Homestar Runner

Homestar Runner
File:Homestar Runner logo.png The Homestar Runner logo
Written by	Mike Chapman Matt Chapman
Production
Animators	Mike Chapman Matt Chapman

Homestar Runner is a Flash animated Internet cartoon. It mixes surreal humor with references to 1980s and 1990s pop culture, notably video games, classic television, and popular music. Most of the site's traffic comes from the United States; events in the cartoon itself usually take place in Free Country, USA.

The cartoons are nominally centered on Homestar Runner. However, the series titled Strong Bad Email, in which another main character, Strong Bad, answers emails from viewers, is the most popular and prominent feature of the site. While Homestar and Strong Bad are the main characters, the site has grown to encompass dozens of other characters over the years.

The site is one of the most popular Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts). It grew in popularity largely through word of mouth.

History

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Early sketches of Homestar Runner

Homestar Runner was brought to life in Atlanta in 1996 by two University of Georgia students, Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel, who were working summer jobs surrounding the 1996 Summer Olympics. On a day off, they visited a bookstore where they found that the state of children's books was dismal. Intending to parody this, they wrote the original story The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest. This story featured Homestar Runner, Pom Pom, Strong Bad, The Cheat, and a few characters that are rarely seen in recent cartoons: The Robot, Mr. Bland, Señor, and the Grape Fairie. This hand-drawn book was the only incarnation of the characters for several years.

They later used Mario Paint, a Super Nintendo video game, to create the first cartoon of the series. By 1999, Mike and his younger brother Matt Chapman, who call themselves The Brothers Chaps, were learning Flash and looking for something on which to practice. Digging out the old children's book provided a solution. The site domain was registered on December 6, 1999, and around the start of the year 2000, homestarrunner.com was live. Matt provided the voices of the male characters, while Missy Palmer provided Marzipan's voice.

Regarding the origin of the name "Homestar Runner", Matt had this to say, from an interview with Kevin Scott:

It actually comes from a friend of ours. There was an old local grocery store commercial, and we live in Atlanta, and it advertised the Atlanta Braves. It was like, "the Atlanta Braves hit home runs, and you can hit a home run with savings here!" And so there was this player named Mark Lemke, and they said something like "All star second baseman for the Braves." And our friend knows nothing about sports, and so he would always do his old-timey radio impression of this guy, and not knowing any positions in baseball or whatever, he would just be like, "homestar runner for the Braves." And we were just like, "Homestar Runner? That’s the best thing we’ve ever heard!"

The site grew slowly at first, but by mid-2001 it began to take off with the first Strong Bad Email. The number of visitors to the site grew, and by March 2003 the site had outgrown its original web host, Yahoo!. Merchandise sales pay for all of the costs of running the website as well as living costs of the creators, whose retired parents managed many of the business aspects.

On January 30, 2006, Podstar Runner was launched, allowing people to download select Strong Bad Emails and other toon episodes to a video-enabled iPod. Once made available through iTunes' podcast directory, it very quickly took the #1 slot on Apple's "Most Popular" podcast list. Podstar Runner was taken down on September 21, 2007, for reasons unknown. A new version was introduced on Thursday, January 10, 2008.

Collaborations with other artists

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Homestar Runner singing "Apple Juice Blues" with They Might Be Giants

The Brothers Chaps on occasion have partnered up with the rock band They Might Be Giants and supplied animation for a music video of their song "Experimental Film." The creators of Homestar Runner spent a day with the band, and those songs have found their way onto the website in the form of "Puppet Jam," a subset of "Puppet Stuff," where Puppet Homestar rocks out with TMBG. TMBG also wrote the music for Strong Bad Email #99, "Different Town." Another group, The Skate Party, helped The Brothers Chaps create "The Cheat Theme Song." As well, a band named Y-O-U helped with the Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits CD, as well as on the strongbad email.exe DVDs.

The Brothers Chaps also employed the services of the erstwhile acapella band DaVinci's Notebook to create a theme song for the old-timey version of The Cheat, called "Ballad of The Sneak".

Reception

The site receives several million hits a month, and almost a thousand emails a day. According to Matt Chapman, the site did no real advertising, but grew on word of mouth and endorsements; "Certain bands, like fairly popular bands and stuff would link us on their site and, you know we were Shockwave site of the day a couple of times over the years." Homestar Runner's popularity, coupled with its positive critical response, has led to the website receiving national coverage. Homestar Runner has been featured in Wired, National Review, Entertainment Weekly, Total Gamer, G4, and NPR's All Things Considered.

A review published in National Review characterized the site's humor as having "the innocence of slapstick with sharp satire of American popular culture" — humor that "tends to be cultural, not political."

