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.

A bit of everything

To follow up the previous post, where I took an in-depth look at two very popular emails, I’m going to try a different approach here. Usually these posts take me at least three hours to write, because I try my best (and usually fail) to make some sort of analysis or personal connection to each toon or email. I end up taking forever just to write a single paragraph because I want to make sure that I’m being thorough, but not overly wordy, and I also try to switch up my writing style as much as possible so you don’t read the same exact sentence structure over and over. I’m not a particularly talented writer, so I know I can use a lot of work in that regard, but I do try my best. And so this time, I’m going to at least attempt to get through a larger amount of material than usual, and not worry too much if I can’t say a lot about one particular toon. So to start off, we have an email featuring Marzipan, and it is called, generically, marzipan.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail59.html

I always remember this one as “that email that came out after dragon and was really underwhelming by comparison”.  Trying to judge it by its own merits, it’s really not that bad, but I also wouldn’t consider it to be particularly memorable. The only things I remembered from it offhand before rewatching it were the “oh yeah” song, Strong Bad’s quadruple negative, and Marzipan not knowing what a “scream name” is. Which is probably more than most people would remember from it, honestly, but I’m just weird that way.

I never really realized before that there’s a picture of a snake on Carol. What’s that all about? And of course The Cheat spells it “carl” in his little music video, which is kind of awesome. One final bit of trivia for this one (and no, it’s not the translation for the webdings, look it up yourself) – if you wait a few seconds at the end, Strong Sad sends an IM about vinegar toast (I actually didn’t know this until I just read about it), which is a reference to something that the Chapmans did in real life. Apparently Mike put toothpaste in cupcakes and fed them to Matt, who then retaliated with “vinegar toast”. Which I assume is just toast soaked in vinegar. But that’s enough for this one. Before the next email came out, there were actually two short toons that were released to explain a couple delays. Which is kinda weird, because the next email was actually only one day late. But anyway, first we have The System is Down.

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

This was released after a two-day website outage, which presumably happened thanks to Trogdor and his legion of sudden fans. I’m basically just paraphrasing the Wiki and DVD commentary here (since I wouldn’t have any other way of knowing this), but the website used to be hosted on Yahoo, and the server’s bandwidth got overloaded by the sudden influx of viewers, so it had to be shut down temporarily, until everything was moved over to another server, apparently called “Sagonet”. This cartoon was going to be hosted on Thorax Corp, and everyone subscribed to the website’s email updates would get an email telling them to go there and watch it, but then the problem got solved faster than expected and so there was no need to do this.

So that’s the history of the toon, which personally I find more interesting than the toon itself, but that’s not to say that it’s not amusing. I like weird off-the-wall stuff like this, and the concept of the characters walking around in a white void with an error page kind of makes your brain hurt if you think about it too hard, so I suggest not doing that. I also suggest not cram-a-lamming Swiss Cake Rolls into a computer. That sounds like something my brother Joey would do. (He hasn’t done that specifically, but he has peed on a keyboard before. Intentionally.) Speaking of tape-leg though, I must say that email is comic gold compared to Superbowl Dealie.

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

I’d skip this, but it is technically a thing that exists, so I have to at least acknowledge it. And unlike some other really short, pointless, and unfunny toons, this one is actually linked to on the site, as an official Holiday Toon alongside the Halloween and Decemberween ones. So to sum this one up, the characters say “Take it to the house” five times and nothing else happens.

I’m not quite sure why this was made, actually. Assuming the release dates on the Wiki are accurate, this was released on a Monday, which would have been the day following the Super Bowl. So I guess they were watching the game and then didn’t have enough time to make a SBEmail for the following day, so they made this instead. Which honestly seems a bit unnecessary. It’s not as if emails haven’t been late before, and especially with the server going down earlier that week (and getting an extra toon out of it), I think they had every right to be late by a day without making an explanation toon. But they did, and then presumably started work immediately on the next email, huttah!.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail60.html

I like how the name of this one explains absolutely nothing about the email. Though I’m not sure what else you’d call it, really. “cheat emails”? That could probably work. But despite the general … genericness of this, I do enjoy it a fair amount. Most of the ones like this where Strong Bad gets a bunch of different emails tend to turn out pretty good, and this one has more of a focus than spring cleaning, and actually features more than 50 emails did. Now that I think about it, all three of those featured the “how do you type with boxing gloves” email, and it was also mentioned in vacation, and will continue to be asked many times in the future. There’s actually an email sort of dedicated to it that’s coming up pretty soon.

