Hello 2014, Goodbye 2003 (alternate title: Caffeinated Strong Sad and Comb-over Strong Bad)

Happy new year, everyone! With a new year comes a new era of me occasionally posting on this blog. Now that I’ve gotten over the addiction to Pokémon Y (following the previous addiction to Minecraft), I might actually be able to update it more often. Before moving on to the usual reviews, let’s take a look back at all the Homestar-related updates from 2013.

1. Will Wheaton was given an introduction at a convention by non-animated Strong Bad and Homestar, much to the surprise of … well, everybody, really. 
2. Decemberween cards were given a $2 discount in the store, meaning you could get all nine cards (three each of three different designs) for only $17.95. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that nobody took advantage of this amazing deal.
3. Nothing else.

Well, I suppose that’s more of an update than we saw in 2012. But anyway, I’m going to see if I can finish up the 2003 updates in this post, which means I have to get through … five SBEmails, an Answering Machine, a secret toon, and a Main Page. I guess it’s actually not that much material after all. I’ll start things off with the weirdest of the bunch, an unnamed toon that wasn’t even featured on the website, known only as Where the Crap Are We? 

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

There’s really not much to say about the toon itself here, just the origins of it. The only things I will point out are the Easter egg at the end (an Easter egg in a toon that is, in itself, an Easter egg. Woah.) and the fact that a quote from this was eventually made into the Quote of the Week, making that the only reference to it on the entire website. Now, since I certainly wouldn’t have known that this thing existed without the help of the Wiki, I can’t really do anything other than just copy their explanation for it: “This cartoon could be found in the program Macromedia Central by going into "Help → About Central" and Ctrl-double clicking on the "C" logo. When given a password field, one would type in "sbemail" and press enter. The cartoon would then play in the "about" box.”

So in other words, nobody would have ever, ever found it without somebody actually involved in the making of it (whether it was Matt/Mike or someone from Macromedia) telling other people it was there and then letting it eventually be spread through word of mouth. I think weird hidden stuff like that is pretty cool, and it’s definitely weird to have a Homestar short hidden in an unrelated application like that. The origins of this will probably remain a mystery, and hey, speaking of which, let’s learn about the couch patch.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail88.html

Is this the first email where the sender is asking about some small, useless detail in the background? I’ll answer my own question – no, because no loafing came out like, right before this one. But I was just thinking of upcoming emails that focus on weird stuff like extra plug and geddup noise, not to mention origins. I guess the mindset here is that you want to email Strong Bad, but can’t think of anything to write about, so you just watch another email, notice something minor, and decide to ask about that. I suppose that works.

Anyway, I like this email’s alternate explanations for what happened. Strong Sad’s probably seemed the most legit (maybe just because Strong Sad is probably the most reputable source), but then Strong Bad acts as if the whole “Coach Z Shadowy Figure puked in it after eating doo-doo meat gumbo” story did actually happen. An interesting fan theory is that all of the stories were actually true. Lil’ Strong Bad writes the message on the couch, realizes his mistake, and tears it up. Much later on, Coach Z pukes in it and sews it up to cover the evidence. Strong Bad later on tears it back open and releases the terrible stench from Coach Z’s mess. And then of course, Homestar spits Teddy Grahams all over the place. And The Cheat’s head explodes for no reason. There’s a few holes in that theory (HA. Pun.) but it makes about as much sense as anything else in this series, so sure, why not.

Actually, if you want to look even more unnecessarily deep into this, the “biblical stench” explanation could kind of tie in with a 2008 Easter short called Rotten Eggs. But here I am putting way too much thought into this again, because that’s what I always end up doing. I’ll end this review with a pointless explanation of something: If you’ve watched my older and more popular LPs on Youtube, you’re probably familiar with “The Steve”, a papaya that I gave a name to for absolutely no reason and then turned into a self-proclaimed “running joke of biblical proportions”. Yes, I was thinking back to this email when I made that statement. And no, I’m still not sure why I called it that. Anyway, enough of that, let’s move on to local news.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail89.html

The subtitle in the screenshot there doesn’t necessarily reflect my opinion on this email (not entirely, at least), I just kind of picked it. And while I’m pointing that out, allow me to correct the statement I made in the fourth post on this blog, where I said that The Cheat’s character video was the only place you ever get subtitles for what he is saying. And while I’m pointing THAT out, allow me to say that The Cheat was actually rather adorable in this email. I like the little ditty he’s singing during the news introduction.