Music

The Homestar Runner site frequently features songs and videos within their animated shorts or as stand-alone entities, which serve as parodies of hair metal, death metal, college rock, and hip hop. These are primarily sung and performed either by the characters or by fictitious rock bands with names such as “Limozeen,” "☮y P" (read "Peacey P"), “sloshy,” "Brainkrieg," and “Taranchula.” Real-life musicians They Might be Giants have also appeared semi-regularly, performing with a Homestar puppet or allowing the characters to perform a video to their song Experimental Film. The site-generated music has enjoyed surprising popularity, such that commercial CDs are now sold and two songs, "Trogdor" by the character Strong Bad, and "Because It's Midnite" by Limozeen, have been included in the successful Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, respectively. Their inclusion in the game is reportedly because Harmonix founder Alex Rigopulos is a professed fan of Homestar Runner. The first music included in the site’s content was humorously absurd hip hop created by the character Coach Z, who often makes references to hip-hop and rap music in conversation. Another character, Strong Bad, sings short intros in weekly cartoons in which he checks his email and provides humorous responses and commentary. In an email titled “dragon,” he draws a bizarre one-armed dragon called “Trogdor, the Burninator,” and performs its theme song. By far, it became the site’s most popular joke, yielding merchandise such as T-shirts, CDs, messenger bags, etc. all featuring the title character, and the song was included as a bonus track in Guitar Hero II. A faux hair metal band, Limozeen, was introduced as a parody in the style of '80s metal bands like Skid Row and White Lion, and Poison; their songs included "Because, It's Midnite," "Nite Mamas," and "Brain Sister." Next came a death metal parody band named Taranchula, which was billed as a Swedish band with disturbing videos and known for writing lyrics that contain words starting with the prefix "de-." Most recently, college rock was introduced with a band called “sloshy” (always spelled in lower case), which featured songs in the musical vein of Pavement such as "We Don't Really Even Care About You," "OK Fine," and "Unripe,” as well as a cover of Limozeen’s "Because, It's Midnite."

Characters

The website's namesake is Homestar Runner, a terrific but dimwitted athlete. As a result of his stupidity, trouble with the others is common, especially with Strong Bad, who manages to answer emails sent to him by fans despite his hands being boxing gloves. Strong Bad is also fond of pranking the rest of the characters, along with his ever diligent lackey The Cheat and Strong Bad's older brother Strong Mad.

Other main characters include Marzipan, Homestar's "girlfriend" and the only female on the site; Pom Pom, Homestar's best friend; Strong Sad, Strong Bad's perpetually depressed younger brother; Bubs, the local concession stand owner; Coach Z, a coach with many problems; the King of Town, the self-assumed ruler of Free Country, USA; and his loyal servant The Poopsmith. Rounding out the cast is Homsar, an enigmatic character introduced due to a typo in a Strong Bad Email.

Cartoons

Homestar Runner features several "sub-cartoons" and spin-offs. Some of these cartoons take place outside the normal Homestar Runner universe, and the main characters of the normal cartoons do not necessarily appear in them. When they do, it is often not in the same way they appear in the main Homestar Runner world — most of the main characters also have alter-egos that appear occasionally.

Some cartoons take place in an old-time setting, with most of the Homestar Runner characters having direct counterparts in the Old-Timey cartoons. These cartoons are in black and white with a film grain effect added and scratchy audio quality. They parody the distinctive style of animated cartoons during the 1920s and 1930s, and can be seen as perhaps purposely unfunny, to make a slanted joke about such old-style cartoons.

Another series of cartoons, Stinkoman K 20X6 (abbreviated to 20X6; pronounced "Twenty Exty-Six"), originated from a response to an email asking Strong Bad what he would look like if he were a Japanese cartoon character. The main character, Stinkoman, is an anime version of Strong Bad with blue hair, a shiny body, and robot boots. He is always looking for a fight, asking various characters he interacts with to engage him in a "challenge". The characters in 20X6 cartoons each have a counterpart in the Homestar Runner universe and their features are based on exactly how characters in anime and Japanese video games always are.

Other cartoons introduce completely new casts of characters. Limozeen, an 80's glam metal band was depicted in a cartoon that described a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon entitled 'Limozeen: "but they're in space!"'. Sweet Cuppin' Cakes, is a surreal children's cartoon also introduced in a Strong Bad Email, featuring characters like "Eh, Steve!", and The Worm. The Cheat Commandos is a parody of G.I. Joe that created a cast of characters that are the same species as The Cheat.

