Here be dragons (and blue hair)

I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for a pretty long time. I actually got the inspiration for this blog from a Nostalgia Chick review that listed Trogdor in the #1 spot for “Top ten viral videos before Youtube”. In the video, she talks about how Strong Bad Emails weren’t really her thing, but it was impossible to be around on the internet in 2003 without knowing about Trogdor. I’m sure there’s tons of people who have seen that particular email, and maybe even a few who bought the Trogdor shirt, and yet have not watched anything else on the website, or at least not very much of it. And that’s what got me thinking that hey, maybe I can expose a new generation to Homestar Runner. If Trogdor can go viral, then why can’t some of the other aspects of the site be appreciated by a wider audience?  Now obviously this blog hasn’t reached anything approaching a “wide” audience, but still, I can try. I’m getting ahead of myself though. 2003 started off not with Trogdor, but with another character that has a pretty sizable fanbase. So let’s begin today with japanese cartoon.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail57.html

This was an amazing way to kick off the year. There’s a lot of say about this email, but first let me attempt to do what I did for comic and try to review this as a standalone product, disregarding things that will come from it later on.

The main body of this toon is the scene of Strong Bad explaining the design changes of what he’d look like as a Japanese cartoon. It’s kind of similar to action figure in a way, but it goes through a step-by-step process instead of just beginning with the finished product. Much like a certain other email that I’ll be talking about shortly, now that I think about it. Now, not being much of an anime fan myself, I can’t really say for sure what Strong Bad was going for with the style he’s emulating here. It seems to be pretty similar to Astro Boy, and there’s definitely some Mega Man influence in there too (though I’m probably just saying that because of the game that got released several years later… and Mega Man isn’t a Japanese cartoon anyway, so yeah). Personally when I think of stereotypical anime, I think either Voltron or Dragon Ball Z, and this doesn’t really fit into either of those (maybe the robot boots are Voltron-ish, but that’s about it). But I do like the design they settled with.

After that scene, we get to see a short glimpse of what the show would look and sound like, and this is where the name “Stinkoman” gets inexplicably connected to the new character. According to the DVD commentary (how many sentences have I started with that line?), the line that 1-Up (20X6 Homestar) says was just a reference to the island email, and that wasn’t really supposed to be his name, but they ended up liking it and it stuck. By the way, I do have to mention here that 1-Up is one of my favorite characters on the site, at least from a design standpoint. He’s just fun to draw, and every time he shows up (which isn’t really that often), he’s entertaining to watch. I guess I’m kind of breaking away from my “no talking about future events” rule, so lemme try to get back on track. I’ve got quite a few other things to mention about this email, so I’ll break out the ol’ bullet points. Many of which are listed on the Wiki as fun facts, but these are actually somewhat interesting, so I have no problem repeating them.

• The beginning of the email is a haiku (“So cool an email, I thought you would enjoy it. Ding dong Dear Strong Bad…”), and also refers to an old email virus that said “so cool a flash, enjoy it”. This was also referred to in weird dream.
• The background music used in this email is actually from the NES game Rad Racer. Eventually Stinkoman gets a different, completely original theme song.
• Again, according to the DVD commentary, the little spaceship that shows up in one of the scenes (you can see it in the first screenshot I posted) was supposed to be The Cheat. This is apparently a reference to an anime called Tenchi Muyo, where a cat could transform into a giant spaceship. I’m just quoting the Wiki here, don’t ask me.
• 1-Up says “I wanna be the guy” in this, which many people cite as the inspiration for the game of the same name (or at least the name of it). It’s been stated by Kayin (the creator of the game) that it was not a direct reference to that, but it may have been an unconscious one. Stinkoman’s response (“no way, you’re just a kid! Don’t make me laugh!”) is really similar to a line from Tengu Man in Mega Man 8, and is apparently also from Akira.
• The fake credits that play during the “challenge and fighting” song are lifted directly from the original Legend of Zelda. This and the Rad Racer music are probably what inspired the “NES endings” Easter egg at the end. If you didn’t catch that one, there’s actually some text that you can click twice and it will lead to two different things.

Will the future hold great things for Stinkoman and his series? Yes, but not as much as you might think. First off, there’s Main Page 17, which was released a few days after this email. It pretty much speaks for itself, I think, but I do have to draw attention to the highly Sailor Moon-esque design for Marzipan shown here (and never again). Other than that, there’s a couple short toons and cameos here and there, but unfortunately, a full series of 20X6-themed toons never happens. It would have been a nice counterpart to the 1936 toons (and a certain G.I. Joe-inspired series we’ll get to eventually), but alas. Instead, Stinkoman actually gets his own game, which is actually pretty awesome. It’ll be a couple years before that happens though, so I won’t get into any of that quite yet.
 
