Some attention for the new spinoffs. Oh, and Homestar too.

What do you do when you’re trying to introduce a bunch of stuff that has no common theme? You can either find some tenuous way of linking them together, or you can just not bother at all. I choose the latter. Teen Girl Squad Issue #2, yo.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs2.html

Is it sad that I was able to quote this entire thing from memory? Ok, let me rephrase that. I could quote this entire thing from memory, isn’t that sad? I’m not even sure why this one is so memorable to me. I remember when it first came out, I was pleasantly surprised to see another TGS, since I figured the first one was just its own little one-off thing. This one’s a step up from the original, in my eyes, because it doesn’t focus solely on killing off the girls in random ways. It just has them get hurt in random ways, and clearly that’s a huge improvement. Nah, I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, I just found this one a lot funnier.

Highlights of this issue: Pretty much everything, really. The “she got hurt” / “Thomas hit her with a bat” contradiction is one of my favorites, but so is the “SWOOP! GRASPED!” thing. …And “you must be girls.” And what’s up with Cheerleader and The Ugly One saying that they got jealous when clearly they were just stolen away by a vulture and a bat? It’s that kind of nonsense that I like best about Teen Girl Squad, more so than the violent and unexpected deaths. Those can be really funny sometimes (the “CHILDREN!” thing from this issue was amazing), but I’ve never considered them the highlight of the series. But by now I’ve already parroted every funny quote from this toon without saying anything interesting about it, so let’s move on. And speaking of unexpected deaths… fingers.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail63.html

I will always remember this email as “the one where Strong Sad appears as a dead body three times for no particular reason”. That completely overshadows the whole fake fingers thing for me, because it kind of disturbed me ever since I first learned about it. Back in the day before I knew about Easter eggs, I never noticed his head on the ground in the “rocking out” scene, and you had to actively look for the other two appearances. But one day I found a website that listed all the Easter eggs (I think it was the-coolest-stuff-ever.com), and when I rewatched this one, it just felt really unsettling to me. Strong Sad wasn’t even my favorite character at the time, but the idea of Strong Bad imagining (wishing, more accurately) that he’s dead just bothered me a lot. I’ll try not to take it too seriously, but like I said, that’s the first thing I remember when I think about this email.

Going back to the main subject though, I must say this is a pretty clever way of dealing with the ever-present boxing gloves emails. I was fine with them just remaining as a running gag, but I feel like this is kind of the logical conclusion to it. There’ll still be references to it later on, but this is the email that put the final nail in the coffin for the most part. Ok, maybe I shouldn’t have used that metaphor with all the dead Strong Sads around.

Now I wouldn’t feel right if I finished talking about this email without pointing out some useless trivia first, so take a seat on my knee and allow me to share my knowledge. First off, there’s the email at the beginning that says “Yo Strongbad. What’s crackin?”. In a certain future email that I won’t completely spoil right now (but people familiar with the site should remember), the word “crackin” is taken and used for … um, things. Except it was never actually said out loud in this email, which is kind of weird, and the only reason I’m pointing it out. On a much less obscure and hard-to-not-spoil note, Homestar’s foam finger turns into a baseball glove during the fadeout. And also, the “Moving Very Slowly” song was different in the original version of this email. It used to have no lyrics, but then the song was actually expanded upon for the Strong Bad Sings CD, so they went back and added it in.

Between fingers and the next email, english paper, there was a funky little thing added to the main page called Super Brave!!, which is about as important to the site’s history as Happy T! was, but hey, I might as well point it out at least briefly. It’s basically just a glorified “Weekly Fanstuff” from before that became a thing, where some kids from Japan show off their drawings of Homestar. No other context is given. But now that I’ve brought it up, I’ve actually been wondering how I should handle the Weekly Fanstuff, Sketchbook, and unique Quote of the Day updates. They don’t really start until 2004, and the majority of them are probably not worth talking about at any length, but should I like, compile them all into one post, add them at the end of normal posts, or just ignore them entirely? Feedback would be appreciated. But yeah, next up is english paper.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html

For such a visually uninteresting email, I actually find this to be one of the most memorable. It’s definitely one of those toons you’ll have to watch more than once (like little questions), due to the conflicting text and dialogue. I do like the Englilsh paper itself quite a bit, and have made a couple references to it in real-life situations throughout the years (such as adding a picture of someone eating a battery to a paper I did once). It’s not quite as good as "Planes, Trains, And Plantains", but to be fair, not many things are. And yes, Google that if you haven’t heard of it before. You’ll thank me later. Rumor has it that Kyle Smith actually did turn in this paper along with a real one, but there doesn’t seem to be any proof of this or any sort of word on what the teacher had to say about it. I do know that one of my friends turned it in to my English teacher in 8th grade though. She was pretty much like “yeah, ok, I don’t get it”.

Arguably more interesting than the paper itself is the little side story of Homestar putting Strong Bad’s breakfast burrito onto an online auction. Clicking “The Cheat’s allowance” in the paper at the end of the email will lead you to a fake auction page, which is funny in its own right, but there was apparently another version of this that actually took place on eBay. Rather than copy and paste the whole description of it from the wiki, I suggest you just go to the page itself and read it there if you’re interested. There doesn’t seem to be an existing archive of it, unfortunately. So once you're done looking that stuff up, we can check out unused emails.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail65.html

The best part of this one is unquestionably the samples of bad emails that show up in Easter eggs. In addition to the four that you can see by clicking on the various stacks, there’s also some extra ones that you can see if you open the flash file and zoom in on the image. (Or you can just look at the wiki page, that works too). The one from clicking the “short” stack is a true work of art, and I’ve always been a fan of “do you enloy reasing?” for some reason. I’ve actually asked that to a few people in real life and gotten some very confused reactions.