Strong Bad Email

Strong Bad Emails (also known as "sbemails") have traditionally been among the most popular features on Homestar Runner. The format has remained essentially unchanged since its inception: Strong Bad receives an email from a fan or viewer, and starts typing his response. Strong Bad generally mocks the sender, criticizing names, hometowns, spelling, and grammar. Most of the time a cut-away sequence is used that gets away from typing the e-mail. Once the events of the email finish unfolding, Strong Bad wraps up the email, and then "The Paper" comes down with a link to email Strong Bad. Often, hidden animations (Easter Eggs) are displayed when the user clicks on a word or picture either during the email or after it has concluded. The animations were initially brief, but grew to establish numerous spinoffs and inside jokes on the site. As of April 21, 2008, there are 194 Sbemails.

Teen Girl Squad

Teen Girl Squad is a crudely drawn comic strip narrated by Strong Bad, using a falsetto voice. It began after Strong Bad received an email asking him to make a comic strip of a girl and her friends. The comic features four archetypal high-school girls, with heavy parody evident in the characters' nondescript names: "Cheerleader", "So-And-So", "What's-Her-Face", and "The Ugly One". The comic strip revolves around their lives (and frequently violent, but comical, deaths devised by Strong Bad).

Holiday specials

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Strong Sad dressed up as David Bowie on Halloween.

Several episodes have been dedicated to special days of the year. For example, every Halloween, a cartoon is released that features all the characters in costumes celebrating some traditional aspect of Halloween (such as ghost stories, trick-or-treating, or pumpkin carving). The characters' costumes are often famously esoteric, full of obscure pop culture references or characters from movies made in the 80's, for example: Prince, Jambi the Genie, Flavor Flav, and Walter Sobchak. April Fool's Day features various gags, such as turning the site into a "PAY PLUS!" offer site or flipping it upside down. The characters also celebrate an annual holiday called "Decemberween", a parody of Christmas that features gift-giving, carol-singing, and decorated trees. The fact that it takes place on December 25, the same day as Christmas, has been presented as just a coincidence, stating that Decemberween traditionally takes place "55 days after Halloween".

Other holidays celebrated include New Year's Day, "The Big Game" (around the time of the Super Bowl), St. Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, "Senorial Day" (a reference to Senor Cardgage, Memorial Day), Flag Day, Independence Day (which Homestar calls "Happy Fireworks"), Labor Day (occasionally referred to as "Labor Dabor"), Thanksgiving, and most recently, Easter.

Marzipan's Answering Machine

Marzipan's Answering Machine has limited animation and consists of a series of phone messages left on Marzipan's answering machine. These cartoons often include attempts by Strong Bad to prank call Marzipan or run some sort of scam. Homestar Runner leaves frequent messages, as does Coach Z, who was revealed to have a crush on Marzipan in one episode of this feature. In addition, less frequently appearing characters appear, such as Crack Stuntman and Vector Strong Bad.

Online video games

Homestar Runner offers a variety of online games that feature one or more of their characters. The first games were simple in nature and are now found under Super Old Games-n-Such. Among them are the "Homestar Talker", a Soundboard starring Homestar, "Astro-Lite 2600", a parody of the Lite-Brite, and "Bronco Trolleys", a game who's goal is to feed Homestar his favorite snack. More recent games have been released as products of "Videlectrix", a side project of the brothers. These games are far more complex, spoofing many popular 80s videogames. Where's an Egg? is another parody game of the company. It is a Web-based Flash game and portrayed as a real, but extremely obscure game with all captions in broken Russian and clunky graphics reminiscent of early days of computer gaming. The game takes place in Soviet Russia with references to Lenin's Tomb, Sputnik, and Siberia. You play as an unnamed detective in search of what appears to be an egg. Videlectrix claims on its homepage that it purchased the game overseas "some years ago." However, no one at the company could figure out how the game worked until they found a page from the original instruction booklet (in Russian, along with strained translations into English from the seller) for sale on an online auction site.

Arguably their most famous game, "Peasant's Quest", is an adventure game featuring Rather Dashing, a young peasant in short pants. He vows to kill the destroyer of his cottage: Trogdor. The game uses a system that is a near replica of Sierra Entertainment's Adventure Game Interpreter, used in King's Quest, Space Quest and several other early Sierra titles. Recently, the website has produced Wii versions of some of the games on the site, for the Wii browser. When played on the computer, these use the mouse only.

On April 10, 2008, a new episodic game called Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People was announced for the Wii's WiiWare service and PC, developed by Telltale Games in partnership with Videlectrix.

External links

• Official website
• Videlectrix Webpage
• strongbad_email.exe at IMDb
• Homestar Runner Wiki
• Emulator required to play the aforementioned ROM file for Windows Computers and Macintosh Computers