My overall opinion on this one is kinda meh. It’s not bad in any way – when I look at all the individual jokes, most of them are pretty good. (Best five bucks I ever spent!) And I definitely like the Strong Bad’s Rhythm n’ Grammar songs at the end. I’ve used those quite a number of times over the years to correct people, and the apostrophe song is genuinely useful. It’s how I usually remember which spelling to use for its/it’s. So yeah, I can’t really place what it is about this email that I didn’t like as much as I should have. Maybe it was just the Strong Bad segments, which were not very funny (saying “tonight” every three words doesn’t really constitute a joke). And while I don’t mind the concept of him throwing together the local news, it feels like something he’s definitely done before, hence why they drew so much attention to it. I can’t think of an exact instance of it though, other than pizza joint, and that email came way later than this. I dunno. Like I said, it’s not bad, just not one of my favorites. And neither is the next one, for that matter. I present colonization.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail90.html

I’m with Strong Sad on this one, ketchup on eggs just sounds gross. I’ve never actually tried it though. Fishcorn, however, that that stuff is the haps. Seriously though, apparently Native Americans taught Pilgrims to plant fish heads with corn to fertilize the soil. I just now learned that from the Wiki and feel like this is something I should have learned in school as a kid. I just assumed this email was being weird.

So going back to the usual standby of overanalyzing the crap out of everything, this email establishes that Strong Badia doesn’t actually belong to Strong Bad, he’s just renting it from Bubs. (Debatably – the ad in the newspaper says “lot for sale”, but then Strong Bad says he pays rent for it). This is kind of the last straw for an issue that’s been bugging me for a while. Come on, man. You’re already running the only frequently seen establishment in the series (the only other places I can think of are Blubb-O’s and Club Technochocolate, neither of which have been seen yet, and the latter of which is also at least employed by Bubs, if not outright run by him), but now you’re renting out dirt fields too? What are you even doing with all the money that you make when there’s nobody else to buy stuff from? I mean, I know there must be other places that you just don’t ever see, but it’s just weird is all. …Unsettling.

Getting back on track … no, actually, that’s about all I have to say about this one, other than pointing out “Hoofton Mifflin” and the two Easter eggs, which are pretty good. I like the Shanama song, and I agree with Homestar about the whole Hank thing. Same for Charles = Chuck, and to a lesser extent, Dickard. But yeah, let’s just move on, because the next couple emails are pretty good. I’ll save those for last though, instead, have an Answering Machine. Version 9.2 to be exact. Why the “.2”? I have no idea.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/answer9.html

I think this is the best Answering Machine so far, thanks to Homestar’s intervention at the end. And as for the “.2”, my best guess is it’s just because the answering machine itself was changed for this installment. I thought for a while that it might be an incredibly obscure reference to a MST3K DVD number, but upon further investigation, Volume 10.2 had a legitimate reason to be called that, and that DVD wasn’t actually released until 2008 anyway, so… uh… moving on.

The King of Town was his usual lame self here. I mean, you can (and do) eat copious amounts of food on days that aren’t Thanksgiving anyway, so why does it matter so much? Turkey and the other typical Thanksgiving food isn’t even that good anyway, in my opinion, hence why I never cared much for the holiday. Strong Bad’s message is definitely a step in the right direction. His first one, that is. The second one is kind of meh, but the Cablem’n Jorge bit was pretty funny. Would 100 feet of coaxial cable really reach Strong Bad’s house from Marzipan’s? It’s never really established where the characters live in relation to each other. Not that it really matters, it was just something I picked up on.

Coach Z’s message was kind of a work of art, honestly. I have no idea what “discatapes” are supposed to be, but whatever they are, he wants them back, so he’s going to sneak in like usual and retrieve them. But then he tries poorly to cover this up and instead just changes the subject completely to curly fries. I love the seamless transition there. And then of course, we end with Homestar’s disaster, where he somehow misinterprets a message to “go away and pick up sticks”, and hilarity ensues. There’s not much I can add to the humor of this segment, but once again we have an instance of Matt doing a character’s voice, impersonating another character’s voice. It’s not quite as hard as it seems (since the impressions aren’t particularly good, it’s basically just the standard Homestar voice but with a slight alteration to it), but it’s still fun to listen to. We also get to hear Homestar not only impersonate himself (badly), but the return of “some animal died”. I love callback jokes like that. Alright, so one last thing before the emails, let’s take a quick look at Main Page 19.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/main19.html

