T w e n t y S i d e d
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Homestarrunner turns 10 this year. Back in the early days of this millenium everyone was linking HSR. The site is still rolling, still making with the funny, but I never see HSR links. I guess nobody links it because they think everyone links it. But still, it seems like Homestar’s tenth birthday should be worth a mention.
I found Homestar via a FARK link. My first exposure to the site was this Strong Bad email which was #20. I wonder when that was? Sometime in 1999 maybe? I thought it was pretty funny, although I’m not sure the site would amuse newcomers these days. The site has built up a strange sort of humor by making in-jokes on in-jokes, nested many levels deep, so that I don’t know if it would even make sense to a newbie. It’s possible to go to the site and watch the various holiday specials, the Strong Bad emails, the cartoon shorts, but what they really need is just a way to see all of the marterial in chronological order, which is the only way the uninitiated can hope to make sense of any of it.
One of their favorite things to do is to take the entire cast and translate them into some other medium / era / artistic style. The “olde timey” B&W depression era stuff isn’t really a send-up of depression era entertainment, but instead just a goofy new lens through which we can view the same old characters. The humor comes from linking the familiar characters to some familiar archetype from the other medium.
When I first saw Strong Bad, I didn’t know he was a short little wrestleman with no shirt. I watched several emails before it cut away to a wide shot and let me see something besides the back of his head. So, my perception was very skewed at first. Who was this hostile guy in the strange helmet (which was really a mask) who answers emails? I figured he was supposed to be some sort of super villian, which was sort of funny. Sort of a “Lex Luthor runs an advice column for aspiring super villians” kind of thing. Then I saw who he was and realized my perception of him was all wrong.
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But then they had this email which showed a comic-book version of Strongbad. It was only meaningful because putting cartoony Strongbad into the more gritty comic book world was funny. But the strange thing is that this new version of Strongbad portrayed him as the character I’d originally mistaken him for. How did they know?!?
It’s an amazing site. I understand the animators (two brothers) have turned the site into a full-time job, which is even more impressive. Despite their relative success, I’ve never seen an animated site that was able to immitate their particular brand of humor. I’m sure some have tried, but I think the HSR formula would be deviously difficult to duplicate. I have to give them credit: They have kept the site amusing for a long time. Their output has dropped in the past year, but the quality hasn’t. I admire envy that.
Way to go guys.
