the other stuff. Personally though, I think it’s pretty funny. I can appreciate intentionally stupid things, and this falls into that category. But enough about the animation style, there’s other things to talk about here.

As stated at the end of the toon, this song was not made by the usual duo. It was written and performed by “The Skate Party”, a two-man band from Tennessee. After reading over the wiki page (and the transcript for the DVD commentary), I have now become aware that they actually just made the song as a fan submission, and then Mike animated the video to go along with it so that the song could be shared with the fanbase. I guess this makes more sense than them randomly commissioning some amateur band, but I always assumed it was just some people they knew previously. But nope.

As for the song, I agree with Strong Bad that it is pretty catchy, and I like the really dumb lyrics like “Who’s the man who looks like The Cheat? The Cheat.” Speaking of which, The Cheat does NOT look like Pikachu. But yeah, the song is good, the visuals are pretty funny, the ending was brief but got the point across (it had to establish that The Cheat animated the video), and overall, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. Nor do I have anything bad to say about the next one, either. Settle in for the longest toon so far (it’s about six minutes long) – Where’s The Cheat?

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

This toon is freaking amazing. I find it hard to believe that anyone would disagree with that, but still, I can’t let this one go without making a buncha comments on it. So… time to do just that.
 

• This is the first toon to feature all 12 main characters. I considered showing this one off in one of the first articles, because it could potentially be a great way to hook new viewers, but I decided against it because it does help to establish some of their personalities before being thrust into this toon. It also features Homsar, who I did my best to avoid early on.
• The first line of the toon makes me laugh no matter how many times I hear it. “Hey stupid, I brought you this stuff!” I should totally say that to my wife one day and see how it goes.
• I recently went to a hamburger place called “Five Guys” with a bunch of little notecards on the wall that people drew on, featuring various cartoon/game characters, internet memes, etc, except they all somehow related to the burger place. So I drew one of Homestar telling Marzipan to “put that fweakin’ Five Guys sandwich down”. Pointless fact, but yeah.
• Strong Bad’s prank call was a work of art. I just love how he’s calling for a legitimate reason and then decides, on the fly, to turn it into a prank. Involving Pom Pom’s death, for some reason.
• The Cheat and I play Jenga on Tuesdays. Tonight is my night to play Caaaaaaaaardinal Sins.
• “The Stick” is a great and well-defined place for people to meet. The previous sentence was both a factual statement and a sarcastic one. Take that as you will.
• Homsar has shown up again, and this time, not as an Easter egg. Since I saw this cartoon quite a while before ever seeing the homsar email, I never was quite sure what his deal was, but I figured it was just some random character that they invented on the fly and would never use again. I do like how Strong Sad tolerates his company though. Bubs apparently does not. (Though he does make a Where My Hat Is At reference)
• The ending raises more questions than it answers. Ok, so we found the Cheat, but why does he live in the grill? And if this was previously known, then yeah, I agree with Coach Z, why didn’t they look there first? I would have liked to hear Strong Bad’s explanation on that one. But I guess it’s funnier to just not know.
• Only certain children get prizes.

Well, now that Homsar’s made another appearance, I think it’s about time to finally address his position as the final main character. And yes, that is an official title, because he actually has his own character video. Remember the page with the VCR and stack of tapes? Well, it’s easy to miss if you’re not used to looking for secrets, but if you press the eject button, the Homsar tape will appear and you can click on it. As with the other main characters, I won’t review the video itself, but I will link to it here and give my thoughts on the character as a whole.

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

Homsar

When I was younger, Homsar was my favorite character, because I was totally into random humor at the time, and he is basically the embodiment of that concept. There are very few times when Homsar will say anything relevant to the current situation (the major exceptions being in his first few appearances). So basically, he’s a very quotable character, but not one that you would want to be the center focus of a cartoon.

Homsar is disliked by the majority of the main cast, with only Strong Sad and Marzipan tolerating him (and occasionally getting on even their nerves at times). He shows up in Easter eggs pretty often; I’m tempted to say more often than not, but I haven’t double-checked this. Of course, as I’ve established before, the character was born out of a spelling error. And so in many ways, Homsar is an outcast, both in terms of his relationships with others in the cast, and just as a character on the website as a whole. I’ve always felt that he is sort of “the bonus character”, and his place on the VCR menu supports this.

And just for the sake of completion, I suppose I should now include Homsar in my list of characters from favorite to least, which I posted in an earlier article. Rating these characters is difficult because most of them are enjoyable in very different ways, but I suppose if I had to come to a conclusion, I’d put Homsar between Bubs and The Cheat, in rank #6. No, I’m not going to repost the list, deal with it.

Alright, so now with that little distraction, it’s time to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, aka, a crapton of SBEmails. Let’s see how many more I can get through in my little unofficial length limit. Our next one is #15, the basics.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail15.html

Much later on, Strong Bad claims that this is his favorite email, and I can only imagine that he’s being sarcastic, because this is actually one of the least funny ones ever. It’s not completely void of humor, but it’s still pretty weak. I guess the humor of this one just comes from the fact that these pranks or whatever you’d call them are really lame. And usually I find dry humor to be funny, but the only part of this I found amusing was the “not like… organs” bit at the end. Also, because I’m obligated to point it out whenever it happens, TJ needs to learn how apostrophes work. Well anyway, next up we have band names.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail16.html

I’m the only person I know who doesn’t listen to music (like, at all), so a lot of these jokes are probably going to be lost on me, but overall, I wouldn’t say this is a bad email. Not by the standards of these old ones, at least. Now, as fans of the site are most likely aware, this was the origin of Limozeen and Taranchula (or the names for them, at least), which turn out to be actual bands in the Homestar universe. Though the funky thing is that Limozeen’s little sample from this email does not reflect their later style of music at all. Personally, I think the best part of this email was the name “invisible robot fish”, but that’s just me. Alright, two down, let’s see if I can do two more. Here’s studying.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail17.html

Ehh, I can’t call this one horrible, but it’s too similar to making out in my mind to really stand out. And since that email wasn’t funny, I usually think of this one as being pretty lame too. Now that I’ve actually gone back and watched it again, it wasn’t so bad. The ending was funny (be sure to wait a few seconds until Strong Bad comes back, the email doesn’t end when he leaves), and the Easter egg is pretty great too.

If you didn’t catch that, just click the orange text when it appears, or the area it used to occupy once he clears it off the screen. I don’t have anything profound to say about it, but I’ve had more experience than necessary with comments from stupid internet people (not on this blog, mind you, please go ahead and leave comments here) to appreciate a nice parody. Alright, I think one more will be good for today, so let’s end on a high note with stand-up.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail18.html

The last couple emails weren’t too bad (way better than the basics, at least), but this one is by far the best of the bunch. The humor sort of speaks for itself here – there’s not really any point in saying “it’s funny because his jokes were really lame and then his pants fell down”, so I’m going to focus on some other stuff. Like Coach Z’s giant afro. Somehow I’m not surprised that he looked like that when he was younger. And Strong Sad’s VCR is probably from the same era as Coach Z’s hair. That thing is freaking ancient looking.

Even though I do like this email, there’s not really much else I can think to say about it that isn’t just stating the obvious. I could go into some huge analysis about why Strong Sad would have that tape, and if he plans to use it for blackmail at some point, but that would not only be a huge stretch, but a completely pointless one. Strong Bad provides evidence for his own ineptitude all the time, there’s no need for a recording of it. I’m glad it was kept around, though. But anyway, I think that’s enough for now. Next time I’ll see if I can burn through another ten or so of these old emails. Hopefully I’ll have more than a paragraph to say about some of them.