I mentioned a couple posts ago that Strong Bad could have easily just backspaced his embarrassing reply at the end of lures & jigs, but the email was apparently being watched live or something. And there’s lots of emails where the typed reply would be a very incomplete response unless you assume that the person who sent the email also sees all the cutaways and insights into Strong Bad’s imagination. It’s never fully explained. But back to huttah!.  (Should there be a period after the exclamation point? Grammar is weird sometimes.) In this email, The Cheat is watching Strong Bad checking his emails as if it’s a livestream. Very strange. Again, try not to think about it too much. And I still haven’t said much about the email itself, so I’ll just say that the idea of taping the little paper over the screen was, though ineffectual, quite clever. And it was lucky that the subjects of the emails changed when he did that, otherwise there would be stuff like “Hey the cheat! i love The Cheat! can you ask him for me if he is taken? because i like him WAY better than you”. Problematic.

Oh right, and then there’s the little screensaver thing at the end . I actually forgot that was part of this email. And the terrible little sound effect of the Atari seagull flapping its wings is awesome. I’m not sure if I’m thankful or disappointed that the noise isn’t there in the downloadable version. Moving on, if these last two emails have been a bit too tame for your tastes, the next one should be significantly better. Even the name implies energy and loudness – monster truck.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail61.html

This is another one of those emails that is actually too good for me to really comment on. The Awexome Cross 98 ad is so over-the-top and energetic you can’t help but laugh at it, especially when it features things like The Cheat riding inside the tire and jumping over the King of Town eating a cardboard box covered in syrup. Everybody always likes the “Let’s do this like Brutus” line from Homestar, and yet I doubt anyone knows what it’s referring to. I know I sure as heck didn’t until I read the Wiki, and … I still don’t really know what it is. Some De La Soul thing. Really though, what else is there to say about this email? Well… a couple things, actually, but one of them is minor, and the other is technically not the email itself, so I’ll get to that in a second.

This email features the first actual appearance of Limozeen and their music. Now I’m going to admit something here – I’ve never been too crazy about Limozeen. Whenever they make an appearance in a toon, I generally find it amusing (and I do like the crappy Saturday morning cartoon they star in, which we won’t be seeing for quite a while), but whenever something is based around the band members in live action, I’ll either skip it or watch it once and then never again. I do know the names of the band members – Larry (the lead singer), Perry, Gary, and Mary, but aside from Larry, I couldn’t tell you who plays what, nor could I tell you if they have distinct personalities outside of Mary from the cartoon, who is intentionally singled out. And I certainly couldn’t tell them apart by looking, but that’s the joke. And they’re usually played by different people every time they appear. In this email, they’re all played by Donnie Chapman.

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

Anyway, hidden in an Easter egg at the end is a game called Awexome Cross 98 (the Wiki claims the “98” is not part of the title, but come on, it totally is). For what it is, it’s actually a pretty decent little game. Basically, you’re The Cheat rolling in the tire, and you have to jump over assorted Strong Badia-related junk, while collecting money and powerups that speed you up and slow you down. The main flaw with the game is the hit detection, which is really picky. Unless you get a bunch of speed powerups, you have to be almost pixel perfect with your jumps over some of the items or else you’ll hit it and lose a man.

This game was originally released with only one level and lacked the speed powerups (and the Strong Mad scenes between levels, obviously). The updated version came out at some point after Jonathan Howe joined the team to help program better games. His first project was a game that we haven’t seen yet, but I’ll be getting to it in a couple posts probably. If you want to play the original version, here’s a link to it. It’s your best bet at seeing the ending, since you only have to go through one level instead of seven. So once you’re done messing around with that, I’ve got one other email to go through – interview.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail62.html

Before you say anything, no, we haven’t looked at this one already. You’re thinking of The Interview, a toon where Strong Bad interviews Homestar. This is an email where Strong Bad pretends to interview Homsar. Totally different.

The first thing I have to point out about this email is the fact that Strong Bad (while imitating Homsar) said “I was raised by a cup of coffee”. Homsar never actually said it, and yet it has somehow become one of his more well-known quotes, even appearing on the T-shirt. It’s kind of a “Beam me up, Scotty” moment, and now that I took the time to check, I actually found that it is indeed listed on TV Tropes’s page of the same name. But yeah, that line and a few others are the main source of humor in this email, so if you like non-sequiturs, then here’s plenty of them. If you don’t, then you probably don’t like Homsar in general, so this email won’t be one of your favorites. Personally I think it’s pretty good. I think “Hey Reggie, is that rhinoceros around” is my favorite line from it. Either that or "Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk". Strong Bad putting salt on his foot, ala island is a nice little callback too. And Kerrek is a nice little flashforward.

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

And finally to end this post, an Easter egg that is actually accessible from outside of the email (kind of like Awexome Cross 98, actually, but this one remains an Easter egg, whereas that one is on the Games page normally). If you click the floppy disk at the end, you’ll be taken to the Homsar Main Page, which is also accessible through the final digit of the copyright date on any of the normal main pages. It’s … well, it’s Homsar. It’s one of the better main pages on the site, but still, it’s Homsar. There’s not much you can say about the guy other than he’s funky looking and says weird things.

So, next time, stuff.