If japanese cartoon had been followed by a run-of-the-mill email that didn’t have anything outstanding about it, I think it probably would have been a lot more popular and impactful than it already is. This is saying something, because if I had to compare it to practically any other email on the site, it stands leagues above the rest in terms of … well, popularity and impactful-ness (setting the stage for a new subseries). So far out of all the emails we’ve watched, I’d say that only homsar and comic come close to it (comic probably surpasses it, actually, but who’s measuring). But it was not followed by a forgettable email. It was followed by dragon.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html

Let’s try this the same way: S, more different S reviewing the email as a stand-alone thing. I think this’ll probably last about eleven seconds, because everyone and their dog has seen this email. So once again, we have Strong Bad showing the design process of a new character, except this is starting from scratch, not altering an existing thing. After a failed first attempt, we end up with a pretty funny-looking dragon with one beefy arm, which he gives a silly name. We then get to see some of the other characters and their attempts. I like Coach Z’s crappy little wormdingler. It’s no worse than the S is for sucks dragon. Well ok, maybe a little bit worse, but it’s still awesome. Strong Mad and Homsar (in an Easter egg) are kinda doing their own little thing, and then of course Strong Sad ruins things by having an actual good drawing, which Strong Bad promptly destroys. Ok, so maybe that was more of a summary than an actual review, but I don’t have much to say about the email itself. It’s good. I don’t know if it’s my favorite (I don’t think I have an actual favorite email), but it’s still really good, the jokes are funny, the concept works out, and then there’s a heavy metal song that comes absolutely the crap out of nowhere which pretty much everybody loves. So now here’s where I get to analyze some things.

Why exactly did this email get so popular? It’s definitely funny, but so are a lot of other emails. So are a lot of other non-email toons on the website. But if you weren’t around for the Trogdor popularity boom of 2003, you wouldn’t understand. Everybody knew what Trogdor was, and could probably quote the whole email. I knew someone who had recorded the audio of it and played it to people at school just to show them how awesome it was, which is kind of stupid, since you have to see the drawings to really understand the humor of it. I also had someone approach me and ask if I had seen the Trogdor cartoon before. He said it was about some weird wrestler guy named Superbad or something who draws a dragon and then there’s a song at the end, and … well, you just have to watch it, it’s awesome. A Trogdor T-shirt made its way into the website’s store, and quickly became the #1 top-selling item. Trogdor got mentioned in the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The song got put into Guitar Hero 2. Seriously, what the crap happened? Well… here’s my take on it.

School can be boring sometimes. This is an established fact. Everybody likes to doodle stuff on their papers when they’re bored. So here’s the situation: one fateful Tuesday in January 2003, you remember that new Strong Bad Email you watched the day before. You start to draw Trogdor on your math paper, or whatever. It’s pretty easy, since Strong Bad teaches you all the steps. Suddenly, the kid sitting next to you looks over at your paper and sees it, and asks what’s up with the weird looking dragon. Why does it have a big muscular arm coming out of the back of its neck? You tell them about the email, and give them the website name, or maybe wait until you get home, and then you can send it in an email or instant message.

So now your friend watches the dragon email, and thinks it’s the funniest thing ever. Remember, this was before Youtube, so most of the visual entertainment on the internet was Flash cartoons. So now this friend passes on the link to some other people. All of a sudden, you’ve got a ton of people who know what Trogdor is, but not really who Strong Bad is. Or Homestar, for that matter. Homestar might as well not even exist. Some of them will check out other parts of the website, of course, but many never move beyond this first thing. They’ll scream out “TROGDORRRR!!!!” at random, quote the email (messing up the words “consummate”, “chiaroscuro”, and “thatched-roof”, of course), and all of a sudden, a plague upon society has been released.

Am I wrong? Obviously not every instance of someone hearing about Trogdor happened in this fashion, but I have a feeling that a good portion of them did. Now, this doesn’t mean that the email is bad, or that fans who started with Trogdor aren’t true fans, or anything of that sort, but it’s just weird how everything kind of exploded out of this one email. I really wonder how popular it would have gotten if not for the random song at the end. It’s funny, because that was actually a last-minute addition to the email that they decided to put in. It was supposed to just end at the Strong Sad scene, but when they were putting in the finishing touches, Matt randomly started singing the Trogdor song in the crazy high-pitched voice, and then there was no way to NOT include that.

Alright, so now that I’ve written a nearly-full-length post about two emails and absolutely nothing else, I’d like to actually jump ahead three years to January 13, 2006, when a toon called Happy Trogday was released. I can’t think of a better way to end this post than to show just how insane some fans went.

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

Good. Gravy. There’s really not much I can say about this other than … wow, people really loved Trogdor. This one’ll definitely take multiple viewings to really process all the images in the montage. You’ve got kids’ drawings, photoshops, some 3D models, dolls, and even some stupid crap like a fish stick shaped like Trogdor that was probably sold on eBay or something.

The ending of this is pretty awesome. I’m glad that they mentioned Stinkoman being overshadowed by Trogdor (and the fact that the emails came out back-to-back), but of course, even that moment itself gets overshadowed by Trogdor. Or actually, Trogador, the 20X6 version. This was a character that was first shown off at a convention, and it was stated that it would probably never end up on the actual site. But then this happened. It was a pretty cool moment for die-hard fans of the site (like myself) who knew of Trogador’s existence from the Wiki but never expected to see it show up like this.

Alright, well I may not have covered a lot of material in this post, but these two emails are a really tough act to follow. Next time things will cool down and go back to normal, which is actually kind of disappointing. I like it when I’m able to analyze stuff like this and really say a lot about something, instead of going for the more rapid-fire approach that I usually take. But I’m only a third of the way through the site’s archive, at best, and I don’t have twenty paragraphs to say about every single email, so … yeah. I’m happy with how this post came out, and I hope to see some good comments on this one. Feel free to share your own experiences with Trogdor and the way he suddenly exploded into the mainstream media.