Bubs’s spamvertisement is pretty great too. It seems to be a nice blend of genuine spam and pointless chain letters (email this to 50 people or else a heron will fly into your kitchen and make a mess of your pots and pans!). Plus it has a picture of a tape dispenser, which you can change to a couple other equally pointless pictures. But moving on from email gags, I suppose the highlight of this would have to be Strong Bad body slamming the computer desk for no reason whatsoever other than to be dramatic, and breaking his clavicus majorus in the process. Which, by the way, was actually a line from the unfinished toon Tis True, Pom Pom, Tis True. It was weird when I first watched that and thought they just reused the line, but then I realized that it was never planned to be released, so they probably just pulled the joke from it rather than let it go to waste.

One final pointless thing for me to share about this one: When I was in junior high, I designed a bunch of cards with Homestar characters on them, and planned on sticking them in random lockers throughout the school to basically advertise the site. Each card had a quote from the character on the back, and the one I chose for Strong Mad was “THIS ONE’S NOT THE CRANE! THIS ONE IS THE CRANE!!!”. Clearly I had picked that from memory and did not do any kind of fact-checking, because Strong Mad says nothing of the sort in this toon. Completely pointless, I know, but I just felt like sharing my own ineptitude. Let’s go check out what Homestar’s been up to in the show.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail66.html

I kind of wish The Show would have become a recurring feature, honestly. It would have probably gotten a bit played out after a few episodes, but it would have been funny at least for a little while. It’s just such a bizarre blend of talk shows and game shows, and it raises even more questions than Strong Bad’s email “show”. Where did the set come from? What studio is hosting this, and who is their intended audience? If the contestants have no idea what’s going on, then how did they even get there? It’s just a bunch of garglemesh that all adds up to a funny, yet surreal, result. Definitely funnier than the whole kicking The Cheat into Strong Sad b/w chicken pox gambit.

Tori and her friends from the volleyball tounament do raise a good point though. While Homestar does show up more frequently than most other characters, he used to be the star of the show, and not just the star of The Show. (lol c wut i did thar) This is nothing new, I’ve mentioned this plenty of times in the past (and it’s kind of obvious anyway), but I do have to wonder why he got pushed to the sidelines in the first place. I guess Strong Bad just has more staying power, and it’s probably easier to write “mean” humor than “dumb” humor. Don’t get me wrong, dumb humor can be very easy to write, but it’s also easier to go wrong and be unfunny. Homestar’s random list at the end is, in my opinion at least, a great example of dumb humor done well. It’s not just like HEY SPONGEBOB STRONG BAD I DROPPED YOUR TOOTHBRUSH IN THE TOILET, it’s more like… well, witch’s brew.

Oh right, and there was a Marshie commercial in this too. Some good lines came out of that, like the “shiver with flavor, SHIVER WITH FLAVOR” thing, and of course “first one to eat a million, wins”, but if you hated Marshie’s first appearance, you’re probably going to hate this one too. Or if you liked the first one, then yeah. But enough about Marshie, nobody likes him. Where’s the Stinkoman and Trogdor stuff? … Actually, that’s exactly what’s next. First, 20X6 vs. 1936.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/20x6vs1936.html

This is a nice little short, and yet another one where I remembered almost the entire thing from memory despite not watching it in years. There’s some great lines from this, like “That name is dumb. It sounds like it’s SO dumb”, but I don’t want to resort to just quoting the entire thing like I did with TGS 2. The problem with reviewing this cartoon is that I can’t find anything about it that bugs me, or raises any weird questions, because the whole concept of the clashing universes doesn’t need to have an explanation. It’s better just the way it is. And unlike every other future-meets-past scenario, there isn’t the obligatory “hey, what is this futuristic thing, we don’t have those in my time” and/or “things sure were simpler in the old days, but in some ways, life was actually better” moment. Those get really old, really fast. This toon actually came close to that with the can of soup and washboard, but it was the opposite of what I said, so it technically doesn’t count.

Now, would I like to see a scenario where Stinkoman was put into the 1936 setting? Possibly, depending on the way it was handled. There actually is a toon with more mix-and-match alternate universe stuff going on, but to my recollection, it doesn’t do that particular swap. I’m fine with this as a one-off toon though. I still wish there was more 20X6 material in general, but that’s another story. So where does Trogdor come in to all of this? Well, he wasn’t part of that toon obviously, but there was another one released on the same day, which was actually more of an advertisement than anything else. An ad for what, you say? An Arcade Game, of course. You’d know that if you had just read the title, jeez.

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

When this was released, there was an update to the Compy menu where the “in da basement – sb” post-it was actually on the screen, so this is considered one of the “Not Quite Strong Bad Emails”.  It’s kind of a pointless classification, but I did feel like mentioning that because there’s not a whole lot else to say about this one. Like I said, this is pretty much just an advertisement for the new game they made, and since this is the first high-quality game to be added to the site, it kind of makes sense to do this. Otherwise people might end up ignoring it, thinking it’s along the lines of the older crap like Dancin’ Bubs and Hairstyle Runner. But yeah, aside from Homestar’s weird list of expenditures (and the straps and practice Easter Egg, seriously what is that supposed to be), this is very … empty. So shut up and let’s play some TROGDOR! (link goes to the game itself)

Instead of a text review, I figured it would be better to talk about this game through video commentary. Enjoy.

And… yeah. That’s it for now, methinks. It took me way longer than predicted to edit that video. Next time… probably a bunch of SBEmails. Just a guess.