Homestar Runner

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2000 · homestarrunner.com, a website made by Mike and Matt Chapman (The Brothers Chaps), based on a 1996 picture book from Atl… · Also known as homestarrunner.com; H*R; Strong Bad Email; sbemail

What it is

A website of short comedy cartoons made by two American brothers, Mike and Matt Chapman, who called themselves The Brothers Chaps. The cartoons were made in Flash, a program that played animation inside a web browser. The title character, Homestar, is a cheerful idiot with no arms. The real star became Strong Bad, a vain, lazy villain in a wrestler's mask and boxing gloves who answered emails from viewers.

Where it came from

Mike Chapman and a friend, Craig Zobel, wrote a fake children's picture book in Atlanta in 1996. Publishers turned it down. Around 1999 Mike and his brother Matt taught themselves Flash and turned the book's characters into cartoons, launching homestarrunner.com on 1 January 2000. It spread by word of mouth, mostly people sending each other the link at school or work. In 2001 the brothers started Strong Bad Email, a weekly cartoon, and visitor numbers grew so much that by 2003 the site had outgrown its Yahoo web hosting. New cartoons stopped regularly in 2010, with occasional ones since.

How people used it

Fans emailed questions to Strong Bad. Each week he picked one, typed a reply on a battered old computer, mocked the sender's spelling and wandered off into a cartoon about something else entirely. At the end he deleted the email. Viewers then clicked around the final screen hunting for hidden extra scenes. People quoted lines to each other at school and in offices, and the expected reply to a quote was the next line. They bought T-shirts, drew Trogdor on school books, and built a fan wiki that transcribed every cartoon and logged every hidden scene.

Why it mattered

It ran on a weekly schedule for most of a decade, and fans treated it like a newspaper column they were owed: when an email cartoon was late, the brothers got angry messages asking where it was. There were no adverts and no company paying for it. T-shirt and DVD sales covered the site's costs and the brothers' living costs, with their retired parents running the business side. Its fans grew up into writers and artists, and the brothers went on to write for television cartoons such as Gravity Falls. Trogdor, a joke drawing, later became a real board game.

The jokes around it

• Trogdor the Burninator: a dragon Strong Bad drew in a 2003 email, with "consummate V's" and one beefy arm.
• "Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasants": a line from the heavy metal song Strong Bad wrote for Trogdor.
• "Come on, fhqwhgads": a nonsense name from the song Everybody to the Limit, typed by fans to show they knew it.
• Teen Girl Squad: Strong Bad's badly drawn comic in which the girls die in a silly way every episode.
• "DELETED": the word that filled the screen when Strong Bad binned an email he didn't like.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Before video sites and advertising money, a few thousand fans buying T-shirts could keep two people making cartoons full time. The fans also expected a free weekly cartoon as if they'd paid for it, and said so by email when it was late.

What noah is not sure of

The first Strong Bad Email is reportedly from August 2001 and the Trogdor email from 2003. The Trogdor board game is reportedly from a 2019 crowdfunding campaign. Flash stopped working in browsers at the end of 2020, and the site reportedly kept its cartoons playable with an emulator, but the details aren't confirmed here.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.