Like most Main Pages, there’s not too much I really need to say about this. It’s a nice little twist on the usual formula, in that Homestar says full sentences relating to the “The Show” theme, rather than just saying Toons, Games, etc and having funky stuff happening. The best part of this (other than referring to the Gremlin as “a new store”) in my opinion is the music that plays during some of the mouse-overs. And well, that’s about it, I don’t want to put anyone to sleep by talking too much about a small thing like this. So let’s have some caffeine and wake up for the next SBEmail.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail91.html

This is one of my favorite emails, but unfortunately, it’s funny in one of those ways that can’t really be described, so there’s not much to really comment on humor-wise. It’s certainly not intelligent humor, it’s just Strong Sad wigging out over some Sanka (which for the record is non-caffeinated, so I don’t know what the crap happened here), and Strong Bad collecting data on it. Practically everything that happens in this email is hilarious, but the highlights for me are Strong Sad rambling about wood-davers (which is what he calls pinecone birdfeeders, and thus, what I call them also), Strong Mad’s very uncharacteristic reaction to “parakeet”, and Strong Sad repeatedly slapping Coach Z. So in other words, about half of the email.

Really though, what else is there to say? This certainly isn’t the first time that a cartoon character has gotten hyperactive and started doing a lot of strange things, but it’s a pretty funny example of one, especially on a character like Strong Sad. And while he definitely steals the show here, I do have to focus on some of the other stuff happening, like the “All-Wide Science Fair”. What kind of name is that? The original project on the effects of gasoline on fire sounds like it would have been interesting to hear. We do see a bit of it at the end in an Easter egg, but it’s not very extensive. Maybe he should have just done the project on the shark-mobile. But at any rate, I hope everyone enjoyed that email, and we’re about to move on to another one of my all-time favorites, which is really funny and … well, kind of cool.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail92.html

In this email, we witness the admittedly confusing origin of one of my favorite characters on the website, Senor Cardgage. I’m going to spoil things for new viewers a bit here – yes, this character does return in later toons and emails. Quite a lot, actually. In fact, I’d consider him the unofficial 13th main character. He doesn’t have as many appearances as the rest of the main cast, but he does exist in the same universe as the rest of them (as opposed to characters from Teen Girl Squad, 1936, 20X6, Trogdor, etc), and there’s not that many other recurring characters that can claim that, aside from The Announcer and The Goblin. As for my high regard for this character, all I can say is that the man is hilarious in a very sketchy sort of way. This email does a fantastic job of describing the guy, and while I don’t think I would enjoy actually hanging out with a person like this in real life, I can definitely enjoy watching his interactions with the rest of the cast.

Now let’s take a step back and look at this email, and try to dissect exactly what it is that we’re seeing here. Strong Bad is describing what he would be like if he wasn’t stylish, buff, or handsome. The rest of the email plays out as if we’re watching a hypothetical scenario where this is what Strong Bad might be like, and at the end, Strong Sad explains that he was basically describing their old neighbor. But coming back to this email later on, after learning that Senor Cardgage does exist, and he is the exact same character that we see in this email, it becomes kind of weird. There’s really no way that this makes sense other than looking at it this way – Strong Bad and Senor Cardgage just happen to look very similar (much like Homestar and Homsar, but even more so), and the character had just never been seen before this email. Strong Bad isn’t making anything up here, he’s basically just introducing us to Cardgage and at the same time, wishing that he could be more like him.

I’d get back to reviewing this one email and not just the character in general, but I think I’ve almost said enough here. I will however point out that there’s three different lines that can play during the scene with Strong Mad (Cardgage describes himself as either an old denominator, wintergreen or Soderbergh). And going back to what I said about Homsar being the “weird variant” of Homestar, Senor Cardgage is actually a similar idea to a character I had drawn once before this email came out, which I named “Stong Bad”. I don’t really remember much about my drawing, but I know it didn’t look anything like Cardgage. And that’s about it for this, I’ll just leave you with a screenshot of my Minecraft skin (credit for making this goes to darkychao).

And that’s it for 2003! Next time we’ll just be going over more SBEmails like usual, but they’re some pretty memorable ones, and there’s a lot of extra content that was released simultaneously with one of them, so there’s that to look forward to. 2004 is also the first year where the regular updates to Weekly Fanstuff and Sketchbook began (Quote of the Week began earlier, but I group it in with those two). I’ll probably be touching on some of the stuff in those every once in a while, but I don’t want to force myself to go over every single update for them, because I’ll drive myself insane and updates will take even longer than usual if I feel the need to incorporate them all. On that note, I’m also going to set a new year’s resolution to finish reviewing all the material from 2004 and 2005 within this year. Honestly I’d like to get even more done than that, but this is more realistic. I guess we’ll see how it goes.